Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Netanyahu's victory in the Likud primaries was inevitable but the real challenge has only begun. Netanyahu now faces a dilemma primarily of his own making, he is a statesman adept at making speeches and poor at actually committing to the resolve necessary to see himself and the nation through tough times. The Israeli public today is more dissatisfied with their government than at any time in the past, even including the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. The one thing the man in the street agrees on is that it's time for a change. All that is required is someone credible to step forward and make that change from a slogan into reality. Before Oslo plenty of left wing activists had dreamed of an accord with Arafat. But it was as implausible and as improbable a policy then as Israel reconquering Gaza and the West Bank would be today. What made it real is that prominent Israeli statesmen like Rabin and Peres were able to see it through by acting as if it was inevitable. If the imposs...

When Hamas won elections in the Palestinian Authority, it should have been rather clear to everyone the world over that the Palestinian Arabs had made their choice and they had chosen murderous terrorists who rejected peace and would accept only truces in a larger war. Some European countries, primarily prodded by the United States, did agree to cut ties with the new ruling authorities in Gaza and boycott Hamas. But months and months have gone by and their little feet are itching to run back to Hamas again. Now the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee is arguing that the British boycott of Hamas was a very big mistake. The committee warns that the boycott of Hamas will only "further jeopardize peace". What peace and with whom is left unresolved as Hamas has no interest in peace only in conquest. But reflexive language like that was used by parliamentarians arguing for diplomatic relations with Hitler, so why should anything have changed in six decades and change. There...

Islam means submission or slavery, the literal opposite of liberty. When Muslim terrorists attacked America on 9/11, their attack took place a block off Liberty St. And now the Liberty Science Center across the river from the World Trade Center has become the first place in North America to host a phony exhibition on the wonders of Islamic science and the glory of Arab culture full of the same fraudulent promotion for a barbaric culture of murderers, bigots and thieves. With enough money invested the Arab and Muslim world has demonstrated the ability to take advantage of American tolerance and Western political correctness to promote their propaganda and self-glorification abroad. The Liberty Science Center exhibition is not simply about promoting a myth of Islamic culture, it is about promoting Islam. Read the following paragraph from the official Liberty Science website. "Never before presented in North America, this important exhibition from MTE Studios in South Africa was fir...

It's funny in a grim sort of way. You can evict thousands of people from their homes. You can break the bones of grandfathers and children. You can put them in concussions so severe they wind up in a coma. You can deprive them of their property and leave them virtually penniless. But if one of those people should curse back, then the outrage of the same press which had stigmatized them and ignored their suffering, comes down on their heads. Thus the campaign against Professor Hillel Weiss which parallels the previous campaign against a Hevron woman who was caught cursing an Arab on camera which parallels the obsession with the supposed curses against Rabin. It seems that the secular leftists in the Israeli media and government are oddly petrified of curses, almost as if they believe that they will come true. And somehow in the warped moral compass of the media, to curse has become worse than to evict, to degrade, to beat and abuse. Now Defense Minister Ehud Barak took a break from ...

The sun goes and the sun comes and goes out again and a week passes in which Barak, the Defense Minister of Israel, began discussing Olmert's plan by way of Shimon Peres by way of Shas, to give Fatah terrorists their own state on 100 percent of the territory and defend Israel from rockets by somehow developing and fielding anti-missile systems that could stop all rockets across Israel and do it before the withdrawal too. Meanwhile the Yassam did what Yassamniks usually do, which was to forcibly and brutally evict Jews from their own property in Hevron while the press became obsessed with Professor Hillel Weiss, rather than the brutal tactics of the police. In America NASA global warming data appears to have a Y2K bug in it slightly dinging the myth of scientific infallibility. The Haditha Marines are good to go while after the press had begun declaring victory for the Taliban, the Taliban are instead being pushed back disappointing their strongest supporters at the Guardian and...

Historical revisionism goes mainstream among the liberal camp as the Presbyterian Church of the United States is putting out a 9/11 conspiracy book. The PCUSA which had formerly innovated a boycott of Israel seems to be the leading edge of the increasing radicalization of formerly mainstream liberal organizations going into areas that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. The link between historical revisionism and a boycott of Israel is of course obvious. Historical revisionism about the Holocaust is practiced not because the 'people' in question really believe the Holocaust didn't happen but because the Holocaust represents an obstacle to reviving Anti-Semitism. The memory and knowledge of the atrocity makes it much too difficult to convince people to walk along a path that will results in its repetition. To revive Anti-Semitism it was necessary to undermine the reality of the Holocaust and turn it into yet another conspiracy theory about the Jews, thus making...

As the situation worsens, the delusion continues. One failure follows another. Barak, who has been whitewashed by the short memory of Israeli politics and the abysmal failures of Amir Peretz, is now going along with Olmert's plan to transfer most of the West Bank to Fatah terrorists with anti-missile systems. Defense Minister Ehud Barak said this week that major Israeli population centers would be threatened by Palestinian Authority rockets if Israel relinquishes Judea and Samaria. That, however, is no reason not to carry out such a withdrawal, according to the Defense Minister, but rather to quickly equip Israel with a defense system against attacks from those very areas. PA control over Judea and Samaria would place Israel's major population centers, such as Tel Aviv, within Kassam rocket range, Minister Barak explained during a Tuesday meeting with IDF reserve officers. Therefore, Barak emphasized, Israel must first acquire and implement an effective anti-missile defense sys...

This is what those soldiers were refusing to take part in. This is what they will serve prison time for. A group of soldiers from the Duchifat counter-terror battalion, including at least two squad commanders, refused or avoided orders they received on Monday morning to secure a road leading to Hevron ahead of the planned forced evictions. An IDF spokesperson said that only 12 soldiers refused orders outright, but reports from the field indicated that a total of almost 30 soldiers said that they would not actively carry out the relevant orders. Those Duchifat troops who refused or avoided assisting with the Hevron evictions, however, were not soldiers from a Hesder yeshiva, and a significant portion of them were not even outwardly religious, according to witnesses from the unit in question. The fault for what has happened here is not merely Olmert's. Not merely Kadima's. It is the fault of every party that continues keeping them in power. It is the fault of religious and secula...

Achdus Uber Alles has been the position counseled by all too many in Israel in the religious community. We must remain united above all else. Some who counsel that are well meaning, others less so. The opposition quickly picked up on it with everyone from Sharon down talking about the importance of unity and warning that "the religious" were destroying the nation's unity. The only way to stay united was to "respect the democracy" and surrender and comply. The fallacy at the heart of the Achdus Uber Alles position is that when the other side, be they Jews, has no interest in Achdus, surrender becomes the same process of appeasement and retreat in exchange for stepped up assaults and abuse as the Oslo Peace Accord. At the start of the State of Israel, Menachem Begin made the decision to stay committed to not fighting other Jews no matter what. Even though the left like the happily deceased former Mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek collaborated with the British in cap...

Another week draws to a close. A week filled not with the grand crash of great events or the flame and death of war so much as with a purposeless drift toward entropy. Partisanship in the US Congress has reached a new low as Democrats violated their own regulations to hijack a vote on illegal immigrants. An increasingly clueless Condoleeza Rice and Livni are leading Israel and America to disaster in the War on Terror in their latest round of negotiations. In other words Ein Chadash Tahat Hasemesh is the watchword. Meanwhile I've learned that Noah Feldman , the target of a previous article on this blog majored in Islamic Thought in college and volunteered 75,000 dollars worth of his services as a lawyer to resist the placement of an Eruv in Tenafly, New Jersey. This makes his article unsurprising except it is no longer the vicious scrawlings of a rejected member of an Orthodox Jewish community but someone who actively hates Jews, religious and otherwise and seeks to do them harm. I ...

The Hebron Massacre which happened at the end of August 1929, 78 years ago, has been all but displaced in popular memory with the Baruch Goldstein shootings. It is as if Auschwitz had been obscured in historical memory by the revenge killings of Nazis by the Jewish Brigade. The horror of the Hebron Massacre though remains, it serves as a reminder of the savage animalistic brutality of the Arabs in their deeds. It reminds us that there is no moral equivalence between Arabs and Jews. It testifies to the lie that Jews lived in peace as minorities in Arab lands. In Hevron where Jews had caused no harm to Arabs, mobs gathered and burned, tortured, looted, raped and committed atrocities too hideous to name. And in Tsfar too, the hands of orphaned children were cut off, already dead bodies were eviscerated and castrated. The synagogue was smeared with the blood of a student and the stones of Hevron again ran with Jewish blood. But most of all it serves as a warning for what is happening and w...

" Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand " Mark Twain Anyone who seriously believed after 9/11 that victory against the ongoing Islamic conquest would be accomplished by military force has by now been steadily disabused of that illusion after 5 years of political correctness, passivity and misguided campaigns to bring democracy to the Muslim world. The war against Islam is not going to be won with guns or bombs. Force is merely the final solution to settling conflicts but Islam's violence is for now only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger campaign to make the world into an Islamic domain. While we fight with police actions and holding elections, Islamists are seizing control of governments by force or by democratic elections. They are conquering African nations and staging civil wars in pacific ones. They are importing millions of Muslims to Europe and America as Europe's 'Palestinians' for a coming European Intifada. They are rewriting...