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February 2018

France: Migrant Crisis Spirals Out of Control by Soeren Kern

French Interior Minister Gérard Collomb described the level of violence in Calais as “unprecedented.” He attributed the fighting to an escalating turf war between Afghan and Kurdish gangs seeking to gain control over human trafficking between Calais and Britain, which many migrants view as “El Dorado” because of its massive underground economy.

During his visit to Calais, Macron outlined his government’s new immigration policy: food and shelter for those entitled to remain in France, and deportation of those in the country illegally.

“Emmanuel Macron did it. Never before has a president of the Republic fallen into unpopularity so fast and then become popular again.” — Paris Match.

Hundreds of Africans and Asians armed with knives and iron rods fought running street battles in the northern port city of Calais on February 1, less than two weeks after French President Emmanuel Macron visited the area and pledged to crack down on illegal immigration.

The clashes plunged Calais — emblematic of Europe’s failure to control mass migration — into a war zone and reinforced the perception that French authorities have lost control of the country’s security situation.

The mass brawls, fought in at least three different parts of Calais, erupted after a 37-year-old Afghan migrant running a human trafficking operation fired gunshots at a group of Africans who did not have money to pay for his services. Five Africans suffered life-threatening injuries.

Within an hour, hundreds of Eritreans, Ethiopians and Sudanese took to the streets of Calais and attacked any Afghans they could find. More than a thousand police officers using batons and tear gas were deployed to restore order. Two dozen migrants were hospitalized.

Palestinians: The Atrocities No One Talks About by Khaled Abu Toameh

Why the need to keep reminding the world of the plight of the Palestinians in Syria? It is because the international community and pro-Palestinian groups around the world do not seem to care about the atrocities that are being committed against Palestinians in Syria or any Arab country because they were not committed by Israel.

The 82-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, meanwhile, has made clear where his priorities stand. Instead of searching for ways to help his people in Syria and the Gaza Strip, where hospitals are facing a deathly shortage of fuel and medicine, Abbas has just spent $50 million to purchase a “presidential plane.”

Abbas, however, could not care less. In his view, the needs of his people are the responsibility of the world. He wants everyone but himself to continue funneling financial aid to the Palestinians. For him, delivering a speech before the EU Parliament or the UN General Assembly easily takes precedence over the Palestinians who are dying due to lack of medicine and food.

A Palestinian refugee camp has been under siege for more than 1,660 days. Hundreds of the camp residents have been killed, while tens of thousands have been forced to flee from their homes.

Those who have remained in the camp — mostly the elderly, women and children — live in unspeakable sanitary conditions and drink polluted water.

More than 200 Palestinians from the camp, which has been under siege since 2103, have died as a result of lack of food or medicine. The conditions in the refugee camp, by any standard, are horrific.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: Serving Canada or Serving Islamists? by Tom Quiggin

In practice, the CBC only respects sensibilities when it comes to Islamists such as ISIS or to those who attacked Charlie Hebdo. When it comes to attacking Christians and Jews, the CBC exercises no such restraint.

The CBC also quotes organizations such as the National Council for Canadian Muslims, formerly known as CAIR CAN, which the CBC has referred to as a civil rights group. But they failed to note that CAIR CAN was formed to support its parent organization, CAIR USA, which is a listed terrorist group in the United Arab Emirates. It also does not mention that CAIR USA was formed in part by supporters of Hamas and that it has had multiple run-ins with terrorism financing.

Similarly, when supporting a variety of Islamist issues, the CBC quotes as a source the Canadian Council of Imams. The CBC does not reveal, however, that the Vice President of the Council of Imams, Hakim Quick, believes that the position of Islam on homosexuality is death. It also does not state that the “Emir” of the council is also the head of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). The ICNA believes that Islam is not compatible with democracy, women are inferior and wife beating is permissible.

As a criminal and federal court expert on terrorism, specifically jihadist-based terrorism, my opinion is that the CBC has willfully assisted Islamists in the creation of the social, cultural and political spaces necessary for extremism to grow. By deliberately sheltering even ISIS supporters acting out in Canada from public scrutiny, the state broadcaster is failing the Canadian public…. This failure appears willful, intentional, and consistent over time.

Canada’s state broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) consistently supports the Islamist cause, including direct cooperation with terrorist front groups. This support extends to editing domestic Canadian stories to ensure that even ISIS is not criticized in the domestic context. Given that the CBC is owned by the Government of Canada and funded by taxpayers with a billion dollar a year subsidy, the question arises as to whom they serve.

The FISA-Gate Boomerangs Many questions remain, but Democrats, including Obama, are probably not going to look good when we get the answers. By Victor Davis Hanson

Some things still do not add up about the so-called Steele dossier, FISA warrants, the Nunes memo, and the hysterical Democratic reaction to it.

A Big Deal or a Nothing Deal?

1) Progressives and Democrats warned on the eve of the memo’s release that it would cause havoc throughout the intelligence agencies, by exposing classified means and processes.

When no serious intelligence expert claimed that the released memo had done such damage, the official response to the memo was suddenly recalibrated by progressives. It went from being radioactive to a “nothingburger.”

The obvious conclusion is cynical: Cry Armageddon to prevent its release, then, after the release, resort to yawns to downplay its significance. An even more cynical interpretation is that Rod Rosenstein, James Comey, and other officials stridently objected to the release of the memo because they are named in it. Comey incoherently mocked the memo’s purported unimportance even while listing all its deleterious effects and the crises that would ensue.

Congressional, DOJ, and FBI resistance to the release of most documents connected to FISA-gate apparently originates with fears that information will either reveal Obama-administration efforts to surveille Trump officials during a campaign or will suggest that the impetus for the Mueller investigation came as a result of illegal activities and a concocted dossier — or both.

2) Critics scream, “Carter Page is no big deal.” Aside from the easy retort that neither, initially, was a petty break-in at the Watergate complex, or rumors of supplying arms to distant guerillas in Central America, Page is a big deal for a variety of reasons.

Democrats allege that, given Carter Page’s familiarity with Russians, it was logical for the Obama administration to use the dossier’s references to him to substantiate FISA warrants.

But is not the opposite more likely true?

Don’t Call it the Steele Dossier, Call it the Clinton Dossier Daniel Greenfield

My research had previously suggested that the Steele Dossier may have really been the work of Cody Shearer, one of Bill’s plumbers. The Grassley memo doesn’t name Shearer but indicates that the dossier produced by Christopher Steele had been based on work from the Clinton campaign.

Clinton associates were “feeding” allegations to former British spy Christopher Steele at the same time he was compiling the controversial anti-Trump dossier paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign, according to an unclassified memo from senior Senate Republicans who recently made a criminal referral.

Those Republicans, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had asked the Justice Department in January to investigate Steele based on evidence they say suggests he lied to the FBI about his contacts with the media (a violation of 18 USC 1001) — or the FBI misrepresented Steele’s statements.

How Trump Changed Saudi Attitudes to Israel and the Islamo-Fascists A new diplomacy is already changing the Middle East. Daniel Greenfield

What a difference an administration makes.

Under Bush, Muslim World League secretary-general Abdullah Al-Turki described the Jews as “perfidious” and suggested that “it is the natural disposition of the Jews who inherited this deception from their forefathers.”

Under Obama, the Muslim World League Journal ran an article claiming that “Jews” and “Jewesses” run the media. It was one of many violently anti-Semitic pieces that had appeared in the publication.

Under Trump, the Muslim World League sent a letter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum before the commemoration of International Holocaust Memorial Day expressing, “our great sympathy with the victims of the Holocaust”. It goes on to completely disavow any support for the Holocaust or its denial, “This human tragedy perpetrated by evil Nazism won’t be forgotten by history, or meet the approval of anyone, except criminal Nazis or their genre. True Islam is against these crimes. It classifies them in the highest degree of penal sanctions and among the worst human atrocities ever.”

The letter was signed by Dr. Mohammad Al Issa, the new Secretary General of the MWL who had replaced Al-Turki in the summer of ’16. The MWL is under Saudi control and Al Issa, who is loosely associated with the reformers, was appointed as major changes were sweeping the desert kingdom.

The MWL Holocaust letter never mentions the Jews by name. It was sent to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, a United States government institution, rather than a Jewish communal institution. The new alignment between the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia is based on a growing threat from Iran. The letter allows Saudi Arabia to distinguish itself from Iran’s anti-Semitic obsession with the Holocaust.

Did Clinton Associates and Obama State Dept. Feed Info to Steele? Questions mount over Steele dossier corruption. Joseph Klein

Democrats and their apologists in the mainstream media are in a state of pitiful denial. They refuse to accept the fact that certain senior officials at the FBI and Department of Justice with political agendas misled the FISA court in their applications for a warrant to spy on an American citizen, Carter Page. First, the Democrats and their apologists raised the specter of a national security crisis if the House Intelligence Committee memo on the discredited Christopher Steele anti-Trump “dossier,” used in part to justify the surveillance warrant, were made public. Then, when the memo was made public, they claimed, in the words of California Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu, that it was a “nothing burger.” There was in fact a lot of beef in the memo, but Democrats and their progressive friends have eliminated truth from their diets.

We shall see what so-called “context” the Democrats put into their rebuttal memo, if and when released. Given their tendency to put their heads in the sand when evidence of malfeasance by partisan higher-ups in the nation’s chief law enforcement agencies stares them in the face, we can expect little more than spin.

From what has been reported so far by the New York Times, the “Democratic memo is said to contend that the F.B.I. was more forthcoming with the surveillance court than Republicans had claimed.” The article quoted Connecticut Democrat Jim Hines, who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, claiming that the FBI did not mislead the FISA court because “the judge had some sense that this information came out of a political context.” However, the article went on to say that, according to people familiar with the Democratic memo, the memo concedes that “the F.B.I. did not name the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign as having funded the Steele research.” Instead, the FBI merely disclosed that the information it had received from Steele was “politically motivated,” which the Democrats believe is sufficient.

The Left’s Memo Hysteria The Dems’ meltdown is in full effect.Matthew Vadum

Democrats and other left-wingers melted down in unison over the weekend after the release of a congressional memo asserting that Obama-era officials relied on the discredited Trump-Russia dossier to obtain court-ordered foreign-intelligence wiretaps against U.S. citizens in a bid to reverse the results of the 2016 presidential election.

The extended freakout came after the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence publicly unveiled a newly declassified four-page report detailing intelligence surveillance abuses perpetrated by the Obama administration during the past election cycle. As expected, the document confirmed more or less all the terrible things we’ve been hearing about the disgraced Federal Bureau of Investigation and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Justice.

One of the more outrageous examples of hyperbole came from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who absurdly claimed “the release of this memo is really reminiscent of the darkest days of the McCarthy era.”

As left-wingers see things, when governmental transparency exposes Republican wrongdoing, it is noble, patriotic, and just. When it exposes Democrat wrongdoing, it is terrorism and treason.

The memo itself is devastating. It shows how corrupt the swamp-dwellers in the nation’s capital are. No wonder Democrats shrieked so loudly in protest of the memo’s release: it indicts them. (Full memo here.)

Steele’s Other Clinton Link A Senate letter says the dossier writer got info from a Clinton ‘friend.’

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley on Monday released an unclassified version of his recent letter to the Justice Department urging a criminal investigation into Christopher Steele, and it raises more questions about the credibility of the dossier that Mr. Steele generated in 2016.

The unclassified version is heavily redacted, consisting of 14 readable paragraphs. It nonetheless provides new details about the FBI’s application to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order against former Trump official Carter Page in October 2016, a request that relied on the Steele dossier. The referral letter says Mr. Steele may have lied to the FBI and that the FBI provided false information to a FISA judge.

The FBI fired Mr. Steele after the ex-British spy talked about his interaction with the bureau and his dossier for an Oct. 30, 2016 Mother Jones article. Yet the referral notes that in subsequent sworn court filings in Britain, Mr. Steele said he also briefed reporters in “late summer/autumn 2016,” including the New York Times, Washington Post and Yahoo News. Fusion GPS chief Glenn Simpson, who hired Mr. Steele and was retained by the Hillary Clinton campaign, has confirmed these briefings.

Yet according to the Grassley referral, this conflicts with “classified documents reviewed by” his committee. In other words, the FBI’s application for surveillance, filed October 21, 2016, led the court to believe that Mr. Steele wasn’t talking to the press and working a political angle. Such an admission might have derailed the surveillance order.

Nunes: ‘Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton Campaign Colluded with the Russians’ By Debra Heine

Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, declared Monday evening that there was “clear evidence of collusion” with the Russians — but it was on the Democratic side.

During an appearance on Fox News’ Hannity, Nunes blasted the mainstream media, calling their failure to report honestly on the growing scandal “embarrassing.”

The California Republican also announced that his committee would be asking for the transcripts of the four surveillance requests from the FISA Court.

Nunes pointed out that no one in the mainstream media seemed bothered by the fact that the FBI knowingly used “political dirt” to open a counterintelligence investigation into a presidential campaign.

The fact that the mainstream media is “totally uninterested in this” Nunes said was a problem. “Can you imagine if the shoe was on the other foot?” he exclaimed.

As an example, he argued that if Donald Trump or President Bush or Karl Rove had paid for political dirt and then George W. Bush’s FBI opened an counterintelligence investigation into the Obama campaign, “this town would be on fire.” Nunes said: “Every reporter would be following around Karl Rove and George W. Bush all over town. Yet it’s crickets from the media. It’s embarrassing. It’s absolutely embarrassing and I’m almost flabbergasted because I thought at least there would be some ounce of credibility left, but there really is none.”