Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

There is one fundamental element that is absolutely necessary for an isolationist foreign policy. Isolation. Isolationism without physical isolation is as much good as belligerence without an army to back it up. American isolationism might have been feasible during WW1 when its neighbors were either friendly or no threat, there was no danger from the Pacific and a fleet crossing the Atlantic seemed unlikely. Though it wasn't so unlikely even then. As far back as 1897 and long before any American involvement in Europe, Operational Plan Three called for shelling New York and seizing parts of Virginia, as a staging base for attacks on Washington and Baltimore. Plans were drawn up in Germany for the occupation of Boston and Philadelphia. Vice-Admiral August Thomsen wrote, "At the moment every thinking German officer is occupied with the consequences of a belligerent conflict between Germany and the United States of America." No American politician was thinking the s

A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears to follow the same narrative. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again. 120 years after the Maccabees drove out the foreign invaders and their collaborators, another foreign invader, Herod, the son of a Roman Idumean governor, was placed on the throne by the Roman Empire, disposing of the last of the Maccabean kings and ending the brief revival of the Jewish kingdom. The revived kingdom was a plaything in the game of empires. Exiled by Babylon, restored by Persia, conquered by the Greeks, ground under the heel of the remnants of Alexander's empire, briefly liberated by the Parthians, tricked into servitude and destroyed by Rome. The victory of the Maccabean brothers in reclaiming Jerusalem was a brief flare of light in the dark centuries and even that light was shadowed by the growing darkness. Israel was free only to the extent that the pro

In addition to being exempt from satirical cartoons, airline security procedures and human rights-- the chattering media classes in all their wisdom have decided that Muslims should also be exempt from the laws of economics. Forget welfare, Muslims are now entitled to media welfare. When normal religions want to put on a show promoting their religion, they build themselves a cable channel. Sadly Bridges TV, the Muslim cable channel dedicated to challenging stereotypes, hating Jews and promoting Islam ran into some trouble when its founder and president beheaded its co-founder, who also happened to be his wife. Muzzammil Hassan, turned out not just to be the president and founder of Bridges TV, but also a member of the Muslim Club for Men, and is now challenging stereotypes about Islam at Clinton Correctional Facility. But TLC stepped into the breach to provide Americans with more of that programming challenging stereotypes about Islam that they never asked for. All-American Mus

Islam is peaceful. At least that is the likely defense of Rafiqi Islam , a loving husband, who told his wife that he had a present for her, blindfolded her to make it a surprise and then cut off her fingers. Then the rest of the Islam family mopped up the blood, while Mr. Islam threw her fingers into the trash, and after a few hours took her to the hospital where they warned her to tell the doctors that she had an accident. The proximate cause of this event was that Mrs. Islam wanted to continue her education and Mr. Islam being a good Emirati Muslim was not so fond of the idea. Islam must be given credit for directness. When Muslims want to punish women for their sexuality, such as not wearing the Hijab, they throw acid in their faces. When they want to punish them for getting an education, they cut off their fingers with a machete. But before the machete comes down, the blindfold goes up. We ourselves have had quite a few Muslims asking us to put on a blindfold because they ha

Forget all the talk about democracy and a revolt against tyranny, the choice here isn't being a tyrant and a populist movement, it's which species of Islamists will come out on top. On one side is Iran and on the other are the Gulf States and the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria is not an Islamist regime, except to the extent which all Muslims countries incorporate Islamic law into their legal and social systems, but it is the pawn of Iran, a Shiite Islamist state. On the other side are Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulfies, Turkey and the Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Forget all the nonsense about a secular opposition. The so-called liberals will show up just enough to legitimate the uprising and then fade away when it's time for the Imams to take power. That is how it happened in Iran, and despite every prediction too many people refused to listen when they were told it would happen in Egypt. Now it has happened in Egypt. Some neo-conservatives have

A LETTER FROM GOEBBELS The Republican race is more muddled than ever as Gingrich's numbers fade a little without anyone to take his place. Either Gingrich recovers, Perry surges or it's Romney all the way. The establishment backing Romney had to damage Gingrich to limit the fallout from their backing of Romney. This way they chose between two evils, rather than choosing the man that they were always going to choose. Congressional deadlocks continue as neither side can really move their agenda forward. But Obama can still abuse executive orders and he benefits from the appearance of a do-nothing congress. Meanwhile the NJDC has dumped a sputtering press release condemning Congressman West for his "shocking" Goebbels comment about the Democratic Party, complete with an ADL press release. The comment may be a bit much, but is the party most associated with breaking Godwin's Law really pretending to be outraged by a Goebbels analogy? Let's just have

"The right wing extremist strains of Israeli Judaism are threatening to turn that ignition into a conflagration." That quote comes from Rabbi Joshua Hammerman, the same Rabbi now being widely quoted for his bizarre Tim Tebow column. Or rather there are numerous articles quoting the column without mentioning his name or who he is. This is not the article that I had planned to run tonight. That article has already been written and sits waiting. It may be timely, but it will have to wait until next week, because this is timelier and it needs to be said. In the last hour I read through numerous blog posts treating Hammerman's column as a Jewish view and turning it into an attack on Jews in general. Some of those attacks are fairly mild mannered, but they come down to the same thing. Those pieces however show very little wisdom. Conservative Christians of all people should know that modern clergy come in two flavors. Religious and liberal. Hammerman does not have an is

A year ago today few of us probably thought that the primaries would come down to debating whether Romney or Gingrich are more conservative. It's a rather thankless and pointless debate currently being settled by cherry picking statements on single issues. The bottom line is that neither man is particularly conservative, certainly neither man is a small government conservative. But the odds of anyone like that getting to the finish line were never very good. The only two consistently conservative candidates in the race, Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann were ridiculed off the stage by a "conservative" media which never gave Santorum a chance and rushed to drown Bachmann the moment that Perry took the stage. Now that media is racking up pageviews on Romney vs Gingrich, tearing down both candidates for fun and profit. Over the last several weeks we have gotten a thorough grounding in each man's negatives. But we have also gotten a reminder of how each man got here

The left of center European press has responded to Prime Minister Cameron's veto of EU 2.0 with all the hysteria of a man on a desert island who sees the rescue plane flying off into the distance. Equal to them is the American press which is already barking that if we don't sign on to Durban's boondoggle and accept a global environmental court, then we have doomed the planet. This pathological drive toward regional and global union regardless of the negatives seems more like a neurotic reaction than serious policy. Is the UK really doomed outside of the EU, especially since for all the hyperbole it isn't anywhere near to being outside the EU, and is a failure to create another disastrous bureaucracy in the name of saving the planet from disaster really going to doom the human race? Union has become the neurotic obsession of progressive politics, regardless of whether that union does anyone any good or not. If we could pretend that EU 1.0 was leaving behind the gho