Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

New York City mayors excel at banning everything from salt to carriages, but they are not very good at cleaning up the streets and roads after a snowstorm. There are two ways of looking at a major city; as a mechanical matter of buildings, streets and sewers to be maintained or as a social problem of misbehaving people. The mayors of the mechanical city understand that they need to clean the streets, but the mayors of the social problem think they have to fix the people. Mayor Bloomberg flubbed the snow challenge badly. Instead of preparing road salt, he banned salt in restaurants. Instead of having a snow strategy for the winter, he had a Global Warming strategy for the next fifty years. Instead of doing his job, he kept trying to transform the people. And his successor is no better. Bill de Blasio's focus after his petty and mean-spirited inauguration was a ban on carriage horses in Central Park at the behest of a real estate developer who backed his campaign and has his ...

It was the fall of ’38 and the motion was submitted to approve “the policy of His Majesty's Government by which war was averted in the recent crisis and supports their efforts to secure a lasting peace." The policy being referred to was the Munich Agreement which carved up Czechoslovakia and the war being averted was World War II which would come shortly anyway. Of the hope that war would be averted through appeasement, Winston Churchill said, “Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonour. They chose dishonour. They will have war.” Echoing that old Munich motion, the pro-Iran left is calling the nuclear deal that lets Iran keep its nukes and its targets their Geiger counters, Obama’s “achievement”. Any Democrat who challenges it is accused of obstructing the only foreign affairs achievement their figurehead can claim. “Cory Booker wants to torpedo a major Obama achievement,” the New Republic shrieked. On MSNBC, Chris Hayes accused sixteen Democratic senator...

Walk along Church Avenue past Beverly Road and turn east onto McDonald Avenue and you will see where the old standards of working class Brooklyn, aging homes with faded American flags and loose siding flapping in the wind, surly bars tucked into the shadows of street corners and the last video stores hanging on to a dying industry give way to mosques and grocery stores selling goat meat. Mosques grow like mushrooms in basements and above stores offering halal patties, pizza and fried chicken. Newspapers with strange characters peer through the broken glass of red vending machines. Old men glare at interlopers, especially if they are infidel women, and old women finger the fringes of colorful shawls behind the dirty windows of hole-in-the-wall stores. This is where Mohammed Siddiquee settled a dispute the old-fashioned way by beheading his landlord. Mohammed beheaded Mahuddin Mahmud making it a case of Mohammed on Mohammed violence almost in time for the original Mohammed's b...

The study of any philosophy is doomed eventually to the solipsism of the idea as the real world falls away and is replaced by the construct of the world. When Buckley favored being governed by the first 2,000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the faculty at Harvard, he was on solid ground. The first 2,000 people in the phone book, good or bad, are more likely to live in the real world than in some strange construct of the real world. And that experience will endow them with some sense of how things actually work. Some of the faculty of Harvard may live in Manhattan, but it is an imaginary Manhattan whose social and economic laws differ drastically from those of the world. Academics are good at theory, not just the theory of riding a bicycle as opposed to the physical act of riding one, but of inhabiting a universe entirely based on that theory. An academic can create a theory in which bicycles cannot be ridden or in which cars have no mass and exist indefinitely in that world...

THE ONLY GOOD REPUBLICAN... The good Republican who has the bad taste to stay alive will only enjoy a temporary vacation in the good graces of the media. It does not matter how often he pays fealty to global warming, gun control, gay marriage and amnesty for illegal aliens, or his willingness to appear on morning shows to bemoan the extremism of the Tea Party; the time will come when he will be dragged out of the Saturday Night Live studio and the CNN green room, hung from a tree and beaten with a stick for the enlightenment of the people. The good Republican imagines that if he is decently centrist enough, he will be allowed to drive on the luxurious wide lane to the left where all traffic violations are forgiven and there is no speed limit, but unfortunately for him, he is still stuck in the same right lane as Michele Bachmann, Allen West and all the other enemies of the state where driving at any speed is considered an unsafe traffic violation. In a country where the cen...

Obituaries rarely have twist endings and the obituaries of famous people are as predictable as the rain. The obituaries for Ariel Sharon, a man who died long ago, are falling now like distant rain. The media left invokes the ghosts of Sabra and Shatila, a bout of inter-Arab violence that he had as much to do with as Jimmy Carter did with September 11, and describes him as a controversial figure. The right and the press releases from politicians claim he embodied all the qualities of Israel and was a mythical figure whose attributes were larger than life. Sharon was certainly a larger than life figure because, like so many Israeli generals turned politicians, he built that myth. The generals of every country are also politicians. Those who cannot hack it as politicians, usually stay colonels. Israel's most famous generals invented their own reputations and made themselves into men of myth. Some were talented fighters, none were good leaders. Israel's predicament today is t...

"The medium is the message," Marshall McLuhan said. The days of the medium however are being left far behind. The newspaper, the radio and the television set that coiled together into the media to provide a bewildering array of information and entertainment have been infinitely complicated and simplified. The day when the last newspaper runs off the last printing press, the last radio broadcast fades into a hum of static and the last television signal winks out is not that far away. The internet is a true media, The internet through the desktop, the television set and the mobile device is capable of duplicating the mediums we knew, but it also ushers in unlimited competition. Every medium was limited in the amount of content that it could or would provide. There were only so many pages in a newspaper, radio and television could only be experienced in real time and only as many programs as would fit into a broadcasting schedule on a single channel. Everything had limits. T...

There was a time when the United States government ran on hooch. Hard up for cash, taxes on whiskey and beer funded the Civil War. With 40 percent of government revenues coming from liquor taxes, alcohol made the dramatic post-war expansion of government possible so that by the 20th Century, the Federal government would have been unrecognizable in scope and function to a man of the 1800s, but would have been all too familiar to us. The Department of Education was created in 1867, the Department of Justice in 1870, the Department of Agriculture in 1862 and the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903. Within that time, the Federal government had become concerned with every aspect of life throughout the country. After the Civil War, the same whiskey taxes that had paid for cannons, aerial balloons and widows' pensions began paying for the transformation of the government into a booming engine of social change. During the same period that the government was being unrecognizably ...