Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

With Rosh Hashana, the new year, beginning tonight Monday evening, the blog will go on hiatus until the end of Rosh Hashana on Wednesday evening. As this update runs Congress is debating the final plank for the gangplank of corporate socialism, bringing America one step closer to the EU way of doing things. The economic crisis we are facing is a manufactured crisis, anyone who doubts that need only look at the connections between George Soros, Countrywide, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. It's a manufactured crisis with a solution that will not only damage our economy but free enterprise, which is the real target here. Whatever happens in the election we will be worse off if this bill passes and our future as a free nation will be worse off. (Update, the bill has failed) In Israel, Olmert, Livni and the Shabak goon squad are beginning the usual noises about right wing extremism. Which naturally is a preface to a crackdown on the opposition before announcing the s...

Elections are often culture wars as much as they are political campaigns, but the 2008 Presidential election is certainly more of a culture war than anything else, with the left putting forward a completely unqualified candidate whose entire pitch is built around his personality and biography, rather than any actual accomplishments. But it is a culture war now also centered around the definition of masculinity. The counterculture for some time has championed a definition of masculinity that uproots the old heroic paradigms, what they produced was generations of selfish, lazy, inept, irresponsible males dedicated to no higher virtues than Carpe Diem and Questioning Authority, which in turn produced broken homes, illegitimate children, swollen welfare rolls and a new kind of culture war. There are few clearer places to see the erosion of masculinity than Hollywood with its focus on putting forward the manchild as the new action star, ushering in the likes of DiCaprio and Matt Damon i...

VIDEOS A former Sudanese slave speaks out against Islamism and tyranny. Beth Gillinsky of the Jewish Action Alliance calls to "Bring back the light" Sarah Palin's representative, a former candidate for Governor Edward Cox showed up to deliver her speech. Guardian Angels head Curtis Sliwa takes on Ahmadinejad A Speaker for the Christian Alliance described the Churches meeting with Ahmadinejad as representing shrinking congregations. A Speaker for Middle Eastern Christians denounces petrodollar politics that put Jews and Christians for sale. MK Benny Elon Spoke An Iranian dissident whose father has been imprisoned by the regime speaks out. On 9/25 wide variety of organizations and speakers gathered together at Perishing Square outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel and Grand Central Station to protest the meeting between Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a variety of liberal Churches including the World Council of Churches and Mennonite and...

With the Wall Street Crisis being declared a financial apocalypse, blame is being hurled at Wall Street Companies and at the Federal government, and while they both deserve the blame, the deeper reality is that the blame also lies with the general public. Wall Street could not have banked so much on a culture of debt, if debt had also not become part of the American landscape. Americans once used to be known as thrifty people and American banks only flourished in the first place because Americans worked hard and saved money. Debt was something shameful and people took on loans for serious ventures that would repay themselves. Today much of that has vanished. Instead we live in a culture of debt, a system in which just about everyone has a credit card or several, in which people routinely buy cars, homes and even appliances they cannot afford to pay for. That is the real ticking time bomb at the heart of our economy. We have gone from an economy based around creating value, to a...

Let's begin with the fact that there really is no such thing as a Jewish vote. The idea of a "Jewish Vote" is a relic of late 19th and early 20th century Democratic machine party politics in which wards and urban political machines took control of entire ethnic communities and drummed up the Irish Vote, the Italian Vote and the Jewish Vote. While Democratic machine politics is alive and well, it has mostly moved on to the Black Vote or less reliably the Latino Vote, newer immigrants and economically depressed groups with a sense of victimization that can more reliably be controlled. That's not to say that the reliable well oiled machine is not a factor in the Jewish vote. It certainly helps insure that millions of Jews and Non-Jews remain registered Democrats in cities such as New York where you're either a registered Democrat or you might as well stay home during the primaries, and often on election day too. But the idea of a Jewish vote is mostly a collectiv...

Nature abhors a vacuum. So does human nature. Atheists pride themselves on thinking that by rejecting "theism" they become free. On the contrary for the most part the absence of conventional religion simply breeds less conventional forms of worship. When the West retreated from monotheism into secularism, watering down religion and reforming their faiths until they were nothing more than leisure beliefs they could throw on over the weekend and then quickly put away, or banishing it entirely, what it did was retreat back to more primitive forms of worship. Cult of Personality - The first of course was the cult of personality. The cult of personality is one of the most basic pre-religious forms of religion there is with man substituting for God with man. The emotional investment in a cult of personality leader enables the individual to identity with the transcendent or uplifted leader and to incorporate him into his own ego. Cults of personality have become commonplace o...

Hello and Welcome to J Street J Street represents an exciting frontier in realizing the moderate voices of American Jews. If you feel that most Jewish organizations do not represent you, J Street does. What is J Street? Many people think that the J in J Street stands for Jewish. It does not. It stands for Judeinrein, an old Yiddish word that embodies our commitment to Jewish social justice. What does J Street do? J Street is the New Address for Middle East Peace and Security. J Street works to assuage the security concerns of Middle Eastern countries worried about the Israeli threat to Middle Eastern Peace and Security. As poll after poll demonstrates the world community is primarily concerned about the threat that Israel poses to peace in the Middle East and around the world. J Street is our way to convey the support of American Jews like you for those concerns and insist that Israel end its provocative policy of attempting to survive in a region that clearly does not want it. For t...

What do the two most successful Republican Presidents of the last few decades have in common? None of them were lawyers. It might seem like a trite observation but Reagan and George W. Bush were both noted for their pragmatism, their ability to connect to voters and grand visions. While both men were certainly flawed, they also had an ability to transcend the trite legalisms of process and procedure in order to strive for something bigger. As I wrote on Friday, the 2008 election beyond party comes to a choice between a ticket with 2 lawyers and a ticket with no lawyers on it. It is any wonder that the liberal political elite has fervently embraced the lawyer ticket while lashing out venomously at the non-lawyer ticket? The legal profession today, more than any other profession, embodies the moral equivalence and the distortions of language that turns right and wrong upside down, at the heart of modern liberalism. While conservatives often attack academia and Hollywood, the worst ...

  With the Sarah Palin email break-in, the Democratic party has legitimized its own Watergate. The hacker was the son of a Democratic politician who somehow obtained a private email address. But what happened afterward is the Democratic party’s Watergate moment. Major liberal blogs and websites, including the Huffington Post and Gawker Media gloatingly published private letters and photos putting even Nixon to shame, while the media repeatedly ran stories mitigating the break-in by claiming that having a semi-private email account justified this version of Watergate. Still you can understand why liberals would be so outraged by the McCain\Palin ticket. For the first time in a long time a major party Presidential ticket is running without a lawyer in the Presidential or VP slot as McCain is a Naval Academy grad and Palin has a degree in Communications. By contrast both Obama and Biden are law school graduates… and lawyers and liberals are naturally terrified and enraged at the th...

One of the reasons that appeasement is so popular is because it's so easy. All you have to do is turn a blind eye, make the occasional vague statement asking both sides to take it easy and go along on your merry way never thinking about the consequences to come. That has been the position of the Paleocons on Russia, just pander to Putin, concede that he has the right to conquer any part of the old USSR and Warsaw Pact nations that he feels like and admit defeat now. It's the stale air wafting from the likes of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, the same old "Isolationism is the Best Defense" politics that allowed Hitler and Stalin to gobble up so much of the world in the first place. The problem with turning a blind eye to Putin is that what happened in Georgia wasn't simply a border dispute, but expansionism by a hungry former world power looking to reclaim vast stretches of territory and former subject nations. Russia finds it convenient to pass off the invasion of ...

An article has been making the rounds over the internet this week called, "Why Feminists Hate Sarah Palin." The real answer to the question of course is that feminism as a political movement ceased when feminism was co-opted by the counterculture and morphed into "sex-positive feminism" which focuses the bulk of its efforts on protecting abortion rights and birth control, the two vital elements that make sex positive feminism practical for women, while ignoring the emotional, financial and health toll this has taken on American women. Professional feminists like professional Jewish or gay or black or union activists have little to do with the groups they claim to serve. They're simply nothing more than front groups for a general Progressive agenda who are funded by major liberal think tanks, donors and political groups for the specific purpose of selling that agenda to the specific demographic they are responsible for. A professional feminist's job is to...