Free Republic

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...

Monday, July 14, 2014 A Game Changer in Gaza Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Terrorism is a game. The rules are simple. You have three choices. 1. Destroy the terrorists. 2. Live with terrorism. 3. Give in to the terrorists. There are no other choices. The first choice comes from the right. The third choice comes from the left. The second choice is what politicians choose when they don’t want to make a decision that will change the status quo. Despite all the explosions in Gaza, Israel is still stuck on the second choice. The air...

Sunday, July 13, 2014 How Diplomats, Reporters and Human Rights Activists Saved Hamas Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog As Israeli airstrikes hit Hamas targets and Hamas rockets fall on Israeli towns, some wonder how did Gaza come to run by Hamas terrorists. The answer is that the world forced Israel to let them in. In the early 90s, Nissim Toledano, a border police sergeant, was kidnapped by terrorists on the way to work. After an extended search, he was found dead in a roadside ditch. In response to that attack and numerous other atrocities committed by...

Friday, July 11, 2014 Friday Afternoon Roundup - Romney Don't Run Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog via American Digest MYTHS AND FACTS Israel is fighting an enemy that insists on having all the advantages of a state and statelessness with none of the disadvantages. The PLO/Hamas unity government is a state when it wants something from the United Nations or the United States, but it’s not a state when it comes to taking responsibility. The Muslims who live in Gaza and the West Bank are considered citizens when it comes to having political rights, but not...

Thursday, July 10, 2014 A Bloody Endless Peace Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog "War is peace," entered our cultural vocabulary some sixty-four years ago. Around the same time that Orwell's masterpiece was being printed up, an armistice was being negotiated between Israel and the Arab invading armies. That armistice began the long peaceful war or the warring peace. The entire charade did not properly enter the realm of the Orwellian until the peace process began. The peace process between Israel and the terrorist militias funded by the countries of those invading armies has gone on for...

Monday, July 07, 2014 Israel's Moloch Syndrome Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog When religion goes, other religions take its place. They mimic the forms and formalities of it without the substance. They are faiths without any gods, but ourselves, and without any devils, but ourselves. Confronted with the religious terror of Islam, the post-religious faiths of the free world act out a godless religious drama in which they take turns playing all the old religious roles without the religion. The most pernicious of these is the martyr to the morally superior high ground of humanism. Faced...

Sunday, July 06, 2014 Co-Dependency Day for Post-America Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The barges were towed along the Hudson. Streets were blocked off, police officers collecting overtime were assembled as the crowds trickled in early to grab prime viewing positions for the fireworks display in a celebration of freedom under heavy guard by opponents of freedom. They were not celebrating the freedoms of the Declaration or the Constitution, but the freedom to get free things. Nancy Pelosi explained that the ObamaCare mandate was a penalty on “Free Riders”. Down by the Hudson River, British warships...

Friday, July 04, 2014 Friday Afternoon Roundup - This is what Revolution Looks Like Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog THIS IS WHAT REVOLUTION LOOKS LIKE A crowd of 200 to 300 people in downtown Murrieta surrounded three Homeland Security buses carrying illegal alien detainees waving large American flags and holding signs that opposed higher taxes and “new illegals” — waited in the hot sun all day for the three charter buses to arrive. Waving Americans flags and protest signs, the crowd refused to give way when the buses arrived with some 140 detainees from Texas, which...

Thursday, July 03, 2014 Remember Your Right to Happiness Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Revolutions are not unique. Some countries have revolutions all the time until revolution becomes their national sport. In banana republics the overthrow of one dictator to make way for another gives everyone a day off from work. These revolutions, no matter how they are cloaked in the familiar rhetoric of liberty, are nothing more than tyranny by other means. What made the American Revolution unique was that its cause was not the mere transfer of power from one ruler to another or...

Wednesday, July 02, 2014 It’s Not the Occupation, It’s Islam Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The bodies of three murdered Israeli teenagers, 16-year-old Naftali who liked to play basketball, 16-year-old Gilad who had just finished a scuba diving course and 19-year-old Eyal with his guitar, will be met by the same ghastly parade of pallbearers who accompany every victim of terrorism. The reporters will scribble down something about “settlements” and the “Cycle of Violence”. The diplomats will urge restraint and remind everyone that the only solution can be found through negotiations with the terrorists. And the...

Monday, June 30, 2014 The Curse of Cain Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog After Cain killed his brother, the Lord told him, "A fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be in the earth." But the natural order has been reversed, instead the Abels, if they survive, become homeless wanderers and the Cains build their Caliphates on the tombs of their victims. "Cursed shall you be from the earth," the Lord said, and so it has been.  The earth under their feet may be cursed, it yields nothing but sand and thistles, but they are nomads, forgetting...

Sunday, June 29, 2014 Our Consensus Rulers Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Every society is ruled by a consensus. The consensus rarely comes from the bottom up. Usually it's imposed from the top down. The consensus is what the people running things believe. It's their equivalent of common sense. The United States is not run by the voters. It's not run by the people. It's run by a consensus. That consensus is what the elites think is true. That consensus is not exactly the same among Democrats and Republicans, but it does overlap in significant ways....

Friday, June 27, 2014 Friday Afternoon Roundup - Can't Miss Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog  Tom Trento's amazing team have put together another video on my article, The Innocence of Hillary. A FEW QUICK THOUGHTS ON COCHRAN 1. Beating a Senate incumbent is still really hard. Even when the votes go your way, the incumbents have any number of dirty options at their disposal. It happened in Alaska. Now it happened again. The system itself is corrupt and winning an election means beating the system. The bigger the election, the harder the system pushes back. It's...

Thursday, June 26, 2014 An Ocean of Failure Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog "This was the moment," Barack Obama had told the cheering audience in St. Paul, Minnesota. "When we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war." St. Paul has an Ocean Street. It has an Ocean Spa and Salon. It even has an Oceanaire Seafood Room. It does not however have...

lections are won by demographics. No soup company blindly dumps cans of its newest "Turkey Coconut Bouillon with Nutmeg and Omega 3" in Aisle 6 of the supermarket without testing to see what demographics such a hideous concoction might appeal to. Will the product appeal to lesbian single mothers, divorced Asian firefighters or eccentric Latvian millionaires? Politics is no different. A political party has its base, definable groups who groove to its message, who eat up the red meat that its candidates toss their way. It has the demographic groups which will always vote for it and those who might...