Helge Lurås: Taking on the MSM in Norway By Bruce Bawer

Good news media are all alike; every bad news medium is bad in its own way. This is not to say that bad news media do not have certain attributes in common. In these days when the Western political and cultural establishment considers it de rigueur to avoid certain unpleasant truths, for example, bad news media tend to whitewash Islam, big time.

But there are different ways of approaching this task. Take Norway. With a couple of exceptions, all of the country’s major newspapers are mediocre, mendacious, and exceedingly Islam-friendly. The dignified look and traditional stylebook of Aftenposten, originally a Conservative Party organ, put a bourgeois façade on its hard-left contents; opinion-heavy Dagbladet, founded as a Liberal Party sheet, wears its socialism – and its enthusiasm for Islam and mass immigration – on its sleeve; VG provides heavy doses of pop culture to make its left-wing politics go down more easily.

Worst of all is Dagsavisen, an anorexically slim sheet that used to be the Labor Party’s (and government’s) official gazette and that now survives only thanks to a hefty line item in the national budget. In 2016, Dagbladet printed 20,440 copies a day and received $4.8 million from the state – a subsidy of $234 per reader. You’d think these people would be ashamed of themselves for ripping off taxpayers so flagrantly. On the contrary, this lame welfare queen of a daily exudes a staggering self-importance, posturing as the intellectual’s choice and presenting its shrill, predictable leftism as sophisticated and original.

Nunes memo raises question: Did FBI violate Woods Procedures? By Sharyl Attkisson,

For all the debate over the House Republican memo pointing to alleged misconduct by some current and former FBI and Justice Department officials, one crucial point hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves.

And it relates in an unexpected way to special counsel Robert Mueller.

The point is: There are strict rules requiring that each and every fact presented in an FBI request to electronically spy on a U.S. citizen be extreme-vetted for accuracy — and presented to the court only if verified.

There’s no dispute that at least some, if not a great deal, of information in the anti-Trump “Steele dossier” was unverified or false. Former FBI director James Comey testified as much himself before a Senate committee in June 2017. Comey repeatedly referred to “salacious” and “unverified” material in the dossier, which turned out to be paid political opposition research against Donald Trump funded first by Republicans, then by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Presentation of any such unverified material to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to justify a wiretap would appear to violate crucial procedural rules, called “Woods Procedures,” designed to protect U.S. citizens.

The Memo and the Mueller Probe If the investigation arose from partisan opposition research, what specific crime is he looking into? By Michael B. Mukasey

The memo released Friday by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was the product of necessity, not choice. Even before its release, the debate over its provenance, motive and effect was obscuring the crucial point that it is the underlying facts the memo alleges that present the real issues.

The committee’s memo says that yet another memo, which goes by the cloak-and-dagger title “Steele dossier,” provided at least part of the basis for a wiretap of Carter Page, a U.S. citizen who had volunteered as a foreign policy-consultant to the Trump campaign. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court granted the wiretap application from the FBI and Justice Department two weeks before the 2016 election. In order to obtain the warrant, the government had to show probable cause that Mr. Page was acting as the agent of a foreign power and that in so doing he had committed a crime.

The Steele dossier is 35 pages of opposition research on Donald Trump, described by former FBI Director James Comey as “salacious and unverified.” It was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent who had a luminous dislike for Mr. Trump and was also an informant for the FBI.

MY SAY: FAKE POLLS

Fake polls have infected politics by disheartening American voters with approval ratings and predictions which are falsely researched and bruited, and out of sync with the American people. In 1948 the Chicago Daily Tribune went to press and public with the now famous headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Harry Truman, who trounced Thomas Dewey held up the Nov. 3, 1948 edition of the Chicago Tribune with that headline as he celebrated victory over the man who was predicted to win by most national polls.

Ronald Reagan averaged a 53% job approval rating during his presidency, slightly below average for all U.S. presidents for which Gallup has recorded job approval ratings.

After the Democratic National Convention in July, the Mondale-Ferraro ticket actually bested the Reagan-Bush ticket in a nationwide Gallup Poll, 48 percent to 46 percent.

Questions in polls remind one of the old saw about a trial when the prosecutor asks: “When did you stop beating your wife?”

I have been polled twice and it goes something like this exaggerated version:

“Are you a registered Republican voter? Just answer yes or no”

” If it were disclosed that the Republican candidate was guilty of pillage and plunder and rape would you vote for him?”

Of course, the answer is no, and the poll then discloses that only 3% of registered Republicans will vote for the party’s incumbent. rsk

Un-Candid in Camera by Mark Steyn

Well, the memo was released. You can read it in full here, and I recommend you do so because, on the evidence of much of Friday’s TV and radio coverage, most commentators only want to talk about it in the most shallow political terms. Whereas the questions it raises about state corruption in an age of round-the-clock technological surveillance are far more profound.

Let’s start with something I wrote back in October:

It seems a reasonable inference, to put it as blandly as possible, that the [Christopher Steele] dossier was used to justify the opening of what the Feds call an “FI” (Full Investigation), which in turn was used to justify a FISA order permitting the FBI to put Trump’s associates under surveillance. Indeed, it seems a reasonable inference that the dossier was created and supplied to friendly forces within the bureau in order to provide a pretext for an FI, without which surveillance of the Trump campaign would not be possible.

So my view has always been that the dossier is not “evidence” but a mere simulacrum of evidence – a stage prop to lay before the FISA court judge to get him to sign off on Trump surveillance. Because a judge has to be given something before he’ll cough up a warrant, even if what it is is no more real than the “secret papers” in a spy thriller. Nevertheless, for a group of highly placed FBI and Department of Justice officials, it was a very crude calculation: No dossier, no surveillance.

That much the memo appears to confirm:

Deputy [FBI] Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.

So Robert Mueller’s entire “Russia investigation” springs from this dossier: a huge sprawling multi-branch tree of a rotten poisonous fruit.

Europe: Judeo-Christian Symbols Vanish, Islam Rises by Giulio Meotti

The British housing market is now dealing with a new special entry: former Christian churches. A former Methodist church in Surrey was recently put on sale for the first time in its 154-year history. And a few days later, a church in London and went on the market — converted into apartments.

Religious symbols are an integral part of a civilization. When old symbols vanish, new ones — with their own identities — take their place. Europe’s public imagination today is being flooded with Islamic symbols, from veils in schools, swimming pools and workplaces, to the volume and height of mosque minarets.

We impenitent secularists might be happily indifferent to the fall of the old religious symbols — but we should not be indifferent to the new religious symbols taking their place.

French writers coined the term “le grand remplacement,” meaning the demographic replacement by immigrants of native Europeans. There is, however, another replacement taking place on the old continent.

Look at the images taken by the Israeli-Hungarian photographer Bernadett Alpern. Synagogues — like silent witnesses of the fall of a fundamental branch of the European civilization — have been turned into museums, swimming pools, shopping centers, police stations and mosques.

Now it is the turn of the Stars of David and skullcaps, the two most visible Jewish symbols. A poll by the World Zionist Organization recently revealed that at least half of Jews in Europe do not feel safe wearing symbols of their faith. They are right. A few days ago, an 8-year-old Jewish boy wearing a skullcap was attacked and beaten in the street by two men in Sarcelles. Earlier in January, in the same suburb, a man slashed the face of a 15-year-old Jewish girl who was walking home while wearing the uniform of her Jewish school. It is the “new normal” for French Jews.

For years, European elites have been preaching multiculturalism and religious and cultural relativism. Now we find ourselves living through not only further assaults on the habitually besieged Jews and their faith, but a massive de-Christianization, as well.

‘The Faculty Unanimously Distance Themselves With Revulsion’ Charlotte Groh helped a friend escape from East Germany. Only decades later could she leave too. By Peter Friedman

The Berlin Wall stood for 10,315 days, from Aug. 13, 1961, until Nov. 9, 1989. On Monday, Feb. 5, it will have been down for as long as it was up.

East Germany began to seal itself off from the West long before the wall was built. In 1952 Soviet troops helped East Germany close and fortify its border with West Germany, leaving only the Berlin border open as an escape route. Some 250,000 East Germans fled to the West every year for most of the following decade. This exodus undermined East Germany’s economy and threatened the Soviet Union’s five-year plans, which depended on East German manufactured goods.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev kept urging East German leader Walter Ulbricht to reduce emigration by easing living conditions, as the Soviets were doing with their own “de-Stalinization” policies. Instead, in 1956, Ulbricht passed a law making emigration without permission—deserting the republic—punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment, as was helping others to desert.

The police combed through subways and elevated trains heading from East Berlin to West Berlin. Whoever seemed suspicious—carrying more than one suitcase could draw scrutiny—would be hauled off for interrogation.

I met Charlotte Groh at an East Berlin cafe in 1992, and she told me of her own involvement in someone’s escape. In 1960 Charlotte and her friend Erika Jahn were in their early 20s and working as schoolteachers in Mecklenburg. Charlotte visited Erika during Christmas vacation and found her in tears.

“I can’t stand living in the GDR any longer!” Erika sobbed, referring to East Germany’s official name, the German Democratic Republic. She said that she had relatives in Hamburg with whom she could stay while looking for a job. She had packed two suitcases to take with her. Charlotte volunteered to accompany Erica and take along one of the suitcases.

A Tale of Two Countries By Ruth Papazian

Rep. Joseph Kennedy III (D-Mass.) had the unenviable task of rebutting President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address this week. Kennedy found himself repudiating Trump’s advocacy of traditional Democratic Party issues, including government accountability, fair trade, job training, paid family leave, prison reform, and rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.

The privileged political tyro also had the misfortune of having to begrudge the tax cuts and regulatory reform that has helped create 2.4 million new jobs (200,000 of them in manufacturing), enabled employers to raise wages substantially for the first time in years, and brought black and Hispanic unemployment levels to historic lows.

How would he try to pull off this trick? By describing a country and a people that exist on a different planet in a parallel universe:

Trump’s America: We endured floods and fires and storms. But through it all, we have seen the beauty of America’s soul, and the steel in America’s spine. Each test has forged new American heroes to remind us who we are, and show us what we can be.

Kennedy’s America: We see … [h]atred and supremacy proudly marching in our streets.

Trump’s America: We saw the volunteers of the “Cajun Navy,” racing to the rescue with their fishing boats to save people in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane. . . . [S]trangers shielding strangers from a hail of gunfire on the Las Vegas strip . . . Americans like Coast Guard Petty Officer Ashlee Leppert, who . . . braved live power lines and deep water, to help save more than 40 lives. . . . Americans like firefighter David Dahlberg [who] faced down walls of flame to rescue almost 60 children trapped at a California summer camp threatened by wildfires.

Kennedy’s America: [“Dreamers”] wade through flood waters, battle hurricanes, and brave wildfires and mudslides to save a stranger.

Trump’s America: Over the last year, the world has seen what we always knew: that no people on Earth are so fearless, or daring, or determined as Americans. If there is a mountain, we climb it. If there is a frontier, we cross it. If there is a challenge, we tame it. If there is an opportunity, we seize it. So let us begin tonight by recognizing that the state of our Union is strong because our people are strong.

Media Fumble Their Latest Attack on Nunes Memo By Julie Kelly

The media and Democratic spinmeisters think we are stupid. Wait, check that. Not just stupid—illiterate.

How else to explain their latest attempt—to borrow a promo from CNN—to tell us an apple is a banana? More specifically, how could they twist media reports that do not say the Justice Department informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the infamous Steele dossier was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign into reports that say they do?

A few hours after the Nunes memo was released Friday afternoon, the Washington Post rushed to dispute one of the missive’s most explosive claims: That none of the FISA applications “disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts.” As anyone who is not living off-the-grid knows, the DNC and Clinton campaign paid millions for the shady dossier that was leveraged to win FISC approval to spy on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page months after he left the campaign.

On Friday night, the Post reported that two U.S. officials speaking on condition of anonymity claimed “ample disclosure of relevant, material facts” were made to the court that “revealed the research was being paid for by a political entity.” The sources went on: “No thinking person who read any of these applications would come to any other conclusion but that [the work was being undertaken] at the behest of people with a partisan aim and that it was being done in opposition to Trump.”

Even though the Post attempted to create a phony plotline that of course the court must have known the dossier was paid for and peddled by the same party of the sitting president, as well as by the campaign of his former secretary of state and the Democrats’ presidential candidate, the paper had to fess up that “the application did not specifically name the Democratic National Committee or the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.” I mean, duh, don’t FISA court judges read Yahoo News?

Video: Muslim Driver Attempts Hit and Run on Jewish Father and Son in Belgium By Michael van der Galien

The Jewish community of Antwerp (Belgium) has released CCTV footage of an attempted car ramming incident on an Orthodox Jewish family Saturday morning.

A Jewish father and his son were on their way to the local synagogue when they suddenly had to jump out of harm’s way because a car was coming directly at them. (Note: the two were walking on the sidewalk.) Here’s the footage:

Police have arrested the driver. According to Israeli public broadcaster Kan News, the driver is of Muslim origin. He was tracked down through the footage of the license plate and is to be arraigned today on the charge of attempted manslaughter.

Sadly, this is one of many recent examples of increased antisemitism in Western Europe over the last few years — and especially the last few months. In September of last year, for instance, a Jewish man was assaulted in Antwerp by a “local youth” who called him every anti-Jewish slur in the dictionary. The attacker had converted to Islam recently and was arrested with the help of onlookers.