Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

DISUNION SQUARED I passed through Union Square on Wednesday. The park on the square happens to be the fallback point of Occupy Wall Street, but the OWS crowd was a little hard to spot. Oh there were a few vendors in the business of selling "radical" T-Shirts and pins, proceeds to either benefit the occupation or him, but the rest of the occupation was hard to find. The breakdancers working for tips weren't with OWS, but what about the clown with pink hair? The men playing chess for money obviously weren't, that was too capitalist an activity. The NYU students sitting around and drinking soda? The guy playing jazz on a sax? The Halal mafia vendor sending smoke and a burnt smell from his cart? The dogwalkers? The artists drawing cartoons of tourists? The vendors at the farmer's market unloading ostrich meat and gourmet goat cheese? The signs reading GENERAL STRIKE MAY 1and STOP EVERYTHING are still pasted to walls, but the first has come and gone and there...

Writing about Israel is a booming field. No news agency, be it ever so humble, can avoid embedding a few correspondents and a dog's tail of stringers into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to sit in cafes clicking away on their laptops, meeting up with leftist NGO's and the oppressed Muslim of the week. At a time when international desks are being cut to the bone, this is the one bone that the newshounds won't give up. Wars can be covered from thousands of miles away, genocide can go to the back page, but, when a rock flies in the West Bank, there had better be a correspondent with a fake continental accent and a khaki shirt to cover it. Writing about Israel isn't hard. Anyone who has consumed a steady diet of media over the years already knows all the bullet points. The trick is arranging them artistically, like so many wilted flowers, in the story of this week's outrage. Israel is hot, even in the winter, with the suggestion of violence brimming under the surface. I...

The commencement address has become part of the campaign trail. How better to showcase your candidate as a man with a vision for tomorrow than to feature him passing along some of his wisdom to the people of tomorrow, those bright-eyed and bushy-tailed graduates going off with an average twenty grand in debt into a marketplace with few job prospects. Not everyone can get Obama to deliver their commencement address. It helps if your college is female and affiliated with the Ivy League, where downtrodden Barnard students can be counseled to "fight for your seat at the head of the table" by an unqualified man who began and ended his career by pushing out better qualified female candidates from Alice Palmer to Hillary Clinton. Barnard women are free to fight for a seat at the head of the table, so long as it's not his seat or a seat that he wants. These days the man whose administration pays women less than men, which has been repeatedly accused of sexist treatment of ...

In the days and weeks after September 11 hardly a day would go by without another homemade design for the World Trade Center showing up in my inbox. Some were crude, some were obscene, some were impossible to construct and some were genuinely visionary. Even those most familiar with the crusted workings of New York state and city government, not to mention the bi-state beast of the Port Authority, could hardly have imagined that eleven years later one far smaller tower would still be under construction. One World Trade Center, formerly the Freedom Tower before that name was deemed too showy and patriotic, is a faintly shiny presence on the skyline, glass slowly sliding over stories of naked steel, overshadowed by Frank Gehry's strikingly surreal Beekman Tower with its rippling lines. If you didn't know what you were looking at, you would hardly notice it was there. Now One World Trade Center will lose a radome enclosure due to budget cuts, which means very little except t...

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 arro...

The People's Cube has illustrated my Forwardism article with some great photoshops. This is one of them. You can find the rest at their site . PROFILES IN COURAGE So after four years, Obama finally got around to openly stating a position that everyone knew he always held, but that he sorta denied he held until the fundraising needs were bad enough to bring it to the table. And it's a position devoid of specific commitments too. If that's not courage, I don't know what is. Four years from now maybe he'll finally admit that he intended to badly damage American business and have the Muslim Brotherhood take over the Middle East. Meanwhile, the media is chewing over what Romney did in high school, described under the trendy label of "Bullying". Isn't it wonderful how we can't nail down what Obama was doing far more recently than that, but our dedicated media corps is busy investing what Romney was doing as in high school. Any day now we...

The modern West has some of the most inefficient governments in human history which are obsessed with making things more efficient. Along with the inefficiently efficient machine, we also have two crises. One real one and one imaginary. The crisis of government growth and the crisis of global warming. Governments insist that we must adopt austerity to cope with the imaginary crisis of global warming, while reform advocates demand that governments adopt austerity to cope with the tremendous piles of debt and unsustainable spending. It's a basic power struggle over whether the government will starve the people or the people will starve the government. Like most political power struggles it begins with a crisis and a program for resolving it by transferring power. Depending on which crisis and which program wins the day, there will either be a massive transfer of power from the government to the people or an equally massive transfer from the people to the government. Determin...