Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

America has never successfully liberated and held territory from Islamic terrorists. After thousands dead in Afghanistan and Iraq: both countries are now controlled by Islamic terrorists. Many top current and former defense officials who oversaw both disasters, despite a track record of zero wins, have been criticizing Israel for not following in their footsteps. Everyone from former Gen. David Petraeus to current Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown offer the familiar criticisms that Israel is not following the COIN or counterinsurgency model. “Not only do you have to actually go in and clear out whatever adversary you are up against, you have to go in, hold the territory and then you’ve got to stabilize it,” Chief Brown argued. The problem with this model is that it failed and left a lot of widows and orphans along the way. The United States spent over 50 years losing wars, prestige and young men by trying to follow the familiar strategy for defeating guerrilla armies through conventi

The view from Mount Olympus is said to be spectacular, but few have ever seen it. Head up past the former homes of long dead movie stars and you can look down from the Hollywood Hills on WeHo’s gay nightlife and Russian restaurants, along with much of the rest of L.A. With names like Hercules Dr, Zeus Dr, Apollo Dr, Jupiter Dr, and, of course, Mt. Olympus Dr, it’s truly a hangout for any gods with twenty million to spare. Reported celebrity residents and owners of the gated community with 24/7 security include Leonardo DiCaprio, Katy Perry, and Harrison Ford, but even more importantly here is the Ross House, a 13,000 square foot modernist monster, where Hollywood studios hold intimate receptions, screenings and award parties for the small club of those who are famous or can help make them even more famous. The Ross House of Mt. Olympus is usually a brief entry in industry publications, but it embodies the vast gulf between how people down in L.A. live and how those who decide their fa

After tossing Jewish voters overboard to accommodate the Hamas supporters of Dearborn, Michigan, the Democrats are starting to get nervous about the choice they made. Despite the rollout of the campaign, beginning with Senator Schumer’s floor speech blasting Israel, and various liberal Jewish surrogates, including Rep. Jerry Nadler, vocally opposing the campaign against Hamas, the Democrats did not manage to sell Jews on Biden’s betrayal. Biden’s declaration that he would stop providing military support to Israel if it continued to pursue Hamas into Rafah touched off a major backlash from donors, like Haim Saban, from celebrities, like Michael Rappaport, who has said he could vote for Trump, and ordinary Jews. While there’s no accurate polling of Jewish voters because there are too few Jews in much of the country to be captured by conventional polls and polls specifically surveying Jews are usually run by leftist groups, Democrats have suddenly begun to sweat the Jewish vote. And

When Jordan’s Arab Legion seized half of Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed its Jewish population and annexed the city– the only entity to recognize the annexation was the United Kingdom which had provided the officers and the training that made the conquest possible. Officers like Colonel Bill Newman, Major Geoffrey Lockett and Major Bob Slade, under Glubb Pasha, better known as General John Bagot Glubb, whose son later converted to Islam, invaded Jerusalem and used the Muslim forces under their command to make the partition and ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem possible. The Jews living in the free half of Jerusalem continued to be killed by Jordanian Muslim snipers. The victims of those years of Muslim occupation included Yaffa Binyamin, a 14-year-old girl sitting on the balcony of her own house and a Christian carpenter working on the Notre Dame Convent. Under Muslim occupation, while Muslim snipers were murdering their children, the Jewish residents living under fire couldn’t so much as

"Politics is downstream from culture" has long since passed from revelation to cliché. Culture has long since become politics and politics has become culture. All culture serves or pretends to serve political ends. And all politics, outside the nitty gritty of the actual legislative agenda, is culture. Politics has come to be defined by social media influencers. Key cultural figures, like AOC, may have no meaningful legislative clout, but adapted social media celebrity to politics. That they don't really do anything is almost beside the point in a culture war where no one really does anything except build their brand by virtue signaling, trolling, and insulting their opponents. The base for politics has been sharply split between issue voters and culture voters with the former still dominating elections, but the latter dominating narratives. And social media narratives preclude the need for real world results. The internet broke our culture the way that it broke our econo

Under the terms of Biden’s proposal, Hamas wins and Israel gets back survivors and corpses. After families across Israel had lit their Sabbath candles, returned home from synagogue services and begun their festive meals, President Biden looked at his watch in D.C. “Just checking it’s afternoon,” he said. And then got started on his speech to save Hamas. There was nothing accidental about the timing of the speech on Friday afternoon at a time when much of America’s political establishment was heading out for the weekend while Israeli Jews were celebrating the Sabbath and many of them were not even using electronic devices. After celebrating former President Trump's conviction, Biden announced a new deal under which Hamas would rule Gaza, get billions in U.S. aid and dozens of its terrorists would be released from prison in exchange for every hostage. Or every hostage's dead body . Under the terms of Biden’s proposal, Hamas wins and Israel gets back survivors and corpses. Finally

The discovery of America was a response to Muslim colonialism. Now it's being undone.   The discovery of America and the apogee of European civilization which ushered in the modern world were based on resistance to Islamic colonialism. Since then, European nations withdrew from the Muslim world to avoid colonialism only to be colonized by millions of Muslims from their old colonies. Rather than ending colonialism, Europe went from the colonizers to the colonized, and European governments were called on to once again rule over millions of Muslims, no longer in the Middle East, Pakistan, North Africa or Asia, but in London, Paris, and across their own nations. With that the rulers swiftly became the ruled. Where the old European governments had looked to pacify Muslims abroad, their EU descendants struggled to pacify them at home. And America soon followed. After 9/11, America had been primarily worried about Muslim terrorism coming from abroad. Now it mostly worries about Islamic

DEI is so unpopular that it’s being renamed. Like a mafia informant hiding out from his old pals, some consultants are trying to rebrand DEI as IDE. There are only so many ways to move the same letters around to form an acronym that isn’t as lethal in connotation as IED or DIE. And if IDE doesn’t work out, expect to see some EID offices around before long. Conservative states have started cracking down on DEI offices at publicly funded colleges, and so the University of Iowa now calls its DEI office the “Division of Access, Opportunity and Diversity” while the University of Oklahoma renamed its racism stronghold the “Division of Access and Opportunity.’ At the University of Tennessee, it’s the “Division of Access and Engagement” while at Louisiana State University it was more awkwardly renamed to the “Division of Engagement, Civil Rights & Title IX”. Utah Valley University’s DEI office adopted the meaninglessly bland title of the “Office of Institutional Engagement and Effectivenes

When Islamists and leftists attacked Jews at the Museum of Tolerance which had been screening images and videos of the Hamas atrocities of Oct 7, Mayor Karen Bass failed to condemn the violent antisemitism at a Holocaust museum. Instead the Los Angeles mayor tweeted a generic condemnation of both sides, stating that “we cannot allow current worldwide tension to devolve into this unacceptable violence in our city. This is a time of immense pain and distress for thousands of Angelenos.” During the UCLA Hamas riots, Mayor Bass once again did not condemn the antisemitism, only denounced the “violence” and “harassment” without saying a word about the Hamas supporters and their attacks on Jews. And that’s not surprising both because of Bass’ radical politics, she was once a member of a pro-Castro front group, but also because of her association with a key antisemitic figure. No one has done more to mainstream antisemitism in LA than Melina Abdullah. Abdullah, a CalState professor and the fo