Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Thirteen years after he was sent packing by Bill Clinton's political consultants and a phony third party, Bibi Netanyahu has become a political survivor. The awkward politician constantly under siege by the media and at the mercy of domestic political squabbling, has become a veteran of Israel's turbulent politics. Netanyahu owes most of his success to a dysfunctional political climate. in which there is no one left to replace him. The old generation of leaders is gone and even a notoriously fickle Israeli electorate would not trust most of his rivals to make them dinner, let alone run a country. Displaced by Sharon, he learned the game of coalitions from him and has ably exploited the rivalries and petty careerism of the Knesset lineup to stay in office. With Barak by his side and Peres shaking hands with foreign dignitaries, the transformation is almost complete. Netanyahu's electability allows him to exploit the less electable, flipping through ministers and coalit...

For the last twenty years Israel has been swept into an obsession with few parallels except to the Dutch Tulip economy. Except instead of tulips, its commodity of choice is an even more insubstantial thing, the faint promise of peace. Peace fever is the disease consuming Israel as surely as the Black Death took Europe. If the Dutch traded fortunes for flowers, the Israelis have traded away most of their territory for worthless pieces of paper that last about as long as tulips do. Mostly, like Madoff's investments, after they wither and die it turns out that they were never worth anything to begin with. Take the Camp David Accords, greeted with insane romantic fervor in Jerusalem and European capitals, but resented and despised by Egyptians because they were a reminder of how their army had failed to destroy Israel. It was a worthless accord that gave Egypt a vast amount of territory in exchange for maintaining a status quo that it had no choice but to maintain after losing mu...

The last President to have taken part in actual combat left office nearly twenty years ago. It's a little-remarked milestone buried amid a great deal of posturing by leaders who want to talk the talk without having walked the walk. Since then, we have gone from a draft dodger to a man who never had to bother dodging, a commentary on a generational shift from a period when military service was not alien to the Yale and Harvard campuses. Meanwhile, the country remains in a conflict without end. Obama will complete his pullouts on a campaign schedule, but that will not end the war. You cannot end a war that you did not begin. The sustained conflict we are in did not begin when we entered Afghanistan or Iraq, it will not end just because we leave. The Afghanistan victory lap is as much about disguising the 'cut and run' phase; as it is about reminding the folks in Virginia and Iowa that the man on television parachuted in, cut the throats of all of Osama's guards, sho...

It's hard running an Obama-style campaign when you're a bland former civil servant whose only real achievement is putting in enough hours in the French Socialist Party to get the top spot on the ticket, after the likely candidate was accused of rape after a tryst with a maid in a New York hotel leading the Party to turn to another man with a foreign last name to lead its charge against Sarkozy for the Presidency of France. It was easier to dress up Ségolène Royal in 2007 as a revolutionary candidate, than it is to pass off François Hollande, who always looks like a tired bank teller on his last hour at work, as anything of the kind. If Hollande does become President of France, it will be as a party man who was in the right time and place to step in after flashier men like Sarkozy and Dominique Strauss-Kahn imploded. That hasn't stopped the press from gushing over Hollande anyway as if there were anything to gush about, or prevented the release of "48 H AVEC FH,...

VICTORIES AND DEFEATS The whole "Gutsy Call" narrative depends on the calculus of risk. In going after Bin Laden, the SEALs were risking their lives, but what was Obama risking? An ordinary leader would at least be expected to suffer political fallout from a failure. But does anyone really believe that a media which failed to hold Obama accountable for his defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Islamic disaster in Egypt and Libya, not to mention an economic crater, would have held him accountable if the operation had failed? Even in the worst case scenario, had the SEALs been captured and paraded on Pakistani television, the blame for the operation would have gone to some military figures, while Obama would have given another speech, conducted more backdoor appeasement and would have been praised for his leadership in a difficult time. This operation, like everything Obama has done, was strictly no risk. There are no "Gutsy Calls" when you never take respo...

Riots are the exclusive domain of those who view themselves as outside the law. Whether they are outside the law because they are above or below it is a matter of perspective. The rioters may see  themselves as the oppressed who are below the law while their victims tend to think of them as above the law, with the power to rob and kill, without paying any significant price for it. All that is true whether we are talking about Russian peasants killing Jews, Indonesians killing ethnic Chinese or African-Americans killing whites. The riot is usually directed at the authorities or some vulnerable group, sometimes both, but invariably one of them takes precedence. The authorities prefer that the rioters direct their rage at a conveniently vulnerable group and afterward the vulnerable group takes the blame for the violence directed at them. The rioters treat those few of their number who were killed in the looting spree as martyrs, while the rioted-upon pick up the broken glass and t...

The Obama slogan for 2012 is in and it's "Forward", which is a compact version of that old classic, "Don't change horses in the middle of a stream" that every incumbent is forced to run on sooner or later. Forward implies that there's no alternative but to go backward, which is a place that no right-thinking person wants to go. The left has always been enamored of "Forwardism" or "Progressivism" which mean much the same thing. Before MSNBC had Lean Forward, Mao had the Great Leap Forward which killed some 40 million people, far more people than MSNBC can ever dream of tuning in to their programs. When Lenin wanted to launch his own newspaper, he called it, "Vperod" or Forward. The name still lingers on among the left and appears on the mastheads of newspapers across the world. It's Vorwarts in Germany, Voorwarts in the Netherlands and Ila al-Amam in the Arab world. Back in New York it's The Forward, the vener...