Free Republic

Friday, September 12, 2014 Friday Afternoon Roundup - Our Hero Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog OUR HERO September 11 had disrupted the multicultural consensus by raising serious questions about immigration and Islam. It had also thrown away the consensus that the collapse of the USSR had made American military power obsolete. Obama had come to revive these consensuses and as recently as the last election dismissed Romney as a reactionary warmonger who didn’t understand the new world order. Obama had declared victory over an undefeated enemy. He had passed off a strategic withdrawal as a victory....

Thursday, September 11, 2014 Divided We Stand Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Time brings distance to all events. No pain is as fresh twenty years later as on the day it happened. The shock of the impossible becomes the new normal and then it becomes more background noise. "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," Joseph Stalin said. The statisticians in Doha, Tehran and Riyadh know it quite well when they count up their numbers. Compound death is more than a statistic; it is incomprehensible. The banal media coverage of September...

Tuesday, September 09, 2014 Obama's "Iraqization" of America Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog When it comes to Iraq, Obama lectures the Sunnis and the Shiites on getting along and forming a government that won't exist for the sole benefit of a single group at the expense of the other. But in America he runs exactly that sort of government. Only 27% of whites see Obama as a "Uniter" compared to 78% of blacks. Those are Sunni-Shiite numbers. And numbers like that have consequences.  Iraqis are not stupid. They look at the news and they see Ferguson...

Sunday, September 07, 2014 Poor Little Rich Liberals Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog No group has been hit harder by the Obama economy than American liberals. From Marin County, where bundlers have had to struggle to scrape together a few ten grand bills to attend Obama fundraisers, to Washington D.C. whose bedroom communities now have seven of the ten highest household incomes in the country, poverty is hitting poor rich little liberals really hard. In 2006, Alaska had the highest household income. But voters chose Obama over Palin and these days it's Maryland. Because six-figure consultants...

Friday, September 05, 2014 Friday Afternoon Roundup - Learning to Love Big Jihad Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog  Code Pink Takes Time Out from ISIS and Hamas to Support Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine  LEAVING TO LOVE BIG JIHAD Israel was told not to take down Arafat or Hamas would take over. Now Israel is being warned that if it destroys Hamas, ISIS will take over... And who is to say that ISIS is as extreme as it gets? Shouldn’t we be careful not to bomb ISIS too much or it will be replaced by an even...

Monday, September 01, 2014 The Deadly Israeli House Strikes Again Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog There are few weapons as deadly as the Israeli house. When its brick and mortar are combined together, the house, whether it is one of those modest one story hilltop affairs or a five floor apartment building complete with hot and cold running water, becomes far more dangerous than anything green and glowing that comes out of the Iranian centrifuges. Forget the cluster bomb and the mine, the poison gas shell and even tailored viruses. Iran can keep its nuclear...

Sunday, August 31, 2014 The Imaginary Non-Interventionist Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Ever since Hillary broke with Barack over the virtues of doing stupid stuff, the editorial columnists have been pretending that she has some new and exciting foreign policy. She doesn't. The left has been denouncing her as an interventionist, the second coming of George W. Bush. They just can't explain how Hillary is any more of an interventionist than her old boss who bombed Libya, is bombing Iraq and wanted to bomb Syria. Other places he's bombing include Yemen and Pakistan. And all that...

Friday, August 29, 2014 Friday Afternoon Roundup - What an Islamophobe Looks Like Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog If you fear being killed by a Muslim terrorist, you may have come down with Islamophobia. THE VERDICT IS IN In August 2012, James Foley retweeted a link to a CNN story asking “Right-wing extremist terrorism as deadly a threat as al Qaeda?” The article concluded that indeed it was. Three months later, Foley had been kidnapped. Two years later, on another August, a former branch of Al Qaeda chopped off his head. A Beheading Ends All Illusions...

Wednesday, August 27, 2014 Ferguson's Media Problem Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog If there’s a problem in America or anywhere in the world, inflicting the media on it can only make it worse. By some accounts there are more reporters in Ferguson than there are protesters. That may be why the protesters ran for cover behind the media after throwing bottles of urine at the police. There are so many reporters in Ferguson that the rioters and looters can use them as human shields. You just wouldn’t know it because they don’t take pictures of each...

Monday, August 25, 2014 Where the Black Flags Fly Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Media conveys immediacy, but it doesn't convey culture. Its famous flattening effect makes shoppers at a Staples in D.C. or a Whole Foods in Berkeley feel like they're right among the toppled buildings of Aleppo or Gaza, without actually giving them any insight into the motivations of the players. They're watching foreign movies in a language that they don't understand and attributing their own motivations to the main characters. They assume that the differences are incidental, but if the differences really were...

Sunday, August 24, 2014 There Are No Self-Hating Jews Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Let's say that Chester A. Maxwell decides that he hates America. He takes a flight from Massachusetts to Paris, renounces his citizenship and spends the rest of his life stomping up and down the beaches of France and screaming imprecations at Americans. Our friend Chester is not a self-hating American because he is no longer an American. He may have an American accent, like the same foods, books and movies that give him a common reference point with many of his old...

Friday, August 22, 2014 Friday Afternoon Roundup - Now We Are All Safe Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Daniel Tregerman, a four-year-old boy, was killed by a terrorist rocket from Gaza launched from near a UNRWA school. “Daniel was disciplined and was always quick to get to shelter. Once the alarm sounded, he always knew what to do and where to go.  Always." "When everyone would come to the shelter, Daniel would say, ‘Now we are all safe.’”Hamas Rocket Fired Near UNRWA School Kills 4-Year-Old Boy 15 SECONDS An Israeli father was moderately injured by shrapnel...

Wednesday, August 20, 2014 Hands Up, Don't Loot Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The interior of the Ferguson Market and Liquor Store is littered with broken bottles and scattered snacks. Despite the plywood boards covering the windows and doors, looters with their faces covered in bandanas helped themselves to anything they could find as those who came to memorialize Michael Brown carried on his work. The violence in Ferguson didn't begin when a police officer shot Michael Brown. It began when a 300 lb thug robbed the Ferguson Market and abused a clerk. The release of...

Tuesday, August 19, 2014 What is Wrong with ISIS, is What is Wrong with Islam Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 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...

Sunday, August 17, 2014 How to Write About Israel Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Writing about Israel is a booming field. No news agency, be it ever so humble, can avoid embedding a few correspondents and a dog's tail of stringers into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to sit in cafes clicking away on their laptops, meeting up with leftist NGO's and the oppressed Muslim of the week. At a time when international desks are being cut to the bone, this is the one bone that the newshounds won't give up. Wars can be covered from thousands...

Friday, August 15, 2014 Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Long Way Around Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog LEARNING FROM HISTORY ISIS represents a familiar Saudi tactic. It’s the revival of the Ikhwan, the armies of Wahhabi bandit raiders who united Saudi Arabia under the House of Saud by terrorizing Sunni rivals and Shiite Muslims. The ISIS atrocities of today were business as usual for the Ikhwan who referred to other Muslims as infidels, invaded Iraq, Kuwait and Jordan, killed some 400,000 people and created a million refugees. (Similar events had also taken place earlier such as...

Thursday, August 14, 2014 Barack Obama's Incredible Vacation Wars Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 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...

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...