Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

 The circle of men whirls around the fire, hand in hand, hand catching hand, drawing in newcomers into the ring that races around and around in the growing darkness. A melody thumps through the speakers teetering unevenly with the bass, the sound is both old and new, a mix of the past and the present, like the participants in the dance, the traditional garments mixing with jeans and t-shirts until it is all a blur. It is Lag BaOmer, an obscure holiday to most, even to those who come to the fires. The remnants of the Jewish Revolt against the might of the Roman Empire are remembered as days of deprivation in memory of the thousands of students dying in the war, until the thirty-third day of the Biblical Omer, part of the way between Passover and Shavuot, the day when Jerusalem was liberated. Deprived of music for weeks, it rolls back in waves through speakers, from horns blown by children and a makeshift drum echoing an ancient celebration when men danced around fires and shot arrow...

Governor Andrew Cuomo is many things: a mass murderer, a sexual predator, and a sore loser. Cuomo spent $70 million census outreach, but his horrifying policy of forcing nursing homes to accept patients infected with the coronavirus had killed untold thousands of New York seniors. Now the census is done and New York is going to lose a House seat by 89 people. “We’re looking at legal options, because when you’re talking about 89, that could be a minor mistake in counting,” Cuomo whined. The ‘9’ is fitting because that’s the number of women who accused him of sexual harassment. Maybe it’s a minor mistake like the time Cuomo’s aides rewrote a report to hide the real death toll in nursing homes as he was prepping his book on his brilliant leadership during the pandemic. A report by New York’s Attorney General Letita James estimated that the undercounting might have been as high as 50%. But minor mistakes do happen. “We were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give...

When the San Francisco Board of Education decided to force admissions for Lowell High School to move from a merit system to a lottery, it was a declaration of war on Asian students. The temporary pandemic shift to a lottery system had already plunged the number of Asian students at the elite high school by 4.4% to 51%. A permanent lottery system would, as an article put it, “better reflect the diversity of San Francisco”. And in San Francisco, where Asian students make up a third, not half the student body, that means another 15% have to go. That means thousands of students being cut off from their dreams despite their hard work. Lowell High School isn’t just any school. It’s a pipeline to the University of California, and to Ivy League colleges. Like its New York counterparts, like Stuyvesant, it’s a high-performing academic environment and part of the bargain between Asian parents and cities, ignoring the dysfunction of Democrat cities in exchange for an advanced educational pathway ...

Shootings have more than doubled in Portland from 111 last year to 275 so far this year. Murders are also up from 2 to 25. That’s an increase of over 1000% for the prog utopia. Portland hit a quarter-century high last year with 55 murders. It’s on track for 100 in 2021. Things are so bad that Mayor Wheeler, who narrowly won reelection over the Antifa candidate after having his apartment building firebombed, pleaded with the City Council to pay for more cops. But the City Council had a better idea: unarmed park rangers with pepper spray. Wheeler had asked the Council for $2 million to put cops on the streets to stop the gunmen, but instead he’s getting $1.4 million to put unarmed park rangers to run from the gunmen. Or try to take them on with the awesome power of their pepper spray. Another $3.5 million will be tossed to the Council’s leftist “community group” allies. “This proposal is the kind of collaborative problem solving I expected from our historically diverse council where t...

It was a love story made in the start-ups of San Francisco when Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram, proposed to Kaitlyn Trigger, a former product manager at TaskRabbit. Instagram is where celebrities go to post their vacation photos and TaskRabbit is the gig economy app where random people labor to perform menial tasks for a few bucks. While both of these apps are a blight on the world, it’s different for the wizards behind the curtain. When Krieger, a Brazilian immigrant, married his TaskRabbit sweetheart, they went back to, what W Magazine described as an , “Art Deco house... in the Dolores Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, where Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is a neighbor.” Zuckerberg’s Facebook had paid $1 billion for Instagram of which Krieger reportedly got $100 million. What do you do when you have lots of money, but no purpose or meaning? The Kriegers began to collect art of the sort that people with no taste and no concept of aesthetics, but ridiculous amo...

Grouches complain that a lot of fake holidays are created by companies, but Earth Day is actually a fake holiday created by a sharp Madison Avenue ad agency, and the name comes to us from the same guy who coined, “Timex: It takes a licking and keeps on ticking". The Earth takes a licking much better than Timex watches, but it’s the job of ad agencies to convince us that consumer products are permanent, while the world is ephemeral. Madison Avenue supplied the name, but Senator Gaylord Nelson, the eugenicist Democrat, had come up with the idea for the event. Gaylord’s Earth Day kickoff hit a bump when Indians showed up and threw garbage on the stage to protest his environmental plan to seize their land for a national park. But the media excised this inconvenient truth from Earth Day history. Real inconvenient truths don’t appear in Al Gore’s documentaries. It was 1970. Nixon’s Vietnamization was underway and the Left, sensing that its antiwar protests had a limited future, was look...

The media is touting Biden’s pick of Robert Santos as historic because he would be the first “census director of color”. Emphasizing the race or ethnicity of Biden’s nominees has become the media’s usual tactic for obscuring their radicalism while accusing their critics of racism. As a third-generation American whose grandparents came to this country over a century ago, whose parents raised him not to speak Spanish, Santos is hardly an oppressed minority. During the census, the media repeatedly trotted Santos out to warn that minorities would be undercounted and that the citizenship question would suppress minority participation. “If the administration tries to take out undocumented folks, that’s going to lead to lot of litigation,” Santos warned. "There is no question that in my mind that the citizenship question would deter participation by some parts of the public,” he told NPR. And for a nominee to head the Census Bureau, Santos has a curious specialty: illegal aliens. The Urb...

In 2019, Rina Shnerb, a 17-year-old girl who had been hiking in Israel with her father and brother, was blown up by a bomb. Rabbi Eitan Shnerb, who ran a charity that handed out clothes and food to the poor, had enough time to kiss Rina on the forehead , before she died. "I will say of the LORD, who is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust," the Rabbi at her gravesite chanted the words of Psalm 91. "Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold, and see the recompense of the wicked." Abdel Razeq Farraj, who was indicted for authorizing the attack, had been named as a career PFLP terrorist who had served 6 years in prison and had been arrested six times. The year that Rina was murdered, Farraj took part in an Adalah youth even t in partnership with a PFLP affiliate. Adalah is one of the anti-Israel hate groups funded by the New Israel Fund (NIF). According to an NGO Monitor report , the NIF has directed $720,481 to Adalah. George Soros’ Open Society Foundati...

Joe Biden is always redefining things by Bidenizing them into random strings of gibberish like “lying, dog-faced pony soldier” or turning them into Bidenisms. But these days his administration is ambitiously trying to redefine the entire English language. “I want to change the paradigm,” Biden told reporters. “I would like elected Republican support, but what I know I have now is I have electoral support from Republican voters. Republican voters agree with what I’m doing.” Like every other word that comes out of Biden’s mouth, that’s a lie. A Gallup poll in March f ound that Biden’s approval rating among Republicans is at 8%. That’s down from 12% in February. “What’s become crystal clear is that Biden has redefined bipartisan," Obama crony Rahm Emanuel argued. "And Washington is slow to catch up to the Biden definition.” The Biden definition of bipartisan is having the support of 8% of Republicans. Not only is Washington D.C. slow to catch up to the Biden definition of bipar...

Nine years ago, the New York Times was accusing John Boehner of racism. Now it’s eager to lap up every drop of vomitous bile from the former Republican House Speaker. When Boehner asked Obama to move his speech by one day to avoid clashing with a Republican debate, NBC political analyst Richard Wolffe suggested that Boehner only did it because of "the color of his skin". Wolffe meant Obama's skin, not Boehner's, which always looks like spoiled meat served in some blackmarket back alley cafe in Havana. Since then Boehner has followed the usual career track of former RINOs from “worse than Hitler” to “sleazy lobbyist” to “author of unnecessary memoir bashing Trump”. Boehner’s memoir On The House, like his political career, has no reason to exist. Even when he occupied one of the most powerful elected positions in the country, Boehner was mostly notable for looking like he was on the edge of tears. That and the time his bartender was arrested for wanting to poison him. ...