Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

One of the difficult things to understand in this week's parsha is the matter of the striped, speckled and ringed animals. It appears as if an angel bears a message for Yaakov Avinu telling him of a way to trick Lavan. This seems like dubious behavior for a great man. It is also unclear why so much space is devoted to it, first in Yaakov offering the deal to Lavan, Yaakov actually implementing it and then Yaakov relating the events to Rachel and Leah. What exactly is the importance of all this. To understand that we need to begin with the importance of sheep herding. From Avraham on down to Moshe and Shaul and David Hamelech, the key leaders of the Jewish people were shepherds. Being a shepherd is a symbol for being a leader who uplifts men. The shepherd who can take care of flocks of sheep, can care for a nation of people. Yaakov did not trick Lavan out of money, but out of herds which symbolize people. The struggle between them was the struggle between two ways of life. We are to...

(Update: in the list of insane excuses, a top Russian defense expert is claiming that Litvinenko ate radioactive fish from Hiroshima at a Sushi Bar...you can't make this stuff up but they can) Pravda, long the organ of the Russian authorities, is an instructive collection of rantings and threats that the average Westerner can now benefit from. Within a day we will see the revelation of the official Soviet line on Litvinenko's death which will claim that Litvinenko was poisoned smuggling nuclear materials for Berezovsky enter the mainstream media before being developed in Pravda. (The domestic jingoistic and extremely convoluted Russian version will claim that Berezovsky was working for the CIA. Those missing out on the far more insane Russian version are also missing out on the story of the Priest who came to consecrate KGB headquarters and bless the KGB agents, who secretly told a KGB associate that he got a sense of evil from Litvinenko) It's grimly entertaining then to t...

In August 1991, the first coup that led was launched by a group headed by Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former chairman of the KGB. The political, military and KGB leadership behind the coup made a public statement stating that Gorbachev was sick and had been relieved of his post and appointed the sitting Prime Minister to replace him. Boris Yeltsin's intervention and the resulting protests prevented the coup from succeeding and resulted in the dismantling of the USSR. In August 1999, the second coup occurred that ended democracy in Russia and removed Yeltsin from power replacing him with the head of the FSB (KGB) Vladimir Putin. Lessons had been learned and unlike the previous coup matters were done quietly and with the appearance of legality. Yeltsin remained in power as a figurehead for several months while Putin was installed as his Prime Minister. Several months later Yeltsin stepped down and Putin replaced him. What followed was a return to tyranny, unity parties and government par...

One of the most difficult to understand things in the Torah for most people remains the blessings of Yitzchak. Why did Yitzchak favor the wicked son with the blessings and why was Yaakov's only resort to trick his father. It's an understandable question when looking back retrospectively but it is important to remember that we are dealing with people who could not look back, only forward speculatively. What baffles most people, Yitzchak's selection of Esav, becomes significantly less so when we look at it in the context of the time and place. Yitzchak was a son of Avraham but lacked his status or strength. The parsha is called Toldos Yitzchak but the only material involving Yitzchak it relates to us up until the blessings are his travails at the hands of the Phlistim. Like Avraham, Yitzchak found himself a wanderer and an alien among peoples who were all too willing to take advantage of him. Indeed both Avraham and Yitzchak even found themselves having to claim their wives a...

via Giyus

Authorities are celebrating Joe Chisholm's implicit suggestion that he will not murder his neighbor, John Norton, when late this week he signed a letter in which he stated his intent to initially take half his neighbor's home, vowed to continue attacking him and pledged to fight on till victory. Press reports however focused on the implication that by not explicitly mentioning his intent to kill Norton and by agreeing for settle half his home, that the entire matter could finally be settled peacefully. Chisholm however disappointed some when he appeared at a press conference later announcing that his letter did not mean any such thing and that he intends to take half of Norton's home only as a first step to taking all of it and that he has never renounced his desire to kill Norton. Reporters and various talking heads however continued to insist that this was a major turnaround for Chisholm and that an era of peace would be at hand if only Norton put away his rifle and left ...

Wounded in today's attack on Sderot.