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Know your enemy. To know what ISIS is, we have to clear away the media myths about ISIS. ISIS is not a new phenomenon. Wahhabi armies have been attacking Iraq in order to wipe out Shiites for over two hundred years. One of the more notably brutal attacks took place during the administration of President Thomas Jefferson. That same year the Marine Corps saw action against the Barbary Pirates and West Point opened, but even Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Howard Zinn chiming via Ouija board would have trouble blaming the Wahhabi assault on the Iraqi city of Kerbala in...

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Obama’s Iraq policy in 2014 is his 2007 policy all over again. The minimal attacks on Al Qaeda are paired with the expectation that Iraqis will unite to achieve a political solution.But what if they don’t?In 2007, Obama had claimed that American withdrawals would pressure Iraqis into a political solution. He was wrong. The withdrawals not only failed to move Iraq toward a political solution, but they gave Maliki and his Iranian allies the power they needed to marginalize the Kurds and the Sunnis.Obama went on insisting that the only...

Obama has a way of starting wars while on vacation. During the Libyan War, Obama declared from Martha’s Vineyard that, “Tonight, the momentum against the Gaddafi regime has reached a tipping point.” Then he went to play golf and accompanied Valerie Jarrett on a visit to the home of the CEO of Comcast. It was August and the Libyan War had been going on for months. NATO planes were conducting hundreds of sorties. But their commander was on vacation. That was only fitting since Obama had begun the Libyan War while hanging out in sunnier climes. His ponderous announcement, “Today...

Tuesday, August 12, 2014 The Romance of the Fall Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Robin Williams is the keyword of the hour. Seeing the rash of stories about him, you might think that he went out at the high point of his career. And yet those same people couldn't be bothered to actually watch the movies he was starring in. The closest he came to a starring role in the last few years was Old Dogs. It made less than $50 million. Before that there was License to Wed. A handful of people saw that. Last...

Sunday, August 10, 2014 Hiroshima's Lessons for the War on Terror Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog In the summer of '45, the United States concluded a war that had come to be seen by some as unwinnable after the carnage at Iwo Jima with a bang. On August 6th, the bomb fell on Hiroshima. And then on the 9th, it was Nagasaki's turn. Six days later, Japan, which had been preparing to fight to the last man, surrendered. For generations of liberals those two names would come to represent the horror of America's war machine when...

Friday, August 08, 2014 Friday Afternoon Roundup - Open Minds, Closed Hearts Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog  LEADER-SHIP The photo was retweeted by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, who had just gotten through explaining that Obama deals with genocide on a case-by-case basis. The White House also uploaded it to its Flickr page and it’s probably on Instagram and projected above the White House with a laser on the sky. This situation room photo is serious. It means business. Susan Rice has changed out of her PJs and into her power suit like she’s ready...

You can tell how bad a crisis is based on the staged photos that Obama’s official propaganda photog deploys for action.On August 2nd, the situation was only mildly severe, so Pete Souza gave us this photo of Obama leaning back in the White House while chatting with Susan Rice and an NSA guy. But then major newspapers (the kind his donors read) started talking about genocide in Iraq and Obama’s inaction. So after signing off on some aid drops, after a whole bunch of non-Muslim Yazidi kids had died of thirst, this photo was deployed for action.The photo was retweeted...

Thursday, August 07, 2014 Are All Dead Children Created Equal? Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog While furious mobs of leftists draped in Keffiyahs and corn syrup were shrieking about Gaza in the public squares of every major city, ISIS was continuing its genocidal advance on Baghdad. In the last 24 hours, the Yazidis, a non-Muslim minority, fled ISIS to a mountaintop where their children are dying of thirst.  The stark reality of their plight, caught between thirst and a genocidal army, is in sharp contrast to the phony claims made about Gaza where truckloads of goods...

Tuesday, August 05, 2014 The UNRWA is Hamas Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The UNRWA is on the front lines of the Hamas War in Gaza. In the headlines, its schools are forever being fired on or found to be stockpiling rockets. If individual Gazans are being used as human shields, the UNRWA often seems as if it is one big organizational human shield. But the UNRWA isn't Hamas' human shield. The UNRWA is Hamas. The "UN" part of the UNRWA, the blue logos and symbols, fool us into thinking of it as an international humanitarian...

Saturday, August 02, 2014 One Million Ceasefires Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog If you like cease-fires, then this is a great time to be alive. Those Israelis who weren't shot in the head by  Hamas terrorists (whom Andrew Sullivan insists weren't real Hamas terrorist, trading in his obsession with Sarah Palin's rogue pregnancy for a new conspiracy theory) or killed by a Hamas rocket, encounter almost as many cease-fires in a given day as terrorist attacks. A cease-fire comes along every few minutes and it can last anywhere from a minute to an hour to a...

Friday, August 01, 2014 Friday Afternoon Roundup - Hamasbara Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog SUICIDE JOURNALISM These tactics, born out of the Twitter age and the complete collapse of journalistic ethics, aren’t just a defense of Islamic terrorism, but they also borrow some of the tactics of the terrorists they defend. Hamasbara is less dependent on developed stories and more on Tweets and blog posts. Its practitioners are just activists with a media forum. Their smear campaigns depend on quick hit and run attacks. They bring a story into being out of thin air and move...

Defund the UNRWAPosted By Daniel Greenfield On August 1, 2014 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 5 Comments The UNRWA is on the front lines of the Hamas War in Gaza. In the headlines, its schools are forever being fired on or found to be stockpiling rockets. If individual Gazans are being used as human shields, the UNRWA often seems as if it is one big organizational human shield.But the UNRWA isn’t Hamas’ human shield. The UNRWA is Hamas.The “UN” part of the UNRWA, the blue logos and symbols, fool us into thinking of it as an international...

Thursday, July 31, 2014 Obama's Gaza Game Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog While Israelis are fighting and dying, families huddling in bomb shelters and soldiers going off to face death, the men and women in suits and power suits moving through the great halls of diplomacy are using them as pawns in a larger game. During the Cold War, Israel was a pawn in a larger struggle between the US and the USSR. Now it is back to being a counter in a larger game. Israel’s function within the great halls of diplomacy was always as...

Sunday, July 27, 2014 Know Your Military Colonists Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog "Military Colonist" is a term that has gone out of fashion in this brave new world of "No Human Being is Illegal" and "Every Refugee Deserves to be Resettled." The university history professor with an office full of fake Indian jewelery and a view of the parking lot will lecture on the military colonies of the Roman period, always careful to emphasize their eventual fate. And he may even get up to the 16th century. But he'll stay away from the present. But...

Friday, July 25, 2014 Friday Afternoon Roundup - Shave Gaza Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog UNDERSTANDING OBAMA What both men have in common is a hard left background which has taught them that the only defining principle in politics is Lenin’s “Kto-Kovo”. Kto-Kovo or Who-Whom reduced all interactions to warfare. The Bolsheviks ushered in the end of rules, decency or honor. All that mattered was who would be able to destroy whom. It didn’t matter whether you had justice on your side, but what you would do about it. Obama and Putin have the same message...

Wednesday, July 23, 2014 Terrorism is a Tactic and It Must Be Defeated Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog There are two dimensions to fighting a War on Terror. One is fighting terrorists and the other is fighting terrorism. In conventional warfare there isn't that much of a difference between fighting men and their tactics. There is a wider space between fighting terrorists and their tactics. Conventional armies use tactics to defeat enemy forces and seize territory. Terrorists however use tactics to take over mental territory. A suicide bomber is not out to take over a particular...

Monday, July 21, 2014 The Noose Around Israel's Neck Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Israel is being hanged on a public gallows erected on the grounds of the United Nations with yards of rope gleefully supplied by the Muslim world. But the hangmen are mostly Westerners who still think that the Muslim lynch mob at their doorstep can be pacified with the death of a single victim. There are three things you can do when you are about to be hanged. You can walk proudly, recite a glorious line or two to embed your martyrdom in...

Saturday, July 19, 2014 It's Another "Death to the Jews" Weekend Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog From Berkeley to Boston and from Paris to Sydney, the season is upon us again. Hipsters twirl  Keffiyahs from some Shanghai factory around their necks, don army surplus jackets and Decembrist t-shirts and head to the nearest Israeli embassy to scream about a new Holocaust. Shiites and Sunnis temporarily put aside their blood feuds and entire families of Syrian Alawites and Turkish Sunnis stand in London or Berlin screaming "Death to the Jews". Joining them are elderly Trotskyists and aging...

Friday, July 18, 2014 Friday Afternoon Roundup - Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog HAMAS IS A 7TH CENTURY PROBLEM To understand why, let’s step into a time machine and go back to the spring of 632. The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius is engaged in the first of a series of wars with Mohammed’s maddened followers. England is divided into seven quarreling kingdoms. Across the water, the Merovingians are killing each other in ways that would give George R.R. Martin nightmares. Meanwhile in a more civilized part of the world, China’s fading Sui Dynasty fields an army of...

Wednesday, July 16, 2014 Winning the Moral High Ground is a Loser's Game Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog In our modern age, things no longer exist to perform their function. Washing machines aren't designed to clean clothes, but to save water and energy. Food isn't there to be eaten, but not eaten. And armies aren't there to win wars, but to be moral. And the truly moral army never fights a war. When it must fight a war, then it fights it as proportionately as possible, slowing down when it's winning so that the enemy has...