Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Obama may be losing the War on Terror, but his War on the Economy is headed full speed ahead. The joblessness, the unemployment rolls and an economic in which the only people still making money are in the government, in public sector unions or on Wall Street is no accident. It was the intended result all along. What Obama and the Democrats miscalculated is the mobilization of populist opposition and the speed with which the public turned to the Republicans for solutions, instead of treating Obama as the Great Savior for extending their unemployment benefits. In little more than a year, Obama's soothing words lost their magic, his telegenic grin stopped connecting and his antics ceased to interest anyone, but the political opposition. The public proved to be much less interested in the bread of his social services doles or the circuses of his media presence. Obama and the left threw in their final effort, convincing congressional Democrats to stand at the barricades for ObamaCare....

The Offense Test is very simple. If another driver on the highway flashes me the middle finger, it is generally accepted that he is a jackass. If I try to kill him in response, it is generally accepted that I am unfit for civil society and should be locked up. But the Offense Test is more than just a way to screen out homicidal maniacs, it also screens out groups that are incapable of reconciling themselves to free speech. And in Europe and America, from the days when Salman Rushdie had to live in hiding to the present day, when Molly Norris has had to abandon her career as a cartoonist and go into hiding-- Islam has failed the Offense Test in the worst way possible. Living in a free society that is not rendered artificially homogeneous by speech codes and guardians of morality, means being willing to ignore offensive speech against your person and your beliefs. That means setting aside the barbaric honor-shame codes of the tribal society, with its value system in which every man ...

We talk a lot about Dhimmis and Dhimmification but aside from the generic yielding to Islam, what exactly does a Dhimmi look like? There's not much point in talking about the average man on the street, bullied into dhimmification by a political and cultural elite. We've talked before about the dhimmi impulse on the left and its cultural impact and we will again. But it's our leaders, the top rank of our nations and civilizations, who have willingly adopted the role of Dhimmi despite being in the power center of mighty nations. Or to put it another way, What Makes Johnny Dhimmi Run Away? A closer look at the Dhimmi leadership will yield some surprises. These leaders of the Dhimmi class and of our own nations and cultural centers are occasionally left wing, sometimes liberal leaning but generally moderate. While their views may seem liberal to us, that's only because they lack any real views of their own. As the left's culture war has continued to push the cent...

There are five stages in the grieving process from Denial to Acceptance. American liberals are now moving through their own five stages of dealing with the decline and fall of the myth of Obama. The last time they had invested this much in a politician was the Kennedy Administration, yet there is no assassin's bullet to explain the fall of Camelot for them here. Instead they have to come to terms with the reality of Obama's failure. And this is what their five stages look like. 1. Denial  Obama is the Messiah. He is perfect and can do no wrong. He will usher in a new era, make conservatives and Republicans irrelevant, and assemble the unstoppable machinery of a socialist state that will care for everyone. Progressive legislation will be instantly passed and implemented without delay. The Iraq War will just vanish. All the other wars will too. The world will love Obama, and so will America. The oceans will stop rising and even the most radical anti-war activists will learn...

There is no debate within the Obama Administration on whether to support Israel or not, mainly because there is no one within there who supports Israel. The only debate is which Anti-Israel terrorist group to support, Fatah or Hamas. That is because the civil war between Palestinian Arab terrorist groups, Fatah and Hamas, isn't just taking place in Gaza and the West Bank, but also within the foreign policy establishment. Unlike the actual civil war, no one is being thrown off buildings or shot in the head, rather there are position papers and fierce behind the scenes debates. The split falls roughly between along ideological lines between the Clinton Administration veterans and some of Obama's new radicals. Between liberals and the hard left. Liberals were often sympathetic to Yasser Arafat and his PLO because of its Socialist/Marxist alignment and ties to the USSR. The PLO had its Islamist layer, and when Arafat was given the chance to create a Palestinian Authority, its sch...

The ADL just honored Rupert Murdoch who delivered a speech mentioning Jabotinsky . At the Huffington Post, David A Love demands to know "Why would a prominent civil rights organization -- one which is supposedly dedicated to fighting bigotry and discrimination -- present an award to a man whose cable network profits from race-baiting and hatred?" But the question could just as easily be asked of Love himself, who blogs at a left wing site that profits from race-baiting and hatred-- directed against Jews. In his speech, Murdoch stated, "Now it seems that the most virulent strains come from the left. Often this new anti-Semitism dresses itself up as legitimate disagreement with Israel." Love then goes on to prove Murdoch's point by making a series of false claims about Israel, describing Netanyahu's Likud-Labor coalition as "hard-right" and accusing him of promoting gender segregation and criminalizing political opposition. Then David A. Love su...

Prince Charles recently visited a Mumbai shantytown and praised its "sustainability" in which residents recycle their waste and build their own homes out of whatever materials come to hand. There is of course a word for this form of "sustainability", it's called grinding poverty. Charles is of course not the first rich European to romanticize poverty as some sort of higher spiritual principle. But it's easier to apply that brand of orientalism to India, to assume that people with brown skin who live in terrible poverty are more spiritual, rather than poor. Had Prince Charles gone back in time, he could have seen that same form of "sustainability" in London . But people do not recycle their wastes and use found objects as building materials because they are environmentalists, but because they have no choice. When posturing hipsters in the United States dig through trash cans for food, they're Freegans. But when people who have to dig through g...

At The Atlantic, J.J. Goldberg produced one of the more misguided addenda to the New York Times' Bash Pamela Geller week, by manufacturing a thin narrative , and then addressing it rather than Geller's actual arguments. And then forwarding it to Gerecht, who isn't familiar with Geller. This practice of creating "strawmen", of arguing against what critics of Islam are supposedly saying, than what they are actually saying, has become a notoriously common tool for the liberal media, which censors even cartoons that don't feature Mohammed, and is certainly eager to censor arguments that do. The attack typically rephrases the arguments in a tone somewhere between mocking and ominous, at once undermining the argument by ridiculing it and associating it with Anti-Semitism, particularly ridiculous as Geller is Jewish, and Islam is undeniably Anti-Semitic. In a recent New York Times interview, the blogger Pamela Geller leveled many serious charges against Islam; s...

After the euphoria died down, the oceans sank and the confetti was gathered up, we're back to Democratic incumbents in conservative states running away from any association with liberalism, toting their rifles, putting holes in cap and trade, and mocking Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco hippies. The magic is gone, and the Obama Umbrella is full of holes. Turning Obama into the messiah was supposed to provide unlimited cover for the left's agenda. But the charisma has faded, and as the leaves turn, so do the Democrats. Suddenly Democratic incumbents are making commercials that look more right wing, than most Republican commercials. How many Republicans running for Congress are shooting Cap and Trade full of holes? How many are hippie bashing? Of course it's all fake. But what it reveals is that the country is more right, than it is left. That despite Obama's rise to power, America is basically conservative. And without the bible and gun folk that Obama sneered at du...