Free Republic

The best evidence of the unlamented death of the Arab Spring (2010-2013) was the nervous response in Washington D.C. to the Syrian crossing of the Red Line. The Red Line had been set up so that Assad would eventually run afoul of it, whether by using chemical weapons or by taking the blame for chemical weapons use by the rebels; as the UN alleges happened. Once the Red Line was crossed, the Liberators of Libya would use the opportunity to enforce the will of the people; at least those people with Qatari RPGs and Turkish machine guns. But instead of...

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 The Post-Obama Democratic Party Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments Two elections ago, the Democratic Party was on the verge of being torn to shreds. After a long series of dirty tricks and one stolen election later, there was an uncomfortable coming together. Obama and his cronies kept most of the important positions, while the Clintonites got a few pieces of the foreign policy apparatus. The arrangement satisfied no one, but it kept ticking along until the Benghazi attacks happened. By the time Benghazi happened, Clinton and Obama needed each other...

Sometimes poetic justice is very poetic. Other times it’s ironic. And sometimes it’s a teachable moment about the folly of appeasement. Not that Dr. Christopher Stone will have learned anything from his experience. Leftist academics are not very educable. Not even when their Muslim teachers are stabbing them in the neck. (via Debbie Schlussel) A man stabbed in the neck near the US Embassy in Cairo on Thursday has been identified as Chris Stone, an American academic. Stone is associate professor of Arabic and head of the Arabic Programme at City University.

The First Rule of Illegal Immigration is No One Talks About Illegal Immigration May 5, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield 2  Print This Post Liberals love euphemisms the way that goats love eating rotten apples. But the problem with euphemisms is that they eventually take on the derogatory meaning of the thing they were trying to slowly back away from. Retarded started out as a euphemism to replace slow which was a euphemism started to replace moron which was also… you get the idea. Liberals insisted that we use illegal immigrant to replace illegal alien which replaced more insulting terms. Now...

Friday, May 03, 2013 "The Golden Apple" - A Socialist Fairy Tale Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments Once upon a time there was a street fair. It had striped awnings and bright colors and from far and near, farmers came with wagons full of produce to sell at the street fair. The produce was plentiful and cheap and the crowds it drew were huge which created all sorts of concerns for the government. So the government created a Ministry of Street Fairs which it funded by taxing the produce sold at the fair. At...

Tuesday, April 30, 2013 The Best Minds of My Generation Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The one thing that gave me hope for my generation was our cynicism. We might not believe in anything, but at least we wouldn't believe in everything. We might be apathetic, but that just meant it was harder to enlist us in causes. We didn't just march to the beat of our own drummer, we questioned the need for having a drummer and a beat. We were burnt out on everything and done with it all. Of course it wasn't really...

Monday, April 29, 2013 The Big Fat Red Line Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Someone chalked a long red line along the street outside my building. The line is sloppy, it turns, wavers and meanders. Car tires have already rubbed it pink in places and dogs have done to it what large four-legged animals do naturally when taken out of the confines of narrow apartments. The line turns a corner and dives inside a pothole near an exposed sewer grate. And then it is gone. Obama's red line is more famous than my red line. It...

The left has a clearly defined set of responses to a terrorist attack. After all the hopes for a properly right wing terrorist have come to naught, it begins the long slow process of rolling back the laws and emotional attitudes stemming from the attack. For it, terrorism, like anything else, either fits into its narrative or conflict with it. The narrative defines the world, past, present and future, in terms of the political agenda of the left. An event that clashes with the agenda must have its meaning changed so that the power of the narrative is restored. Most...

Means, opportunity and motive are the three crucial elements of investigating a crime and establishing the guilt of its perpetrator. Many crimes cannot be narrowed down by motive until a suspect is on the scene; but acts of terrorism can be. Almost anyone might be responsible for a random killing; but political killings are carried out by those who subscribe to common beliefs. Eliminate motive from terrorism and it becomes no different than investigating a random killing. If investigators are not allowed to profile potential terrorists based on shared beliefs rooted in violence, that makes it harder to catch terrorists...

Wednesday, April 24, 2013 Terrorism Without a Motive Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 2 Comments Means, opportunity and motive are the three crucial elements of investigating a crime and establishing the guilt of its perpetrator. Means and opportunity tell us how the crime could have been committed while motive tells us why it was committed. Many crimes cannot be narrowed down by motive until a suspect is on the scene; but acts of terrorism can be. Almost anyone might be responsible for a random killing; but political killings are carried out by those who subscribe to...

Monday, April 22, 2013 A Tribal War in Boston Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 10 Comments Terrorism, like urban crime, is one of those things that you're not supposed to think about too much. It's fine to talk about your emotions after a bombing or a mugging. You can even share stories and eventually learn to laugh about it. What you cannot do is talk about where it comes from except in the vaguest terms of social conditions. Like pollution from industry or corruption from government, it's one of those toxic spinoffs of our modern society....

On September 12, 2012, Obama stepped out into the Rose Garden and told the millions of Americans watching at home, “We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.” More than half a year has passed since then and justice is nowhere in sight. The perpetrators of the attack openly walk the streets of Benghazi long after the FBI team sent there has gone home. It may well be a coincidence that the first major successful terrorist attack comes as the administration plots a...

Saturday, April 20, 2013 Refusing to be Terrorized Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 2 out of 3 governments agree that dealing with terrorism is all about having the right attitude. That, "Yes, we've been bombed, but we're ready to pick ourselves up and get on with our lives without drawing any conclusions from what happened" attitude that politicians patriotically advocate as soon as the carnage is over.  "Americans refuse to be terrorized. Ultimately, that's what we'll remember from this week," Obama said in his radio address. But of course Americans were terrorized. Obama's message is that...

Motive still a giant incomprehensible mystery. But there are suspicions that he was one of those Tea Party NRA type of people. Certainly his peaceful tolerant religion notorious for its love of kites, puppies, infidels and women had nothing to do with it. NPR has done some background on Tamerlan Tsarnaev who, it turns out, was surprisingly Muslim. (Not that NPR can say so.) His Islamic attitudes extended to his treatment of American women. LAURA SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Well, these women were close friends and roommates of Tamerlan’s girlfriend, Katherine Russell, and they knew him for several years while they...

“One of the Chechen terrorists who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings could have been deported years ago after a criminal conviction and the other was granted American citizenship on the 11th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. “Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old killed in a wild shootout with police, was a legal U.S. resident who nevertheless could have been removed from the country after a 2009 domestic violence conviction, according to a Judicial Watch source. That means the Obama administration missed an opportunity to deport Tsarnaev but evidently didn’t feel he represented a big enough threat.”

Now that we know who the bombers are and one of them is dead, and that they are Chechen Muslims, the media has gone into “Palestinian” mode insisting that we need to talk about the conflict in Chechnya. We can talk about Chechnya, but the issue there and everywhere else is Islamic nationalism or Islamism. The bombers could have been from Chechnya or Mali or Bosnia or Iraq or Egypt or Afghanistan or any Muslim country where Islamists are active. And that’s most Muslim countries, especially after the Arab Spring. There is a conflict in Chechnya and Iraq and Pakistan...

Sleeper? Every believer in Islam is potentially a sleeper, ready to undergo what the experts call “radicalization”. But radicalization is largely a misnomer. The proper term is religiosity...

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 Tears Don't Protect Against Murder Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 6 Comments After serving a few years in prison for his role in the Munich Massacre, Willi Pohl moved to Beirut. The brief sentence was a slap in the wrist, but Pohl had still served more time in prison than the Muslim gunmen who had murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches during the 1972 Summer Olympics. Mohammed Safady and the Al-Gashey cousins were released after a few months by the German authorities. They went back to Lebanon and so did he.

In The Republic, Plato argued that philosophers must be made kings for the ideal city-state to be born. In the pages of The New Republic, Cass Sunstein argues for the benevolent paternalism of the nanny state and its philosopher-kings. It’s an old Sunstein theme and the one that brought him to the attention of politicians who dearly love to imagine themselves in the roles of those philosopher-kings. One of those politicians, Barack Obama, even made Sunstein his Regulatory Czar. Sunstein debuted as the philosopher-king of the technocrats with his book Nudge. Now having left his D.C. Czardom, Sunstein is back...

The first urban political machine was named after a fictional Indian saint unrecognized by any church and whose name, when pronounced with a Y at the end, began to strike many as Irish which only further confused the issue. The godfather of that machine was another fictional saint who became Thomas Jefferson's vice president after successfully rigging an election using a phony water company that eventually became Chase Bank, was tried for murder after killing the first Secretary of the Treasury, was tried for treason after a conspiracy to make himself King of Mexico and plotted to convince New England...