Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Even as Russia and Putin's KGB buddies in South Ossetia are going through the fiction of recognizing "South Ossetian independence", they're already admitting that Russia really plans to annex the territory. Officials in South Ossetia said Friday that Russia intends eventually to absorb the breakaway Georgian province. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and the region's leader, Eduard Kokoity, discussed South Ossetia's future earlier this week in Moscow, South Ossetian parliamentary speaker Znaur Gassiyev said.Russia will absorb South Ossetia "in several years" or earlier, a position that was "firmly stated by both leaders," Gassiyev said. Worked great for the Sudetenland. If you're wondering who Kokoity is, he was a former Komsomol leader who moved to Moscow, became a "businessman", joined in the Putin gang and then was dispatched back to "lead" South Ossetia, a fictional government that's nothing more tha...

Anti-war liberals have it as an article of faith that the way to resolve our terrorist problem is to address their grievances. But the idea that you can make a violent attacker go away by addressing his grievances has a spotty record at best. It was theorized that you could make crime go away by addressing social and racism problems. Social and racial problems were addressed and crime only increased. It decreased only when a "Tough on Crime" approach came into vogue again. In a decade New York City went from dangerous to one of the safest cities in America under a Mayor who disdained the social problems answer and instead got tough on crime. And even more shockingly this sea change was accompanied by a general increase in prosperity for everyone. Even earlier than that it had been theorized that we could make Hitler go away by addressing the grievances of the German people. The grievances were addressed and Hitler got the Ruhr valley and Czechoslovakia, but it turned out ...

Naturally in response to Sarah Palin's role as the VP for McCain, the Democrats are already reciting the party line about McCain putting someone with "no experience a heartbeat away from the Presidency." It's laughable from a party that has actually put someone with no experience as their Presidential candidate. It's also bizarre since Sarah Palin has served as Governor since 2006, Barack Obama has served in the Senate since 2005. Is the Obama campaign really claiming that Obama's extra year in the Senate makes him qualified to be President but makes Sarah Palin unqualified to be Vice President? It actually gets worse because when you consider that Obama has spent a lot of time playing hooky from the Senate and spent most of that "extra" year on the campaign trail, his extra year vanishes entirely. On top of that Sarah Palin spent those 2 years in an executive position making a stunning series of reforms. Obama spent those 3 years doing what ex...

The first blood in the Presidential election of 2008 has been drawn and it was drawn by McCain. Baffled political reporters are still trying to understand why McCain is suddenly winning and why Obama is falling behind. They don't understand what happened because there's a shortage of experienced political reporters left anymore. Most of the media has been taken in by the shiny and glitzy Obama campaign that progressed like a product release with carefully selected design themes, viral marketing, concerts, celebrity appearances and carefully controlled media relations. The media were taken in by it, in large part because the political press today is short on real reporters and long on media reporters who rarely leave a studio, work hard on their makeup and have very little understanding of what it takes to actually win an election. They relate to Obama so well, because their image is based as much on shiny corporate branding as he is. The media has become increasingly ...

Part of the pretense of outlets such as the BBC is to pretend that their hatred for Israel has nothing to do with a hatred for Jews. But sometimes the mask slips, particularly in foreign language Arabic and Russian articles when the Beeb thinks it isn't being watched. Israel's 60th anniversary naturally drew a witches sabbath of hateful articles from the BBC in every language, but one piece genuinely let the mask slip. In a BBC Russian language article purporting to be about Orthodox Christians in Israel from Ksenia Svetlova, a left wing Arabist reporter closely supportive of Islamic terrorists, published for Israel's 60th anniversary, Ksenia Svetlova gave extensive space to Israel Shamir. The word anti-semite gets thrown around a lot, so the best way to measure just how vile and repulsive "Israel Shamir" is that he's considered beyond the pale even by some of the most extreme figures who hate Israel and have very little use for Jews. Sue Blackwell wh...

If the devil's greatest trick was convincing the world that he doesn't exist, arguably the Environmentalist' Greatest Trick is convincing the world that they really stand for conserving, rather than spending flagrantly. Case in point Barack Obama who calls for everyone to rotate their tires, drive less and use less energy-- even while unveiling a massive spending program that would choke even the 2004 GOP elephant. In other words make sure to limit your showers to 1 minute of cold water, while shelling out your money to fund Barack's own domestic civilian corps. Cut back on toilet paper so Obama can blow hundreds of billions on pet projects that the country can't possibly afford. But then why be surprised, conservation for the greater good was always a staple of planned economies in the USSR or China or Cuba, just so long as you knew that the greater good was the good of the authorities. Hypocrisy is no obstacle to being an environmentalist prophet as Al Gore...

Israel 2018 or 5778, what will the future of Israel look like 10 years from now? With the continuing rise of Islamist terrorism followed by pressure on Israel to continue appeasing the terrorists, it's a difficult five futures that we look toward Israel 2018. 1. Annihilation - Whether through nuclear devastation or being overrun by its enemies, Israel has ceased to exist. It has happened before in Jewish history and without vigilance it can happen again. Whatever survivors remain are in exile, the land itself is in the hands of Israel's enemies and is a disaster area in line with the worst of Afghanistan and has been annexed to one of the neighboring Arab countries. 2. Things Go On - Most countries don't come to a spectacular end, they simply continue going the way they have with things steadily getting worse and worse. In this scenario by 2018, Israel has failed to arrest its current course over the last 10 years. Its territory has shrunk, the Arab and Islamic terror...

Obama's long lost brother recently turned up in Africa living on less than a dollar a day. But he may have only been testing Obama's new economic plan for America because by the time Obama is through with America we might not even have a dollar a day to live on. As the Messiah With No Middle Name finds himself floundering in the polls, something has got to give. For months Obama harnessed the belief of gullible twenty somethings sure that if they just waited around long enough he would break out a guitar and jam with them. Months later with no guitar in sight, FISA voted on and passed, campaign financing promises trashed and faith lagging, Obama brought out the big guns. He began with an extended viral campaign promising anyone who volunteered to work on his campaign and shine his shoes a chance to be the first to learn who his VP was. Or something like that. At least he managed to forego the star search, he did however rely on a Kennedy headed search committee that natur...

Pat Buchanan continues to exemplify a race to the very bottom, allying with a racist cult to seize power at the Reform Party, heading up a Magazine funded by a racist and convicted drug smuggler and now penning a column accusing John McCain's adviser of treason and by extension McCain himself of treason for supporting Georgia . The column is titled "None Dare Call it Treason". This is beneath contempt from Pat Buchanan who as I've demonstrated earlier has spent years agitating on behalf of Russia and arguing that Putin should be able to invade any country he likes. Georgia is not an enemy of the United States. Putin's Russia is. If anyone is a traitor it's Pat Buchanan. For the man who takes the side of Nazi Germany over England and America, the side of Saddam over America, the side of Russia over America to open up his vile yap and accuse McCain's campaign of treason is beyond despicable. McCain served in Vietnam. Pat Buchanan dodged the draft by ...

Obama is preparing to name his VP candidate and really drawing out the suspense. Will it be Joe Biden? Will it be this adorable fluffy but enraged Penguin? Will it be Larry Sinclair? There's just no way to know or care. Most pundits say that John Edwards' love child is probably out of the running, but to be certain you will need to go to an absolutely secret page on Obama's campaign site, sign over your first born child and spent 2 years working in the Recycling Mines as part of the Obama Youth Brigade, and then in gratitude for your service, Obama will send you a text message letting you know 60 seconds before anyone else who his VP pick will be. Hope it's worth it. Meanwhile the media is reporting that Russia has pulled out of Georgia, which they have, since by pulling out what they really mean is that they're digging trenches, positioning missiles and keeping an army inside Georgia, not to mention planting minefields. In Israel meanwhile the race to succe...

"And Moscow girls make me sing and shout. That Georgia's always on my mind" - Back in the USSR For anyone who's missed the days of the Cold War, the good news is that aside from a brief respite during the Yeltsin era, they're back with a vengeance. Russian weapons are headed around the world again, Russian armies are threatening former Soviet Republics and dissidents are finding out the hard way that the bad days are back. But it's about more than just tactics, dictatorships don't begin with bullets, they begin with a mindset and it's clear that the mindset is deeply ingrained in the Russian authorities, sometimes in ways that many Western observers are not equipped to recognize. Domestic Russian propaganda has deployed claims that Saakashvili is mentally ill with Russian psychiatrists quoted as saying that Saakashvili is deranged, schizophrenic and in need of treatment, including in some sources even forcible hospitalization. While to Western ...

After Russian bombings that killed thousands of civilians and after Russian tanks trod their way across sovereign Georgian territory, most of the usual suspects who had wailed about the American violation of "Iraq's Sovereignty" and Israeli bombings in Lebanon had little to say on the subject, when they weren't actively taking Russia's side. But that's only to be expected. These self-proclaimed guardians of international morality aren't out to save lives or protect peoples, if they did they might elevate Darfur somewhere above the bottom of a long list headed by Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon. Like the rest of us they've picked a side, and if the greatest trick of the devil was to convince the world that he doesn't exist, the greatest trick of these freelance humanitarians is to convince the world that they haven't picked a side, despite the blatantly obvious fact that they have. Such people of course resist awkward labels such as "Anti...

It's a simple but vital question. Between friendly or non-hostile nations, a treaty is a mutually beneficial compact creating advantages for both sides. Between hostile nations or entities, a treaty is simply a line in the sand. You draw the line in the sand to make a point. This line you shall not cross. Drawing the line unilaterally means you will use force to prevent that line from being crossed. Drawing the line through a treaty means the same exact. The only difference is that the line has been drawn by mutual agreement. That is the reality of negotiating with an enemy. It's a dangerous reality that the media and the upbeat tendency of First World nations to view every negotiation as the triumph of peace over war, and benevolence over man's innately savage nature. Such a feast of wishful thinking tends to blur or even blot out the reality of the situation, that the treaty is nothing more than a line in the sand. This sort of blurry thinking resulted in celebratio...