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January 2018

The Steele Dossier Fits the Kremlin Playbook The likely objective was to undermine Republicans, Democrats—and American democracy. By Daniel Hoffman

When the “Steele dossier” was first published a year ago, it looked like a bombshell. The document, drawn up by the British ex-spy Christopher Steele, contained salacious allegations against President Trump and suggested that Russia had helped him win the 2016 election. No one has been able to corroborate its charges, but Democrats continue to see the dossier as a road map for impeaching Mr. Trump. Republicans, on the other hand, point out that it was created as opposition research, leading them to see it as an elaborate partisan ploy.

There is a third possibility, namely that the dossier was part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot targeting both parties and America’s political process. This is what seems most likely to me, having spent much of my 30-year government career, including with the CIA, observing Soviet and then Russian intelligence operations. If there is one thing I have learned, it’s that Vladimir Putin continues in the Soviet tradition of using disinformation and espionage as foreign-policy tools.

There are three reasons the Kremlin would have detected Mr. Steele’s information gathering and seen an opportunity to intervene. First, Mr. Steele did not travel to Russia to acquire his information and instead relied on intermediaries. That is a weak link, since Russia’s internal police service, the FSB, devotes significant technical and human resources to blanket surveillance of Western private citizens and government officials, with a particular focus on uncovering their Russian contacts.

Second, Mr. Steele was an especially likely target for such surveillance given that he had retired from MI-6, the British spy agency, after serving in Moscow. Russians are fond of saying that there is no such thing as a “former” intelligence officer. The FSB would have had its eye on him.

Third, the Kremlin successfully hacked into the Democratic National Committee. Emails there could have tipped it off that the Clinton campaign was collecting information on Mr. Trump’s dealings in Russia.

If the FSB did discover that Mr. Steele was poking around for information, it hardly could have resisted using the gravitas of a retired MI-6 agent to plant false information. After hacking the DNC and senior Democratic officials, Russian intelligence chose to pass the information to WikiLeaks, most likely to capitalize on that group’s “self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity,” according to a 2017 report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Simultaneously the Kremlin was conducting influence operations on Facebook and other social-media sites. CONTINUE AT SITE

Marquette and the First Amendment Wisconsin’s Supreme Court will judge a promise of academic freedom.

A political-science professor who says Marquette University violated his employment contract’s guarantee of academic freedom will get his day in court. Though a judge for a lower state court earlier ruled for the university, last week the Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed to John McAdams’s request that it bypass the appeals courts and take up his suit directly.

Professor McAdams is now in his seventh semester outside the classroom because of a November 2014 post on his Marquette Warrior blog. The post criticized a graduate instructor, Cheryl Abbate, for telling a student with more traditional views that she would tolerate no dissent on same-sex marriage in her class on ethics.

After the post Ms. Abbate received several ugly emails. Mr. McAdams was blamed and punished, though he had nothing to do with those messages. The university contends that Mr. McAdams’s offense is having identified a student by name—Ms. Abbate. The characterization is telling, because though Ms. Abbate was indeed a grad student she was also a paid employee of the university teaching a course. If any student was harmed here, it was the Marquette undergraduate who was told there was no room for his views in Ms. Abbate’s classroom.

No one forced Marquette to enter into an employment contract with Mr. McAdams. But it did. And that contract says he cannot be fired for exercising a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. By any reasonable standard that would include the First Amendment—even at a Jesuit university.

Fusion’s Russian Dirty Work How the firm sought to discredit an anti-Kremlin activist.

Media defenders of Fusion GPS and the FBI are criticizing as friends of the Kremlin anyone who dares raise questions about their behavior during the 2016 campaign. You almost have to admire their loyalty to sources, if not to readers. We’ll wait for the evidence, thanks, including the memo that the House Intelligence Committee understandably wants to make public.

Meantime, regarding Russia, the recent Congressional testimony by Fusion founder Glenn Simpson deserves more attention—specifically for what it reveals about Fusion’s campaign against Bill Browder, the human-rights and anti-Kremlin activist.

Mr. Browder hired Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky to investigate a 2007 Russian raid on Mr. Browder’s investment company. Magnitsky ultimately exposed a financial fraud perpetrated by corrupt officials and the mafia. Russia responded by arresting Magnitsky and keeping him in pre-trial detention for 358 days, where he was tortured and denied vital medical care. He was found dead on a cell floor in 2009.

Magnitsky and his lawyers meticulously documented his abuse while in prison. His evidence was affirmed by multiple governments and outside organizations, including U.S. prosecutors. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, Congress in 2012 passed the Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned individuals involved in Magnitsky’s death and other Russian rights abusers.

About That ‘Blue Wave…’ By Michael Walsh

Now that we’ve all had a year-long respite from Washington electoral politics (stop laughing), it’s time once again for journalists to resume retailing their favorite narrative — the horse race. Fortunately for them, this year they can combine it with their Trump hatred and their fondness for the “resistance” and thus turn nearly every story about the president, the Republicans, conservatives and everybody else they loathe into the Left’s Coming Revenge on Trump.

In this scenario, the electorate is finally waking up from a long hangover; revolted, the righteous, female-dominated, Democrat-voting majority will now rise up at the ballot box, recapture the House, and immediately vote articles of impeachment. At the same time — and despite the extremely long odds of this actually happening — the Great Blue Wave will wash over the Senate as well, which means that a conviction and Trump’s removal from office would be at least a theoretical possibility. Why, just look at Virginia and Alabama!

Such daydreams, however, are very likely misplaced, as Nate Silver notes:

The Senate map is really tough for Democrats, with 26 Democratic seats in play next year (including a newly opened seat in Minnesota after Al Franken announced his intention to retire) as compared to just eight Republican ones. Moreover, five of the Democratic-held seats — the ones in West Virginia, North Dakota, Montana, Missouri and Indiana — are in states that President Trump won by 18 percentage points or more.

Donald Trump Should Refuse a Mueller Interview And as president, he shouldn’t even be asked. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Let’s cut to the chase: Donald Trump should not agree to be interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller — and President Trump should not even be asked.

See, there are two Trumps to consider here. There is the very eccentric and volatile man who is the subject of Mueller’s amorphous investigation. And there is the president of the United States, who has responsibilities to that vital public office. Here, the interests of both happen to align.

We’ll first examine Trump the man. No long history lesson is required here; let’s just take the last couple of weeks. Trump told a room full of lawmakers that he’d sign whatever immigration legislation they brought him —everything was negotiable. When senior legislators from both parties brought him the familiar Washington plan of amnesty now, security maybe someday, he said no way, no wall, no deal.

The eight-dimensional-chess explanation is that Trump realizes his supporters will never hold him to his commitments, so he makes bad ones in order to expose his opponents’ extremism. My preferred explanation is that Trump didn’t care what he said to lawmakers in the first meeting; his purpose was to refute Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury depiction of a demented doofus by appearing engaged and in command. Either way, the point is that Trump says stuff. And then he says other stuff. Quite often, the other stuff doesn’t match up with the first stuff.

Take this week’s sensational non-story: In June, Trump ordered his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which McGahn refused to do . . . so Trump dropped the idea and took no action.

There is no reason to doubt the veracity of the story produced by two veteran New York Times reporters, Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman. They have four sources who, though anonymous, appear well-placed (likely drawn from current and former White House staff, lawyers representing such witnesses, and Mueller’s investigators). And their account has the ring of truth: Trump, like all of us, longs to do things within his power that it would please him to do, but that would be really stupid to do, and so in the end he refrains from doing them. More idiosyncratically, Trump is torn between his brash persona (“You’re fired!”) and his real self (though wont to browbeat, he shrinks from personally delivering the pink slip, having subordinates do that dirty work).

More importantly, the Times report is harmless in its substance.

‘It Was Like An Orgy’: Pandemonium Ensues after French Market Slashes Price of Nutella By Paula Bolyard

Pandamonium ensued on Thursday when a French supermarket chain announced that it was slashing the price of Nutella by 70 percent. A half-dozen Intermarch supermarkets were overrun with customers hustling to get their beloved nutty spread, with long lines forming outside stores and violence reported at several locations.

The chain usually sells Nutella for 4.50 euros ($5.60 US). After the discount, the price dropped to 1.41 euros. One employee exclaimed, “70 percent off? That’s a steal!”

“People just rushed in, shoving everyone, breaking things. It was like an orgy,” one employee told AFP. “We were on the verge of calling the police.”

At a store in L’Horme, an employee described the tense scene to Le Progres: “We were trying to get in between the customers, but they were pushing us,” he said, adding that one customer received a black eye in the tussle.

Le Progres reported:

In Saint-Chamond, the store is quite small, it is an Intermarché Contact. But the 300 pots left in a quarter of an hour too. “It was fighting. We sold what we sell in three months. On the crate carpets, there was only Nutella,” says an employee, who says he has never known that in sixteen years.

“We need another system, we would prefer not to do it. It’s more of a nuisance than anything else. We are just intermediate, there is no margin and besides it was not our usual clientele. Our clients, they were crying because they had nothing, “adds the employee, who speaks of” Berezina “.

At the Intermarché de Saint-Cyprien, people fought, they threw themselves on the person who carried the Nutella pots on a pallet.

In Rive-de-Gier, the cell phones were out to film the riot: “They are like animals. A woman had her hair pulled, an elderly lady took a box on her head, another had a blood

Intermarche told AFP that it was “surprised” by the demand and apologized to customers who were inconvenienced.

Ferrero, the company that makes Nutella, said they weren’t involved in the decision to cut the price of their product.

“The company Ferrero wishes to recall that this promotion was decided unilaterally by the brand Intermarché,” Ferrero said in a statement. They added that the company “deplores this operation and its consequences that create confusion and disappointment in the minds of consumers.”
Watch the video below:

Belgium: How Low Can a Low Country Get? by Bruce Bawer

French journalist Éric Zemmour facetiously suggested that France should forget about bombing Raqqa and should instead bomb Molenbeek.

Even the New York Times, of all places, ran an exposé about the ineffectiveness of Belgium’s anti-terror efforts, pointing up the chronic laxity, buck-passing, and turf-confusions that characterize every level of its government.

Shut up. Zip it. It is a pathetic and cowardly way of responding to reality, but it is, alas, a widespread behavior pattern in Western Europe today – and, at least in certain milieux in poor little Belgium, it has been all but raised to a sacrament.

In the 15 years that followed the Napoleonic Wars, a messy series of events — international conferences, great-power land swaps, treaties, riots, military skirmishes, and, finally, a brief revolution — resulted in a redrawing of borders in the Low Countries and the establishment of a new country called Belgium. Even in the best of times, it was hardly a country, fatally divided into a French-speaking south and a Flemish-speaking north, whose residents had little sense of shared identity. If, when the European Union came along, the Belgians embraced the idea so ardently — and welcomed the transformation of their own capital into the capital of the EU — it was largely because they had far less of a sense of nationhood than their Western European neighbors, and felt, or hoped, that the EU would artificially supply something ineffable that their own history and culture had failed to give them.

Even now, when the citizens of many Western European countries have been brought up to be ashamed of their national flags, some of these Europeans, at least, still exhibit intermittent signs of national pride: witness the crowds across the UK who, every year, sing “God Save the Queen”, “Jerusalem”, and “Land of Hope and Glory” during the broadcast of the Last Night of the Proms, or the spectacle of the French Parliament breaking spontaneously into “La Marseillaise” after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Such displays are few and far between in Belgium. It seems appropriate that, while the official proportions of the Belgian flag are 13:15, most of the flags flown over government buildings are 2:3. In other words, they do not even bother getting the proportions of their own flag right.

Living in Pakistan – A Hell for Non-Muslims by Rahat John Austin

In Pakistan, Muslims burn the homes of non-Muslims, burn their places of worship, burn their holy books, even burn their women and children alive — and there is no law or punishment to prevent this criminal behaviour or to make non-Muslims safe.

Non-Muslim women and children are raped and forcibly converted; this is considered a religious obligation to please “Allah,” the god of Islam. These taskmasters see themselves as “Soldiers of Allah”. Even if a case of “blasphemy” is not proven against Christians, they still can be killed by an angry mob or while in police custody. Non-Muslims can also easily be sentenced to death by a court: even a single claim by Muslim against a non-Muslim is enough to “prove” him guilty.

Christian leaders and organizations, especially the Pope, have failed to give any hope to persecuted Christians. Providing a press release or sending a note is not enough. The Pope truly needs to come to help his flock, to establish policies to safeguard these persecuted people from the Islamic world.

According to the official results of Pakistan’s 2017 census, as of August 25, 2017, the population of Islamic Republic of Pakistan is 207.74 million.

The country is divided into an overwhelmingly Muslim majority of 96.28%; and the remaining 3.72% are Christian, Bahais, Buddhists, Hindus, Ahmadis, Jains, Kalasha, Parsis and Sikhs, who are identified as non-Muslim minority Pakistanis.

Religious minorities in the territory of present-day Pakistan, at the time of the partition of India in 1947, were almost 23% of Pakistan’s population. But instead of their numbers increasing, they have decreased to the current 3.72%. If the Muslim population has grown, why have non-Muslim minorities not grown also?

This 23% represents millions of people; how have they vanished?

According to the same census, from 1998 to 2017, Pakistan’s overall population grew by 57%. Presumably, non-Muslim minorities should have increased at the same rate. Instead, their numbers have dangerously fallen.

The Hindu population, for example, which, according to the 1951 census, was 12.9%, is now only 1.6%.

These numbers begin to reveal the situation of minorities in Pakistan.

David Archibald The Problem with Norwegians

President Trump had best be careful what he wishes for. Some of those Nordic types he reportedly opined would make better immigrants to the US are quite likely to bring with them a leftist culture every bit as problematic as the mores of the lavatorial hell holes he derided.

The overwhelmingly left wing US foreign policy Establishment would not normally let slip that all is not peaches and cream in Africa, that the Dark Continent is a bottomless pit which will absorb aid funds without trace of improvement for all eternity. So what gave Foreign Policy cover to report that the U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe, a man of African ancestry, continues to be vilified in racial terms by the Zimbabwean government? It is likely the abuse was prompted by President Trump’s reported comment in which he is said to have used a pithy aphorism to describe some of the countries from which recent waves of immigrants have come.

The President, as you might recall, expressed a preference for migrants from Norway. Perhaps he was thinking of the likes of Ann-Margret, who migrated to the United States in 1946. Other Norwegians have been less pleasant — and there is a tie to Zimbabwe. Norway in the 1980s had a prime minister by the name of Gro Harlem Brundtland who secretly financed the establishment of communist regimes in southern Africa through the Norwegian Development Agency. That is one reason why the Brundtland commission on climate, forerunner to the UN climate commission, chose to convene its conferences in Harare over 1986-87.

Not to be outdone, Norway’s neighbour, Sweden, also was up to no good in Africa. Sweden pursued and fostered a secret military cooperation with Robert Mugabe and his then-head of state security, Comrade Mnangagwa, who recently replaced Mugabe as the country’s dictator. Funded by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), this cooperation, starting in 1969, was top secret, even from the Swedish parliament, which authorised SIDA budgets. Similar efforts were made by Swedish socialist governments to encourage and establish communist regimes in South Africa, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and Zambia.

The Islamization of Oslo In Groruddalen, a large neighborhood of the Norwegian capital, heavy Muslim immigration is testing multiculturalism’s limits. Bruce Bawer

With a population exceeding 600,000, Oslo is divided into two parts by Akerselva, a modest brook that runs from the mountains in the north down into the Oslo Fjord. West Oslo is the upscale side of town, with fancy townhouses near the city center and, farther out, elegant neighborhoods full of large, handsome houses and wide, well-tended lawns. East Oslo is grungier: on the downtown end, you’ll find East Village–type districts with cool bars and clubs and plenty of graffiti, plus a couple of largely Muslim areas, Tøyen and Grønland; farther east lies Groruddalen.

A broad, flat, relatively nondescript valley (dal means “valley” in Norwegian), Groruddalen is home to more than a quarter of Oslo’s population. Think San Fernando Valley, and you won’t be far off. For a few decades now, the valley has been associated in the Norwegian mind with Islam. On August 28, 2017, Rita Karlsen of Human Rights Service (HRS), an Oslo-based think tank, noted that it had been 16 years to the day since Labour Party politician Thorbjørn Berntsen had declared: “There’s a limit to how many immigrants Groruddalen can accept. That limit is beginning to be reached. I know of people who want to move because the city of Oslo is filling entire apartment buildings with asylum seekers and refugees. . . . We must simply admit that cultural conflicts are beginning to be noticeable.” Other politicians rejected Berntsen’s concerns. The Labour Party’s then-head in Oslo, Bjørgulv Froyn, insisted that Groruddalen’s problems had “nothing to do with immigrants.” The leader of Oslo’s Conservatives, Per-Kristian Foss, agreed, accusing Berntsen of “stigmatizing a neighborhood and a population group.” Foss, who is openly gay, chose not to address the fact that it was already becoming uncomfortable for homosexuals to live in certain parts of Groruddalen.

Berntsen’s warning, issued in 2001, has proved prescient. From 2008 to 2010, more than 6,000 ethnic Norwegians moved out of Groruddalen, while almost twice that number of immigrants—mostly Muslims—moved in. In 2009, fully 67 percent of the children born in Stovner, a borough at the far eastern end of the valley, had non-Western mothers. In 2010, immigrants made up more than 40 percent of Groruddalen’s population, and Lars Østby, chief demographer at Statistics Norway (SSB), the nation’s official statistics agency, predicted that, before long, a majority of the valley’s population would consist of immigrants and their children. Yet Østby did not see this as a problem—notwithstanding the grim reality of certain urban areas in next-door Sweden, such as Rinkeby in Stockholm and Rosengård in Malmö, that had become Muslim enclaves: parallel societies where sharia trumped Swedish law and where community leaders, imams, and gangs had largely displaced the authority of the Swedish government, police, and courts.