Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

No one is perfect and I am certainly not. I think my former posts on the topic were fairly realistic about what to expect from some European conservatives. And then Brussels Journal put up one post promoting Ron Paul as the American Paul Belien and an article from Taki's magazine that cheers Jewish Holocaust denier Norman Finkelstein as an inconoclast, calls Mearsheimer and Walt "illustrious academics" and claims AIPAC was behind the invasion of Kuwait. I'm not sure what the point of this exercise was at a time when Brussels Journal was fighting accusations of racism. Taki is notorious as a bigot, a jailed drug addict and a millionaire whose money finances paleocons like Pat Buchanan who have a bug up their ass about Jews too. It may simply reflect a split going back to old fashioned bigotry. Charming sections of the article complete with money quotes can be seen below. The livre de scandale of John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign

Our biggest handicap in the war we're fighting is a failure to understand the nature of the war. We can best begin defining by defining what it is not. It is not the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan. Those are only individual battlefields. Defining the war in terms of Iraq or Afghanistan is as limited as describing WW2 in terms of Algiers or the Philippines. It is not the War on Terror. Terror is an emotion. Terrorism is a particular tactic. A group using it can be defeated. The tactic itself can only be defeated within the scope of a particular conflict. It is not a war with Al Queda, Al Queda represents only an ideological faction of the enemy whose attack on us served as a wake up call. But the war predates Al Queda and will postdate Al Queda as well. Here is what the war is. Our war is with Islamic Supremacism, similar to our struggle with Communism. This is a struggle not with nations, but with an ideology-- one originated by Karl Marx and reimagined by decades of Communist ideol

In reality Norman Mailer died many decades ago but his body kept on running long after the mind that powered it had long ago sputtered and quit. Mailer was the remnant and legacy of a writing culture that encouraged writers to write with the whiskey bottle rather than the pen and viewed a whorehouse as a better setting for a writer's education than a salon or a course in English literature. As a writer with one successful book, Norman Mailer might have gone the Henry Roth route and settled down, raised a family and then reemerge only when he had something to say. Instead Norman Mailer became a one man circus embodying the worst of two decades and entertaining baby boomers before they had to actually grow up and take real jobs. Early on Norman Mailer stopped being a writer and became a performer, his performance was to portray Norman Mailer, like many celebrities Mailer became the object of his own fame. It's a long dark road that fame leads men and women along and boiled down p

Parshas Toldos begins with the story of Yitzchak but quite soon transfers to the story of Yaakov. Yitzchak emerged in the previous two Parshas as a miracle son and in Toldos he becomes quickly a father, his story submerged within that of Yaakov, the father of the tribes of Israel. There are any number of seemingly strange events in Parshas Toldos. Rivka at first is doubting that she was right to even want children when she experiences the turmoil inside her and goes to seek an answer from G-d. G-d tells her that there are actually two enemy nations fighting inside her. Not exactly the most reassuring of news. Then Esau appears willing to trade his birthright for some lentil soup and yet weeps and mourns when the blessings of the birthright fall of Yaakov. Yitzchak who is supposed to be righteous, for some reason loves Esav and insists on blessing him originally. To understand a lot of this we need to go back to the first case of sibling rivalry in the Torah, that of Kayin and Hevel. Li

When students protesting Hugo Chavez's plan to make himself into a dictator for life protested in Caracas chanting "Freedom", the riot police that smashed through their ranks were under the supervision of Deputy Justice Minister Tarik or Tareck El-Aissami. In his early thirties Tarik El-Assimi is one of the younger men to have held such a post. His father Carlos el-Aissami headed the Venezuelan branch of the Baath Party, while his great-uncle Shibli el-Aissami was a close Saddam ally and served as assistant to the Secretary General of the Baath Party. Before the invasion of Iraq, Carlos El-Aissami held a press conference in which he described himself as a Taliban and called Osama Bin Laden, "the great Mujahedeen, Sheik Osama bin Laden". The son, Tareck el-Aissimi who headed up Venezuela's visa department and now serves as deputy justice minister, began as student union leader supervising drug dealing and a car theft ring, while intimidating his rivals. He

The show is set as the ruling powers put on a show to remember the 12th anniversary of Rabin's death, in the way they did not bother to commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of Yerushalayim. I do not weep for Yitzchak Rabin nor can I even begin to understand the mindset that says I must mourn for an elderly politician more than for the little girl riding a bus on which a Fatah suicide bomber dispatched by Yasir Arafat (Rabin's partner in peace) detonated himself. I reject the moral universe of anyone who places the life of a corrupt senile politician transformed into a martyr by a corps of press agents over the lives of the men, women and children murdered as a consequence of Rabin's policies. Accompanying the "regime approved" memorialization of Rabin, are the usual bouts of hysteria over Yigal Amir. Currently a law has been passed denying Amir parole for life. He has been denied a furlough to attend his son's Brit or to have the Brit take pla

The first obvious question that arises in Parshas Chayei Sarah is why do we dedicate so much time to discussing Avraham's purchase of the Maarat HaMachpelah, the Cave of the Forefathers? The funeral of Sarah herself goes all but unmentioned and the funeral of Avraham is a footnote, yet apparently the details of the fairly ordinary bargain is somehow of crucial importance. Some commentaries tell us that this retelling provides proof of our legal right to the cave, but this seems rather redundant. After all doesn't Rashi already tell us that the reason the entire Torah began with the creation of the world was to tell us that G-d had created all the world and had the right to distribute lands to whom he wanted and therefore had the right to give Israel to the Jewish people. Why then do we need the sale of this particular piece of land, above and beyond G-d giving us the entire land? And what is the connection between this sale of the land for burying Sarah our Foremother and the m