Free Republic

Monday, April 13, 2015 Gunter Grass and the Left's Red Flags Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog A few days after September 11 I saw a quote from Gunter Grass on a Manhattan lamppost. In those dark days, the lampposts and walls that weren't covered in missing persons posters were decorated with the hysterical pamphleteering of the left urging us to blame ourselves for the attacks. The quote has long since been lost to memory, buried under smoke and ash, a green parrot perched on an empty staircase and crowds thronging on foot across the bridge. The...

Wednesday, April 08, 2015 The Closing of the Liberal Mind Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Suppose that you are a Soviet agent in 1955. Your cover is that of an insurance salesman. Of your two "jobs", the Soviet agent part is more important, but you need to be a good insurance salesman to maintain your cover. Being a good insurance salesman doesn't clash with being a good Communist, because your job selling life insurance allows you to pursue your real job. And you cannot conflate the two jobs. You can't sell insurance to your KGB bosses...

Wednesday, April 01, 2015 This Culture War We're In Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog How are wars won? To win a war you don't need to kill every soldier on the other side. What you need to do is destroy the other army as an organized force. You destroy the ability of the officers to command and the morale of the men. You destroy their perception of the worth of their side and of their own self-worth. All wars are culture wars. To win you must destroy the values of the other side. (That is one...

Thursday, March 26, 2015 Obama’s Two State Tantrum Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Obama’s two terms showed us that he was a sore winner. Israel’s election showed us that he is even more of sore loser. Ever since Netanyahu survived an election that he was supposed to lose, Obama has been throwing a floor-pounding, siren-shrieking and high-kicking tantrum over the Jewish State. Its latest kick and shriek had White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough sidling into the toxic atmosphere at the D.C. conference for the anti-Israel lobby J-Street to berate Netanyahu. In attendance at the...

Monday, March 23, 2015 Israel’s Leftist Losers Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog For thousands of years the Jews dreamed of reclaiming their country. The left had another dream. It dreamed of a country run by bureaucrats that worked only three days a week. It dreamed of unions running monopolies that worked whenever they liked and charged whatever they wanted. It dreamed of children raised on collective farms without parents and of government as a Socialist café debate. Most of all it dreamed of a country without conservatives. It still hasn’t gotten that wish. Netanyahu’s victory hit...

Thursday, March 19, 2015 The Technophobic Democrats Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog If you believe Hillary Clinton, her email scandal happened because she couldn’t figure out how to do what every American of working age knows how to do; juggle a work and personal email account. The Clinton vaporware bridge to the 21st century turned out to be a private email server that kept out the media, but not foreign spy agencies. When Hillary finally had to turn over some emails, she printed out tens of thousands of pages of them as if this were still...

Monday, March 16, 2015 Obama's Treason is the New Patriotism Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog When Republicans complained that Obama refused to talk about Islamic terrorism, he accused them of playing into the hands of ISIS by demanding that he identify the enemy we’re fighting.  When they spoke out against his Iranian nuclear sellout, he accused them of “wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran”. Those hardliners would presumably toe a harder line than Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who responded to Obama’s outreach in his first term by saying, “The Islamic peoples...

Friday, March 13, 2015 It's Either Hillary or Biden Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Hillary will survive her email woes, but scandals serve as tests that show the strengths and weaknesses of politicians. What the email scandal showed is that Hillary lacks her husband’s breezy ability to weather political outrage. Instead her paranoia and resentment combine to make her scandals worse. Democrats are looking for inspiration, but Hillary couldn’t whip up inspiration on a very special episode of Oprah. The petty resentment that Obama camouflages under a likeable exterior is out in the open. That’s why...

Tuesday, March 10, 2015 The Tolerance Surplus Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog If you ask American, Israeli and European liberals and leftists what the key problem with Islam is, they will answer that there is a lack of tolerance. Not of course a lack of tolerance on the part of the throat-slitters, car burners, gang rapists, car bombers and hate preachers of Islam. On the contrary they will assert that there is a great tolerance deficit on the part of Western nations toward Islam. In a rational political calculus, we take for granted that the people...

Saturday, March 07, 2015 Nostalgia for a Pre-Obama America Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The one thing that Democrats and Republicans have in common these days is nostalgia for a pre-Obama era. The leading candidates of both parties serve as shorthand for a time before the era of Obama. The last names Bush and Clinton summon up nostalgic visions of their family’s previous administrations. The Bush and Clinton political express is moving forward not because these families have become dynasties, but because the majority of Americans want to go back to a time before Obama. Hillary...

Wednesday, March 04, 2015 The Ages of Purim Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Tonight begins the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim. Like so many Jewish holidays, it is an inconvenient fit for liberal clergy and parishioners who insist that Jewish values consist of social justice. There is no peace process conducted with Haman, the chief villain of the Purim story. No one tries to understand his point of view or figure out how much bowing he will accept in exchange for calling off the genocide. Instead he and his fellow conspirators must die. Purim...

Monday, March 02, 2015 The Obama Inquisition Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog If you want to infuriate a liberal, question his patriotism. He’ll sneer, mock and ridicule the question. And then when he is up against the wall, he will mumble that the real patriots don’t need to wear flag pins because they covertly perform their patriotism in the dead of night when no one is looking. He may even trot out that fake Jefferson quote about dissent being the highest form of patriotism. No, Teddy Roosevelt didn’t say it either. He did however say that...

Friday, February 27, 2015 Our Crucial Choice of the War on Terror Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog There are two models for fighting terrorism. We can see the terrorists as an external invading force that has to be destroyed or as an internal element in our society to be managed. In the War on Terror, Bush saw terrorists as an external force that had to be fought while Obama sees them as an internal element to be managed. And while both men signed off on some of the same tactics, their view of the conflict at...

Sunday, February 22, 2015 We Can Kill Our Way to Victory Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog “We can not win this war by killing them,” Marie Harf said on MSNBC.  Reversing thousands of years of battlefield experience in which wars were won by “killing them”, the State Department spokeswoman argued that you can’t defeat ISIS by killing its fighters. "We can not kill our way out of this war,” she said. “We need in the medium and longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it is lack...

Thursday, February 19, 2015 European Colonialism is the Only Thing That Modernized Islam Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Like math and the Midwest, ISIS confuses progressives. It’s not hard to confuse a group of people who never figured out that if you borrow 18 trillion dollars, you’re going to have to pay it back. But ISIS is especially confusing to a demographic whose entire ideology is being on the right side of history. Raised to believe that history inevitably trended toward diversity in catalog models, fusion restaurants and gay marriage, the Arab Spring led them...

Monday, February 16, 2015 A Revisionist Muslim History of America Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blogTurkish President Erdogan’s claim that Columbus encountered a mosque in Cuba (the explorer actually saw a rock whose shape he compared to the dome of a mosque) and a Saudi Imam claiming that Columbus had sailed to America to attack Muslims are typical of an emerging genre of Muslim revisionist history that lays claim to America based on an imaginary earlier Muslim presence here. While these examples may be laughable, Muslim historical revisionism has taken root in academia. It can be found...

February 16, 2015 by Daniel Greenfield Dan Uzan died at the gate keeping a Muslim terrorist out of the Jewish Hall behind the Great Synagogue of Copenhagen. In the hall, a young girl was coming of age surrounded by eighty guests. They did not hear the gunshots over the music. They did not hear the 6’5 basketball player guarding them die.The gates of the Great Synagogue are more modest than the Gates of Vienna, where the Ottoman Empire was prevented from overrunning Europe, but Dan held them anyway so that a young girl could survive her birthday. And it may...

Thursday, February 12, 2015 An Era of Bad Faith Ends Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Generation Xers mourning Stewart’s departure ought to be thanking the man who made the awkward comedian’s long tenure of pulling faces while making snide remarks possible; President Bush. George W. Bush made Jon Stewart. Even Stewart has admitted that his show came into its own when Bush did. A world in which a President Gore spent eight years sonorously lecturing Americans about his love for the trees is also a world in which Jon Stewart would be out there doing pizza...

Monday, February 09, 2015 Beat the Media, Win the White House Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog One of the reasons that Romney lost is that he failed to take on the media. The ultimate lost opportunity came when CNN’s debate moderator Candy Crowley directly inserted herself into the argument between Obama and Romney to declare her favorite right and Romney wrong. Romney had won the Republican primaries, but had failed to absorb the lesson of his most tenacious opponent. Newt Gingrich did not treat the media as a neutral moderator, but as a debate opponent, challenging...

Saturday, February 07, 2015 Obama’s Big Fat Greek Budget Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog In a speech at the Department of Homeland Security, Obama declared that he wants to “replace mindless austerity with smart investments that strengthen America”. Those “smart” investments scattered across a gargantuan $4 trillion budget include a $500 million Green Climate Fund for the Third World and $105 million to help the government build better websites. Obama is fond of putting the word “smart” in front of stupid ideas to make them seem less stupid. The $4 trillion budget is actually as stupid...