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Trump and the Media’s Stockholm Syndrome By Daniel John Sobieski

Posted By on February 23rd, 2017

The usual media suspects were aghast at President Trump’s mention in his Florida rally speech regarding unrestricted acceptance of refugees:

During a rally Saturday in Florida, Trump referred to several countries that have taken in a disproportionate number of refugees and that have recently been the target of attacks. “We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” Trump went on to refer to Paris, Nice, France, and Brussels, European cities where attacks have occurred in the past two years.

Except for the fact that there was not much going on that particular night in Sweden, President Trump, who was conflating the steady descent of Sweden into a caliphate with a Tucker Carlson report on Fox News was exactly right. Europe is rapidly becoming Eurabia due to unrestricted immigration. Yet the media obsessed about the “last night” part, quoted allegedly “confused” Swedish officials, officials who have much to hide about their reckless policies, ignoring Sweden’s decline into radical Islamic terrorist hell. As reported on Fox Nation:

Filmmaker Ami Horowitz defended his investigation of refugees in Sweden Monday night amid a backlash after President Donald Trump cited his work during a campaign speech over the weekend.

“Between 2012 and 2016 the murder rate [in Sweden] is up almost 70 percent,” Horowitz told “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” citing the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention. “Rape between 2007 and 2015 is up a similar number, almost 70 percent. These are their statistics, not my statistics.”

At the Florida event Saturday, Trump said Sweden “took in large numbers” of refugees and was “having problems like they never thought possible.” Trump later specified on Twitter that he was referring to Carlson’s original segment with Horowitz, which aired Friday night.

Trump’s remarks, which implied that a terror attack had hit Sweden Friday night, was roundly criticized by Swedish officials and mainstream media outlets.

No, this rise in Swedish rapes and murders didn’t just happen last night, but Trump is right that it is happening and that it is tied to the rapid and unrestricted influx of refugees from Muslim countries racked by chaos and terror. As Jihad Watch reports, Sweden reflects the consequences of the Islamization of Europe:

Statistics concerning ethnicity and religion when it comes to criminals are not to be found in the world’s most politically correct country with probably the fastest-growing share of Muslims: Sweden. The risk of being raped in Sweden during one’s lifetime is one out of four, which is probably equal to the risk of being raped in any other country under Muslim attack. When it comes to rapes, Islamized Sweden is already in a state of war. If we want to have a hint about who is committing these tens of thousands of rapes and other types of sexual assaults yearly, we can turn to another Scandinavian country, Sweden’s neighbor Norway, the country most similar to Sweden. Here 100 percent of all rapes in the last five years in Oslo were committed by immigrants from “non-Western” countries. In Stavanger, a major Norwegian city, 90 percent of rapes are committed by “immigrants.” Sweden has 75,000 crimes yearly, in a population of only 9.5 million.

Sweden is now the rape capital of Europe, thanks largely to an influx of Islamic refugees not content to wait for a chance at being rewarded for jihad with 72 virgins:

Forty years after the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogenous Sweden into a multicultural country, violent crime has increased by 300% and rapes by 1,472%. Sweden is now number two on the list of rape countries, surpassed only by Lesotho in Southern Africa….

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A Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in France: January 2017 by Soeren Kern

Posted By on February 23rd, 2017

“I am not ashamed of what I am. I am a Muslim, that is to say, submissive to Allah who created me and who by his grace has harmoniously shaped me.” — Salah Abdeslam, a Belgium-born French national of Moroccan descent and the main suspect in the November 13, 2015 attacks that killed 130 people in Paris.

The Grand Mosque of Paris announced that it was withdrawing from the Foundation for Islam of France, a new, government-sponsored foundation charged with “contributing to the emergence of an Islam of France that is fully anchored in the French Republic.” In a statement, the mosque, which represents 250 of the 2,500 of the mosques and Muslim associations in France, said that it denounced “any form of interference in the management of Muslim worship.”

“An Algerian sociologist, Smaïn Laacher, with great courage, just said in a documentary aired on Channel 3: ‘It is a shame to deny this taboo, namely that in the Arab families in France, and everyone knows it but nobody wants to say it, anti-Semitism is sucked with mother’s milk.'” —Georges Bensoussan, a highly regarded Jewish historian of Moroccan descent, who is being prosecuted for talking about anti-Semitism among French Arabs.

“When parents shout at their children, when they want to reprimand them, they call them Jews. Yes. All Arab families know this. It is monumental hypocrisy not to see that this anti-Semitism begins as a domestic one.” — Smaïn Laacher, a French-Algerian sociologist, in a documentary called, “Teachers in the Lost Territories of the Republic.”

“Islamophobia is a weapon of intimidation and an invention to forbid debate.” — Pascal Bruckner.

Three months after French authorities demolished the “Jungle” migrant camp, migrants are returning to Calais at the rate of around 30 a day. Most of them are unaccompanied minors hoping to smuggle their way across the English Channel to Britain.

January 1. The Interior Ministry announced the most anticipated statistic of the year: a total of 945 cars and trucks were torched across France on New Year’s Eve, a 17.5% increase from the 804 vehicles burned during the annual ritual on the same holiday in 2015. Car burnings, commonplace in France, are often attributed to rival Muslim gangs that compete with each other for the media spotlight over which can cause the most destruction. An estimated 40,000 cars are torched in France every year.

A van burns during a recent riot in a Paris suburb. Car burnings, commonplace in France, are often attributed to rival Muslim gangs that compete with each other for the media spotlight. An estimated 40,000 cars are torched in France every year. (Image source: RT video screenshot)

January 2. Approximately 3.7 million crimes were reported in France in 2016, a 4% increase over 2015, according to Le Figaro. Seine-Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb which has one of the highest concentrations of Muslims in France, ranks as the most dangerous part of the country, with 18.2 attacks per 1,000 inhabitants. It is followed by Paris, with 15.7 attacks per 1,000 inhabitants and Bouches-du-Rhône with 11.5 attacks per 1,000 inhabitants.

January 2. The Criminal Court of Paris sentenced Nicolas Moreau, a 32-year-old French jihadist, to ten years in prison for fighting for the Islamic State. He is the brother of Flavien Moreau, the first French jihadist to be sentenced for such an offense upon his return from Syria in November 2014. Born in South Korea, adopted by a French family at the age of 4, Nicolas became a delinquent after the divorce of his adoptive parents. He converted to Islam in prison, where he spent five years. Nicolas said he fled the Islamic State after 17 months due to its “excesses.”

January 3. Jean-Christophe Lagarde, the president of the Union of Democrats and Independents, a center-right political party, attributed the closure of a PSA Peugeot-Citroën automobile factory to an excess of religious demands by Muslim employees. “There have been difficulties even in my department, for example in Aulnay-sous-Bois. It has never been said, but part of the reason for the closure of PSA was due to the omnipresence of religion and the fact that there were religious demands at work, work stoppages, decreased productivity. PSA’s decision to close Aulnay was influenced by this aspect.”

January 3. The Administrative Court of Poitiers dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Coalition against Racism and Islamophobia (CRI), which tried to ban a 14-page document aimed at preventing radicalization in schools. The document called on teachers to monitor several criteria, including “uncut long beards,” “shaved hair,” “Muslim clothing,” “refusal of tattoos,” and “weight loss associated with frequent fasting.” The document also referred to behavior such as “identity withdrawal,” “selective exposure to the media,” and “political rhetoric” concerning Palestine, Chechnya and Iraq. The document urged teachers to monitor closely students interested in the “history of early Islam.” The court emphasized the strictly internal nature of the document, which was deemed to be “devoid of any legal effect” because it contains “no mandatory provisions.”

January 4. Of the 230 French jihadists who have been killed in Iraq and Syria, seven were killed by American drones, according to Le Monde. “The French targets had a twofold status: they were military objectives, the elimination of which is theoretically governed by the law of war, and they were also targets of judicial proceedings in France. In the name of the ‘self-defense,’ which the coalition states claim, military logic prevailed over the right to legal defense,” the paper complained.

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Corrupt State of Affairs at the International Federation of Journalists? by Tamar Sternthal

Posted By on February 23rd, 2017

Participation by journalists in political events, especially those which they are covering, is a serious violation of Agence France-Presse’s commitment to “rigorous neutrality” and its pledge that it “is independent of the French government and all other economic or political interests.”

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) press release is based on a falsehood: that AFP, relying on “misinformation from Israeli extremist websites,” unfairly sanctioned its reporter Nasser Abu Baker, and includes a call to action to hundreds of thousands of journalists. It is evident that there is no truth behind the International Federation of Journalists’ lofty “respect for truth.”

Nor is there any justice at the IFJ, which pretends to fight for freedom of press and against discrimination, but which provides cover and comfort to Abu Baker, and which, based on that falsehood, actively discriminates against Israeli journalists, denies them their freedom of press, and endangers their lives in the West Bank by sending the message to Palestinian officials and journalists that the Israeli reporters are not welcome there.

That Abu Bakr was a delegate to the Fatah Congress and also ran in the elections was first covered in the Palestinian media. There is nothing inaccurate about that.

The IFJ covered up the fact that its own executive committee member ran for political office, and attacked AFP for supposedly persecuting him with no basis.

It is evident that there is no truth behind the International Federation of Journalists’ lofty “respect for truth.”

“The journalist shall be aware of the danger of discrimination being furthered by the media, and shall do the utmost to avoid facilitating such discrimination based on, among other things, race, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinions, and national or social origins,” declares the Declaration of Principles of the International Federation of Journalists, the world’s largest organization of journalists that represents 600,000 journalists in 140 countries.

One might imagine, then, that this organization that defends press freedom, truth and equality, would vigorously counter a boycott by the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate of Israeli journalists, especially in a discriminatory campaign that endangers Israelis covering the West Bank by sending the message to Palestinian officials and journalists that the Israeli reporters are not welcome there.

That presumably should be the position of an organization which says it “promotes international action to defend press freedom and social justice,” but it is not. Far from condemning the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate’s boycott targeting Israelis, the International Federation of Journalists has come to the defense of Nasser Abu Baker, chairman of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate and the key prosecutor of the discriminatory campaign against Israelis. In fact, Abu Baker, who has threatened Palestinian officials who dare to speak with Israeli journalists, sits on the International Federation of Journalists’ executive committee.

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Malmo, Sweden – A Bellwether for Europe’s Unraveling

Posted By on February 23rd, 2017

FROM JANET LEVY
In 1971, I was a student at the University of Copenhagen, On weekends, I would frequently join friends to take the boat across the Oresund Strait to Malmo, Sweden. At the time, Malmo, was a safe, pleasant, bustling gateway to Sweden. Of course, Sweden’s liberal social welfare and immigration policies have changed all that.

A British friend, a lawyer and musician, who owned 330 shops in 24 countries and has since immigrated to Tel Aviv, has this to say:

Malmo, Sweden

It must be over 20 years ago that my company had a shop in Malmo. It had been a profitable business but the figures
went down. Without going there I asked our regional manager why the sales were down. She told me “the wrong kind of immigrants
had moved into Malmo.” Without ado I sold the shop since we had had an offer and thought no more about it.

The same thing happened in Holland in The Hague and Rotterdam and in France, in Paris and Marseille.

Then came 9/11 after which I launched my own enquiry, (with an open mind) into what I soon learned Churchill had labelled “the religion of blood and war” and “this form of madness” and much, much more.

Now the media, which is indeed the enemy of the people, not only in America but worldwide, together with the dhimmi, crazed elite-globalist-no borders-no nations-politicians, are trying to convince people that reality is not real.

Well, I can confirm from my own experience that what happened to my enterprise in Malmo, Sweden happened, actually happened, and that was 20 years ago. It was as though locusts had come and devoured the crops.

– R

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Trump Is Right: Sweden’s Embrace of Refugees Isn’t Working The country has accepted 275,000 asylum-seekers, many without passports—leading to riots and crime. By Jimmie Åkesson and Mattias Karlsson

Posted By on February 23rd, 2017

When President Trump last week raised Sweden’s problematic experience with open-door immigration, skeptics were quick to dismiss his claims. Two days later an immigrant suburb of Stockholm was racked by another riot. No one was seriously injured, though the crowd burned cars and hurled stones at police officers.

Mr. Trump did not exaggerate Sweden’s current problems. If anything, he understated them. Sweden took in about 275,000 asylum-seekers from 2014-16—more per capita than any other European country. Eighty percent of those who came in 2015 lacked passports and identification, but a majority come from Muslim nations. Islam has become Sweden’s second-largest religion. In Malmö, our third-largest city, Mohamed is the most common name for baby boys.

The effects are palpable, starting with national security. An estimated 300 Swedish citizens with immigrant backgrounds have traveled to the Middle East to fight for Islamic State. Many are now returning to Sweden and are being welcomed back with open arms by our socialist government. In December 2010 we had our first suicide attack on Swedish soil, when an Islamic terrorist tried to blow up hundreds of civilians in central Stockholm while they were shopping for Christmas presents. Thankfully the bomber killed only himself.

Riots and social unrest have become a part of everyday life. Police officers, firefighters and ambulance personnel are regularly attacked. Serious riots in 2013, involving many suburbs with large immigrant populations, lasted for almost a week. Gang violence is booming. Despite very strict firearm laws, gun violence is five times as common in Sweden, in total, as in the capital cities of our three Nordic neighbors combined.

Anti-Semitism has risen. Jews in Malmö are threatened, harassed and assaulted in the streets. Many have left the city, becoming internal refugees in their country of birth.

The number of sex crimes nearly doubled from 2014-15, according to surveys by the Swedish government body for crime statistics. One-third of Swedish women report that they no longer feel secure in their own neighborhoods, and 12% say they don’t feel safe going out alone after dark. A 1996 report from the same government body found that immigrant men were far likelier to commit rape than Swedish men. Last year our party asked the minister of justice to conduct a new report on crime and immigration, and he replied: “In light of previous studies, I do not see that a further report on recorded crime and individuals’ origins would add knowledge with the potential to improve the Swedish society.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Media Do Battle With a Pragmatic New President Trump talked policy in his Florida rally, but journalists thought it was about them.

Posted By on February 23rd, 2017

During labor disputes at major newspapers, it’s not uncommon for reporters to withhold their bylines from stories to demonstrate frustration with management and win sympathy from readers. This can sometimes get management’s attention, but it’s unclear how many readers notice or care.

In recent weeks the Washington press corps’s coverage of its continuing personal feud with Donald Trump, which pits a supposedly tyrannical president against a supposedly noble Fourth Estate, has dominated the news. Does the public care about this standoff as much as the media believe?

“They have their own agenda,” Mr. Trump said of the national press at a rally in Florida Feb. 18, where he pitted the elite media against his supporters. “And their agenda is not your agenda.” The president is on firmer ground than his media foes.

Republican presidents have been accustomed to harsh criticism from the mostly left-wing Beltway journalists who cover them, but no one in memory has received as much sustained abuse as Mr. Trump. Most major news outlets showed nothing but contempt for him and his supporters throughout the campaign, and the disdain has only escalated since the election.

“They could not defeat us in the primaries and they could not defeat us in the general election,” Mr. Trump told supporters, referring not to his political opponents but to the press. “We are not going to let the fake news tell us what to do, how to live, or what to believe. We are free and independent people, and we will make our own choices.”

It’s also becoming clearer that the media are more interested than Mr. Trump in maintaining this antagonistic relationship. Mr. Trump won the White House as an outsider who preached the sort of pragmatism on display in Florida, where he spoke at length about his administration’s intention to focus on jobs, crime, border security and economic growth.

“I know that you want safe neighborhoods where the streets belong to families and communities, not gang members and drug dealers,” he said. The president talked about reducing violent crime nationwide and assembling a task force that will focus on urban areas. He said “safety is a civil right.” The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that murder rates in Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Memphis have returned to record levels reached in the 1990s. For millions of Americans, that task force can’t come soon enough.

Mr. Trump’s approach to job creation is no less commonsensical. He wants to cut red tape and use our natural resources as safely and strategically as possible. “You want low-cost American energy also, which means lifting the restrictions on oil, on shale, on natural gas, on clean—very clean—coal,” he said at the Florida rally. “We’re going to put the miners back to work.” Mr. Trump pledged to reverse course at the Environmental Protection Agency, where regulatory activity increased dramatically during a previous administration that placed the concerns of environmentalists above those of blue-collar workers in Ohio and Michigan.

In the president’s view, these regulations have been “clogging up the veins of our country,” which “meant no jobs. It meant companies leaving our country and going to foreign countries to do things that they’d rather do here.” An Americans for Tax Reform report last year said EPA compliance costs had grown by more than $50 billion annually under President Obama and “ripple throughout the economy, impacting GDP, killing thousands of jobs, and increasing the cost of consumer goods.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Trump’s Deportation Surge Bravo for sparing the ‘dreamers,’ but the rest is enforcement overkill.

Posted By on February 23rd, 2017

President Trump campaigned on enforcing immigration law, and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly plans to deliver. On Tuesday Mr. Kelly ordered a deportation surge that will cost billions of dollars and expand the size and intrusiveness of government in ways that should make conservatives wince.

In a pair of memos the Secretary fleshes out the Administration’s immigration priorities to protect public safety. By all means deport gangbangers and miscreants. But Mr. Kelly’s order is so sweeping that it could capture law-abiding immigrants whose only crime is using false documents to work. This policy may respond to the politics of the moment, but chasing down maids and meatpackers will not go down as America’s finest hour.
***

Under Mr. Kelly’s guidelines, any undocumented immigrant who has committed even a misdemeanor could be “subject to immigration arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States.” So a restaurant worker with an expired visa or driver without a license who is caught rolling a stop sign could be an expulsion target.

One question is whether all this effort is needed. More than 90% of the 65,000 undocumented immigrants removed last year from the U.S. interior were convicted criminals, and about 2,000 were affiliated with gangs. This suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is already targeting and removing as many bad guys as it can locate.

To assist with removals, the memos call for hiring an additional 5,000 border patrol and 10,000 ICE agents, which represent a roughly 25% and 50% increase in their respective workforces. The increase in the agencies’ operating budgets would cost about $4 billion annually.

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KEEP QUIET- A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN

Posted By on February 23rd, 2017

When we watch a documentary film, we assume that we are seeing a true story and that there will be sufficient information for us to contemplate its veracity. In this film about a former leader of Hungary’s far-right, anti-semitic, holocaust- denying Jobbik party, there are huge blocks of missing information that would have helped to put the main character in better context. Csanad Szegedi is the protagonist whose life is upended by the discovery that his grandmother is a Jewish woman who was deported to Auschwitz and bears the tattoo which she has concealed until now. Not wanting to relive the horrors that she had already experienced, she married a non-Jew and raised her daughter without any reference to Judaism. Similarly the half-Jewish daughter followed in her mother’s footsteps and never mentioned it to her son, Csanad.

When he is kicked out of his political party because even a drop of Jewish blood can contaminate a barrel of water, Csanad seeks out Rabbi Oberlander, an ultra-orthodox rabbi who undertakes the task of bringing this anti-semite back to his religion – including circumcision, putting on tefilin, davening with the congregation and speaking out about his past transgressions in an effort to atone. Here are some of the myriad questions that occurred to me:

Why didn’t Csanad remain a secular Jew? Where is the family of this seemingly middle-aged man – wife, children, brother – and how does this orthodox conversion sit with them? We meet his mother and grandmother – is he single, divorced, gay? How many Jews are there in Hungary, where do they live and what is their demographic? Is the English-speaking rabbi an American sent to Hungary by Chabad? What is the current Hungarian attitude towards Israel? Are they one of the pro-Palestinian European countries who boycott Israeli products as well as their artists, scholars and athletes? The filmmakers follow Csanad to Auschwitz because the grandmother was imprisoned there. Bobby, another woman survivor who speaks Hungarian but seems to be American tells the chilling story of children forced to climb into the toilets and use their caps to clean out the contents, then put those caps on their heads. Just ponder this plan – no comment would be sufficient to characterize its cruelty.

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Trump’s Immigration Guidance: The Rule of Law Returns BY Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on February 23rd, 2017

On Tuesday, John Kelly, President Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, published a six-page, single-spaced memorandum detailing new guidance on immigration enforcement. Thereupon, I spent about 1,500 words summarizing the guidance in a column at National Review. Brevity being the soul of wit, both the memo and my description of it could have been reduced to a single, easy-to-remember sentence:

Henceforth, the United States shall be governed by the laws of the United States.

That it was necessary for Secretary Kelly to say more than this — and, sadly, that such alarm has greeted a memo that merely announces the return of the rule of law in immigration enforcement — owes to the Obama administration abuses of three legal doctrines: prosecutorial discretion, preemption, and separation of powers (specifically, the executive usurpation of legislative power).

To the extent President Obama declined to enforce immigration law (notwithstanding his constitutional obligation to execute the laws faithfully), he did so under the guise of prosecutorial discretion. In the pre-Obama days, prosecutorial discretion was an unremarkable, uncontroversial resource-allocation doctrine. It simply meant that since resources are finite, and since it would be neither possible nor desirable to prosecute every crime, we target law-enforcement resources to get the most crime-fighting bang for the taxpayer buck. That means prioritizing enforcement action against (a) the worst offenders and (b) the unlawful causes of the activity.

This is easily illustrated by federal drug enforcement. There are comparatively few federal narcotics agents, compared, say, to police in a major city. But while both feds and cops have authority to arrest traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs, only federal jurisdiction is interstate and international. Consequently, the best use of finite federal enforcement resources is to limit them to prosecutions of significant felony importation and distribution offenses, leaving it to the states and municipalities to handle street pushers and misdemeanor violations involving the use of drugs.

Significantly, the fact that federal enforcement policy, which is made by the executive branch, does not target lesser felons or users does not mean this policy effectively repeals federal drug laws, which are written by Congress.

The non-targeted crimes are still crimes, and the feds reserve the right to prosecute them in appropriate cases (e.g., if they encounter these offenses in the course of carrying out other criminal enforcement missions).

In the area of immigration enforcement, Obama contorted this resource allocation doctrine into a de facto immunity scheme. That is, the Obama Homeland Security Department announced what it labeled enforcement “priorities.” If an illegal alien did not fit into the priorities, it was as if the alien were insulated against prosecution — effectively, it was as if there was nothing illegal about being an alien unlawfully present in the United States; it was as if Obama’s policies were a legal defense against Congress’s duly enacted laws.

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The “Adults” Resume Control View all posts from this blog By:Srdja Trifkovic

Posted By on February 23rd, 2017

At the security conference in Munich over the weekend and at the EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday, VP Mike Pence offered profuse assurances to the European elite class that the Trump administration supports unity and cohesion in the face of various threats allegedly facing the Western alliance. His remarks amounted to an explicit repudiation of Trump’s campaign statements and promises.

“The United States strongly supports NATO and will not waver in our commitment to our transatlantic alliance,” Pence said, in contrast to Trump’s repeated (and reasonable) remarks before the election that NATO was “obsolete.” In a conference dominated by the narrative of the “Russian threat,” hacks and other fake news (Sen. Lindsey Graham warned France and Germany that the Russians were coming after them, vowing to “kick Russia in the ass in Congress”), Pence did not sound a single discordant note. He paid tribute to “our shared values,” our “noble ideals—freedom, democracy, justice and the rule of law.” “As you keep faith with us,” he went on, “under President Trump we will always keep faith with you.”

Defense Secretary James Mattis—who also attended the Munich conference—made similar points in a speech last Saturday—points which until recently would have been considered distinctly un-Trumpian. President Trump has “thrown his full support behind NATO,” Mattis declared, and warned of threats “on multiple fronts as the arc of instability builds on NATO’s periphery and beyond.” Earlier last week Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went to Germany for the Group of 20 foreign ministers’ meeting. According to The Washington Post, as he left the meeting “there was a palpable sense of relief” among the Europeans, which “stemmed in part from a sense that Tillerson is a serious man who came to Bonn willing to hear their viewpoints.” According to the Post, after Tillerson’s meeting with Russian’s FM Lavrov,

Diplomats said they got the sense that there would be no radical shift in the U.S. stance toward Russia . . . One diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the participants were encouraged when Tillerson said the administration believes that before it can consider any lifting sanctions against Russia, Moscow must meet its commitments to help end the fighting in the Russian-speaking, separatist region of eastern Ukraine.