Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

The chief liberal critique of the War on Terror has been that George W. Bush wrongly treated 9/11 as an act of war, rather than a criminal act. Instead of passing the Patriot Act, invading Afghanistan, torturing terrorists and trying them under military tribunals, he should have just made a nice speech, and then turned the rest over to the FBI, holding civilian trials and moving on-- the way Bill Clinton did. Under Obama, liberals have gotten the chance to implement their security solution. And from civilian trials for terrorists, to soft power and diplomacy in the Muslim world, to 'civil rights first' security at home, every bit of it has failed badly. Far more Americans are up in arms over "naked scanners" and TSA groping, than were ever outraged over the Patriot Act. Obama's non-stop world tour has not made America any more loved or any safer. Soft power has not stopped terrorists or the regimes that arm and fund them. If anything it has emboldened them. An...

In the wake of the election of 2010, the defining element is chaos. Obama's bumbling international trips, Pelosi's return to power, MSNBC purging yet another anchor to try and show that it's apolitical or centrist or something anyway, and international Democratic infighting have given way to sheer lunacy. The TSA firestorm should have been seriously addressed by now, and it's a mark of the chaos that the administration and congressional democrats have refused to take it seriously. Meanwhile the bizarre outbursts continue. LaHood's cell phone nanny state ban or Rockerfeller's suggestion that MSNBC and FOX both be banned are a little unnerving, but they're also symptoms of a Democratic party that is unable to break from its nanny state core. Which still thinks government force is the only solution to any problem. And wonders why the public isn't more grateful for it. It's the definition problem again. MSNBC suddenly wants to be centrist, except it ...

When Obama attacked Israel for building housing on Jewish owned land in Jerusalem, he was doing more than just pandering to his Muslim hosts with an obligatory dose of Israel bashing. He was diving once again into the ugly pool of bigotry, that first surfaced when he used Joe Biden as a proxy to launch a hate campaign against Israel over the same issue back in March. And what it comes down to is Apartheid . Plain and simple. Obama does not object to Arab Muslims living in Jerusalem. He objects only to Jews living in Jerusalem. The  issue is not about "Israelis", as the media likes to present it, because Jerusalem Arabs and Jews are all citizens of Israel. What distinguishes them is race and religion. The media and the administration only attack the municipal authorities of Jerusalem and the Israeli government for providing housing for its citizens -- when those citizens happen to be Jewish. If they are Arab and Muslim , then there's no problem. If they're Jew...

Good news everybody. Saudi Arabia now has a seat on the women's board at the United Nations. That's right, a regime where it's illegal for women to drive or leave the house without being accompanied by a male guardian, where girls were pushed into a burning building because they were trying to flee without covering their 'obscene' female faces... will be a key player in the international effort to empower women. I don't know what contribution the Saudis can make to the project, since in Ridyah, empowering women usually means strapping them into an electric chair. But in the Muslim world, human rights is usually read to mean banning criticism of Islam under the guise of Islamophobia. In Europe, Islamists are calling the Burqa a human right. That's probably what the Saudis will bring to the table, along with the condemnations of Israel that are De rigueur in every UN group and body. Obama's ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, called the Saudi win, ...

Olbermann's suspension mini-drama was a direct product of the 2010 election which has made cable liberals wonder about their place in the bigger picture. Olbermann had found his place on MSNBC as in the run-up to the War in Iraq liberals felt increasingly emboldened to attack the Bush Administration. And the touchy sports anchor used it as an opportunity to reinvent himself as a cartoon of Edward R. Murrow, that has more than a little in common with Stephen Colbert's performance, and channel liberal anger toward the Bush Administration. With Obama's victory, Olbermann like the rest of the liberal cable punditocracy switched from being the voice of the opposition, to the court jesters of the new administration. Their goal to harangue and denounce Republicans for their obstructionism of Obama's wonderful agenda. But in in 2010, the marketplace switched again. The Republican sweep of congress demonstrated to MSNBC that the face of the electorate had changed. The number o...

The debate over the TSA security measures comes down to two options. Either subject everyone to strip searches or accept the possibility of being blown out of the sky. The authoritarians champion the first option and the libertarians champion the second option. But there is another way. A third option. To understand what that is, we first need to understand why things are the way they are. Security measures at airports are a defensive measure. And a society on the defense develops a siege mentality. In a society under siege, civil rights quickly go by the wayside. The longer the siege goes on, the more rights vanish, never to be recovered again, as people adopt the siege mentality. "If you don't want to die, then just cooperate with the authorities", is the byword of the siege mentality. There is a very simple reason why we need airline security. Because we have Muslims living in the United States, and traveling to the United States. Unlike the old leftist terrorists,...

I spent yesterday evening in the company of a man whose grandfather spent much of the Holocaust dressed in a Nazi uniform. The difference between him and George Soros, is that he used that uniform as a disguise in order to find Jewish refugees and lead them to shelter. And that difference is a profound one. It is the difference between a perpetrator and a rescuer. Between a collaborator and a hero. Soros did not wear a Nazi uniform, but he might as well have, because he aided in the persecution of the Jews of Europe, without compassion, without guilt and without regret. Various excuses have been made for his actions, and none of them hold the least bit of water. Yes Soros was only a teenager at the time. So was my father, who nevertheless escaped to join the partisans, rather than accompanying a Nazi officer in his search for Jewish property he could loot. He had no choice? He certainly had a choice. Even in the worst of times, people still can and do make moral choices. And the ch...

Good news. Apparently there is no such thing as Muslim terrorism after all, because Al Qaeda have been redefined as "Pre-Islamic Pagans". Lisa Graas, who has been providing extensive coverage of the murder of Christians in Iraq , picked up on this bizarre claim by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. The redefinition of Al Qaeda as "Pre-Islamic Pagans" is surreal to most Westerners, but this kind of constant editing and re-editing of history has become commonplace in the Muslim world. If Muslims can insist that Abraham and King David were Muslims and that Jesus was a Palestinian, it's a hop and a skip to claiming that Bin Laden's followers are somehow pre-Islamic. This kind of reasoning isn't completely random. Maliki is a member of the Dawa Party, which is noted for its convoluted path to promoting an Islamic state. Getting a Fatwa against fellow Muslims is tricky. But by defining Al Qaeda as pagans, suddenly there's Koranic permission to kill them. ...

While grief counselors are once again being rushed to congressional offices, the left is throwing a full blown temper tantrum. After spending two years warning about the threat of right wing extremism, MSNBC featured Ted Rall calling for a violent takeover of America. It's easy enough to write off MSNBC as a collection of television losers who exist only to cater to their own class of angry disenfranchised liberals with six figure salaries, but it doesn't end there. Rall's Anti-American Manifesto which calls for enforcing left wing social policies through a violent takeover of America using "Al-Qaeda" like cells, got a positive writeup from Publisher's Weekly, "His revolutionary rants and belief in a green, egalitarian world are compelling, yet a stubborn truth remains: most Americans don't want to revolt". The Seattle Post Intelligencer enthusiastically endorses it. And Firedoglake, which spends so much time worried about "right wing extr...