Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Columbus may have outfoxed the Spanish court and his rivals, but he is falling victim to the court of political correctness. The explorer who discovered America has become controversial because the very idea of America has become controversial. There are counter-historical claims put forward by Muslim and Chinese scholars claiming that they discovered America first. And there are mobs of fake indigenous activists on every campus to whom the old Italian is as much of a villain as the bearded Uncle Sam. Columbus Day parades are met with protests and some have been minimized or eliminated. In Seattle, Columbus Day became Indigenous People's Day, which sounds like a Marxist terrorist group's holiday. The shift from celebrating Columbus' arrival in America to commemorating it as an American Nakba by focusing on the Indians, rather than the Americans, is a profound form of historical revisionism that hacks away at the origins of this country. No American state has fol...

"We’re liberals! We’re liberals. We’re not crazy tea-baggers," Bill Maher protested after his televised argument with Ben Affleck about Islam.  "We are not bigoted people. On the contrary, we’re trying to stand up for the principles of liberalism!" Maher added. "I think we’re just saying we need to identify illiberalism wherever we find it in the world, and not forgive it because it comes from [a group] people perceive as a minority." But despite Maher’s protests, the majority of liberals would agree with Affleck that criticizing Islam is racist. Liberals claim that the Islamic State is Un-Islamic. It would be more accurate to state that liberals are illiberal. Liberalism, even the form that was in common usage not too long ago, is as dead as Lenin. Ben Affleck isn’t a liberal. He’s an enthusiast of revisionist Communist historian Howard Zinn. The modern liberal of today is uninterested in identifying “illiberalism” since he is an illiberal man of t...

There is no one that the left hates more than a man who does not hate, who goes through the day without outrage and who does not spend his life stewing with vindictive resentments. Leftists call it “privilege” now. They have called it apathy, escapism and a hundred other things. They will find a thousand other names for it as they march through the future centuries grinding their teeth and cursing their country for its backwardness, their people for their provincialism and their culture for its mercantilism. But privilege is simply freedom from resentment. To be of the left is to confuse perpetual outrage with righteousness. The professional leftist believes that the path to utopia on earth lies in constantly denouncing thought criminals until they have all been unthought so that only their kind of ethical and empathetic people walk the earth. Like most utopians, they plan for a utopia that they could never actually live in. Leftists without grievances are like an army with...

The quintessential question of Watergate was “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Obamagate, the vast scandal that encompasses an entire presidency, offers a preemptive answer. Obama didn’t know anything and he never knew it. At least not until, like smuggling weapons to druglords, bugging journalists, IRSing his political enemies and killing vets, his right hand found out about what his left hand was doing from the morning paper. After skipping 58% of his daily intelligence briefings in Term 1 and 59% of them in Term 2, he went on 60 Minutes and blamed intelligence agencies for being caught by surprise by ISIS. The intelligence had been there all along, but Obama wasn’t just missing his 3 AM phone calls, he was also skipping the 3 PM phone calls while golfing with the CEO of Comcast, friendly hedge fund managers and assorted lobbyists. When the media, in the person of loyalist New Yorker editor David Remnick, tried to do its newfound duty by briefing him on the...

Controlling a large number of people isn't easy. The United States alone consists of 312 million people spread out across nearly 4 million square miles. Add on nearly 500 million for the population of the European Union and another 1 million square miles of territory. Then pile on Canada with 34 million people and another 4 million square miles, Australia with 22 million and 3 million square miles and a few other stragglers here and there, and the postmodern rulers of the progressive empire have to cope with nearly a billion people spread out across 15 million square miles. Large territories and large numbers of people are very difficult to govern. Structures tend to break down and people further away from the centers of power don't listen to the boys at the top. The only way to make a going proposition of it is to consolidate as much power as possible at the center and the very act of centralizing power leads to tyranny. The most direct chokehold possible is physical. Ch...

 Socialist President of Bankrupt France Pledges $1 Bil for Global Warming ISLAM IS UNISLAMIC Obama denounces ISIS as un-Islamic  for beheading people while leading a coalition against them which includes Muslim countries that use beheading as an Islamic punishment. The Saudis recently beheaded a man accused of sorcery. What’s the difference between the Islamic State and the Saudis? They both have lots of oil, terrorists and a penchant for beheading people, but the Saudis have better public relations. Maybe when the Islamic State starts funding chairs at Georgetown and UCLA, and donating to the Clinton Global Initiative, it’ll start getting better press. The Saudis can’t possibly be un-Islamic because the establishment’s official definition of Islam comes from them. Even the idea of denying that the Islamic State is Islamic is a Saudi strategy. But if Alton Nolen is un-Islamic then ISIS is un-Islamic and if ISIS is un-Islamic then Saudi Arabia is un-Islamic. And th...

If the weather is too hot or too cold, if there is a natural disaster, if a plane crashes, if crime increases, if crime decreases, if the Ebola virus rampages across of Africa or stays home to read a good book instead, if the price of coffee goes up or if a war breaks out… it will eventually be connected to Global Warming. Even the rise of ISIS has been blamed not on the Koran, but on Global Warming. Meanwhile a Muslim terrorist can blow himself up at Ground Zero on September 11 while screaming, “I am doing this because I am a Muslim and I hate you all” and those same experts will tell us that it had nothing to do with Islam, but it was caused by the impact of Global Warming on the molecules of his brain. It’s all a matter of how you connect the dots. Democrats think that Global Warming is a bigger threat to America than Al Qaeda. That’s the profitable notion that Al Gore has been selling for some time. When ISIS began making headlines, lefty publications scurried to explain ho...

Every ideology needs to believe in its inevitability. Religions get their inevitability from prophecies; secular ideologies get theirs from the modernist fallacy. The modernist fallacy says that history is moving on an inevitable track toward their ideology. Resistance is futile, you will be liberalized. Marxism predicted the inevitable breakdown of capitalism. Obama keeps talking about being “on the right side of history” as if history, like a university history curriculum, has a right side and a wrong side. All everyone has to do is grab a sign and march “Forward!” to the future. The bad economics and sociology around which the left builds its Socialist sand castles assume that technological progress will mean improved control. Capitalism with its mass production convinced budding Socialists that the entire world could be run like a giant factory under technocrats who would use industrial techniques to control the economic production of mankind in line with their ideals. The US...

Say that you get a tempting offer from a Nigerian prince and decide to invest some money in helping him transfer his vast fortune from Burkina Faso or Dubai over to the bank across the street. The seemingly simple task of bringing over the 18 million dollars left to him by his father hits some snags which require you to put in more and more of your own money. Eventually you have invested more than you ever would have ever done up front just trying to protect the money that you already sank into Prince Hussein Ngobo’s scheme. And to protect your self-esteem, you go on believing that no matter what Prince Ngobo does, he is credible and sincere. Any failings in the interaction are either your fault or the fault of some third party. Anyone who tells you otherwise must be a Ngobophobe. Now imagine that Prince Ngobo’s real name is Islam. That is where Western elites find themselves now. They invested heavily in the illusion of a compatible Islamic civilization. Those investments, w...