https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2014/08/owen-jones-is-lying-about-israel-plain-and-simple/
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2014/08/owen-jones-is-lying-about-israel-plain-and-simple/
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/03/a-very-eu-coup-martin-selmayrs-astonishing-power-grab/
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/03/a-very-eu-coup-martin-selmayrs-astonishing-power-grab/
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/02/in-defence-of-christopher-steele/
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/02/in-defence-of-christopher-steele/
In defence of Christopher Steele
BBC liar goes for the testicles.
There are two Trump-Russia ‘conspiracies’. In one, the US President is bought or blackmailed by the Kremlin. In the other, the FBI and the intelligences agencies — the ‘deep state’ — commit a monstrous abuse of power to try to overturn the election result. The first conspiracy is described in the ‘dossier’ written by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele; the second, in a series of memos and leaks over the past week, from Congressional Republicans defending Donald Trump.
They accuse Steele of setting out to destroy Trump for money. They want to see him prosecuted for ‘lying’ to the FBI about his contacts with journalists. They say the FBI used Steele’s information to get a surveillance warrant from the US secret intelligence court without telling the court he was being paid by the Democrats. They support the President’s claim that the Obama administration broke the law to spy on his campaign: ‘Obama tapped my phones!’ The real collusion, they say, was not between Trump and Russia, but between Clinton loyalists in the FBI.
I have spoken to a number of people with first-hand knowledge of how the dossier was compiled. Almost all, for various reasons, must remain anonymous, but here is their account of what happened. It is the case for Steele’s defence.
When Christopher Steele began investigating Trump and Russia, in June 2016, he thought he would be looking for financial connections. He set about asking his contacts if the Kremlin had funded Trump in any way. He was taken aback when he received intelligence of a bizarre incident. One of his informants spoke about Trump being filmed watching prostitutes urinate on a bed once used by the Obamas in the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow. This was the now notorious story of the ‘pee tape’.
This supposedly took place in 2013, when Trump visited Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant. Steele eventually collected ‘multiple sources’ in Russia for the Ritz-Carlton story. They left him in no doubt that it was true. He says that explaining exactly why risks revealing their identities; that could be very bad for them or their families. He didn’t think his sources were telling an elaborate, sordid — yet irresistible — lie on behalf of Russian intelligence. Why would they bother? Back then, no one thought Trump could actually win the presidency.
And the ‘motivation behind it added up’ — a subject’s motivation was always a key question for an intelligence officer: Trump was obsessed with Obama’s legacy; his presidential run may have been prompted by the public humiliation Obama heaped on him at a White House correspondents’ dinner in 2012 (Trump had to sit there, a tight smile on his face, while Obama mocked him); the Obamas’ bed had a touch of Trump’s wit about it. Steele became convinced that the Russians could blackmail Trump with sexual kompromat —— comprising material. He also believed that he had found the financial connections he had originally been looking for, as well as evidence of troubling contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence.
President Trump’s defenders in Congress say Steele was always out to get him. Staff working for the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, have produced a memo saying Steele once told a senior US official he ‘was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president’. But Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow, said Steele didn’t start out this way. ‘He came to see me because he was troubled… It was obvious that he was shocked. He’d discovered things he’d never expected to hear. It was like a bad film.’ Wood told Senator John McCain of Steele’s concerns; McCain handed the dossier to the FBI director.
It was a series of reports, the first completed on 20 June 2016. Steele had been contracted to write it a few weeks earlier by a Washington research company, Fusion GPS. Initially, the company worked for an anti-Trump Republican billionaire, who dropped out in spring 2016 as it became obvious that Trump would win his party’s nomination. Fusion GPS needed a new benefactor and eventually found one, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Fusion GPS was either still looking for that new client or had only just signed him when it engaged Steele. Either way, Steele did not know where its fees came from. He steadily wrote his reports. Most of them — setting down the allegations about weird sex, tainted money and Russian influence in the Trump campaign — were completed by August 2016. Only then did he learn the identity of his ultimate client, the Clinton campaign.
That’s important because the Nunes memo accuses Steele of having ‘anti-Trump financial and ideological motivations’. It says that the FBI ‘ignored or concealed’ this background when it asked the intelligence court for a warrant to surveil a Trump aide called Carter Page. Steele’s friends point out that the reports are not kind to Hillary Clinton either. His Russian sources describe her as a hypocrite, saying one thing in private, another in public. Steele was paid $160,000 for the dossier but he is offended by the idea that he would sacrifice a ‘30-year reputation’ for a few thousand dollars in fees. ‘He’s honest and professional,’ said Wood. ‘And he was trying to build up a business that depends on people believing you and believing your information.’
Steele had been cooperating with the US government for years, either giving some of his political reporting to the State Department or helping the FBI. In early July 2016, an FBI agent visited Steele at his office in London to learn what he had found. Steele had another meeting, with a large team from the FBI, in Rome in October. Two Republican senators , ‘Chuck’ Grassley and Lindsey Graham, have called for Steele to be investigated for ‘lying’ to the FBI in those encounters, an offence that can carry a sentence of five years if convicted.
The senators seem to believe — their letter to the Justice Department is heavily redacted — that Steele told the FBI he had not spoken to any journalists. They point to documents submitted by him for a court case in London confirming that he briefed several US news organisations, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. ‘It appears that either Mr Steele lied to the FBI or the British court,’ the senators say. ‘There is substantial evidence suggesting that Mr Steele materially misled the FBI about a key aspect of his dossier efforts, one which bears on his credibility.’
But Steele’s meeting with the FBI in July took place before he had briefed the US journalists, which was in September. Neither he nor his associates have any recollection of the Bureau raising the issue at either meeting, including the one in October. Anyway, the FBI was not their client; Steele was volunteering information, he thought: any contacts with journalists were his business. Steele’s supporters say he is open to such attacks because he gave his entire Russia file to the FBI and it handed the whole thing to the Congressional committees investigating Trump-Russia, albeit after several months of wrangling. Parts of that file are now being selectively leaked to smear Steele, they believe, fearing that his sources in Russia could be exposed in this process.
Trump’s defenders — in Congress and elsewhere — are concentrating on procedural issues rather than the substance of the dossier’s allegations. They say that’s because those allegations are lies. Trump’s critics say it is because the allegations are true. Trump himself has said both that he doesn’t necessarily believe that Russia interfered in the election — and that Russia was behind Steele’s dossier.
He is right that no proof of the dossier’s incendiary claims has yet been published; the dossier’s defenders are right that nothing has been disproved. They believe that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is making progress in substantiating some of the claims — but there’s no proof of that either. A plot to put a Russian agent in the White House; or one to overturn the election result? American voters can still pick their conspiracy theory.
Paul Wood is a BBC correspondent.
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2014/08/owen-jones-is-lying-about-israel-plain-and-simple/
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2014/08/owen-jones-is-lying-about-israel-plain-and-simple/
Owen Jones is lying about Israel. Plain and simple
Another pack of lies?????????????
Owen Jones’s column in the Guardian is headlined ‘Anti-Jewish hatred is rising – we must see it for what it is.’ Sadly the article falls well short of that headline’s aspiration.
At one point in the piece Owen singles me out for criticism: ‘Take Douglas Murray, a writer with a particular obsession with Islam.’ (I suppose ‘obsession’, rather than ‘interest’, say, is intended to suggest something untoward. But I confess that I am indeed especially interested in one of the major stories of our day.) Owen goes on to say of me:
‘“Thousands of anti-Semites have today succeeded in bringing central London to an almost total standstill” was his reprehensible description of a Palestine solidarity demonstration last month. This is not simply an unforgivable libel against peace protestors – Jews among them – who simply object to their government’s complicity in the massacre of children. It makes it much harder to identify genuine anti-Semitism.’
Now I have had to pick Owen up on this before. But here we go again.
The last time there was an exchange between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Owen appeared on primetime BBC TV and seemed especially eager to claim, during a lengthy anti-Israel rant, that Israel was particularly interested in killing children. He said:
‘“I don’t want to just throw statistics around – I’ll give you one example of one of those children. Omar Misheri [sic]. He’s 11-months old, he’s a little boy, the son of a BBC journalist and he was killed in a so-called “targeted strike”.’
Now as I noted here last year, the case Owen appeared to be referencing was the tragic case of Omar Jihad al-Mishrawi. The son of a BBC Arabic Journalist, he was indeed killed in a strike. But not a ‘targeted strike’ by the IDF. No — the young Omar al-Mishrawi was killed by a rocket fired off by Hamas which ‘misfired’ and killed a child in Gaza rather than, as Hamas intended, a child in Israel. This was not my claim, but the claim of a subsequent UN report. As I noted last year, there should have been a lesson in this for Owen — as well as numerous other commentators on these matters. During a war it is exceedingly difficult if you are on the ground — never mind if you are not — to determine who has fired what where and when. I wrote a whole book about this a few years ago. Anybody who knows anything at all about conflict zones knows that the reporting of wars needs to be done with great care.
But on that occasion Owen was so keen to attack Israel that he failed to exercise that care. When I highlighted his serious factual error and suggested that he apologise for misleading viewers of the BBC, he refused to apologise and decided to stick to the libel under the apparent impression that attack was a better form of defence than apology. I thought that a shame at the time and thought less of Owen as a result.
Yet what is most striking today is that Owen is at it again. It is not just that he does not have the intellectual honesty to admit that anti-Semitism in Europe today is spearheaded not by far-right white racists, but by Muslims — and young Muslims in particular. Such people are happy to spend weekend after weekend dragging their young children to chant hatred against Israel on the streets of western capitals (thus ensuring that the hatred is kept alive for another generation). The real problem is that he continues to condemn anti-Semitism at the same time as assiduously feeding it.
As you can see from the quote above from his piece today, Owen criticises me for perpetrating an
‘unforgivable libel against peace protestors – Jews among them – who simply object to their government’s complicity in the massacre of children.’
And there that real and outrageous libel is once again. Take the word ‘massacre’.
‘Massacre’. So carelessly and easily dropped in. Perhaps it is thrown around in the society which Owen keeps and the rallies which he attends. So commonplace, perhaps, that he doesn’t even notice that he’s using it. But here’s the thing. Even if Owen and his fellow-travellers don’t hear the ‘Heil Hitlers’ of their fellow protestors or see the posters saying ‘Hitler, you were right’, or claim that this is some minority fringe, all the while they are writing columns strenuously objecting to the burning of synagogues and the beating up of rabbis while painting the background against which these acts of violence occur. And facts — and their distortion — are, after all, meant to matter.
Yet here is Owen glibly holding Israel responsible not just for a ‘massacre’ but for ‘the massacre of children.’ What is one to do about a claim like that? Beside me I have a Chambers dictionary:
‘Massacre, n indiscriminate slaughter, esp with cruelty; carnage. – vt to kill with violence and cruelty; to slaughter.’
That might be how one would describe the activities of ISIS in Iraq. It might well be how one would describe the intentions (even if they are largely, and carefully thwarted by Israeli defence systems) of Hamas or Hezbollah. But Israel? The IDF is carrying out the most targeted and careful campaign in military history. They seek to take out Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s rocket launch sites and to target the terrorist leadership. They have not been involved in Gaza in order to kill the Palestinian civilians which Hamas deliberately puts in their way as human shields.
I am sure that, if Israel ‘wanted’ to carry out ‘indiscriminate slaughter’ in Gaza, they could. But they don’t want to, which is a major reason why they don’t. Israel’s aim is to minimize civilian casualties. Hamas’s aim — in Israel and in Gaza (where at least 10 per cent of Hamas’s own rockets fall short and hit Gazans) — is to maximise civilian casualties.
But this is of no apparent interest to Owen or the thousands of people who turned out again last weekend to protest against Israel. To these people Israel is committing a ‘massacre’, an ‘atrocity’, ‘war-crimes’, ‘genocide’ and even a ‘Holocaust.’ There is no evidence for these claims. They are a wild and wilful distortion of the facts on the ground. The claim that Israel is engaged in ‘the massacre of children’ is not just a lie. It is precisely the sort of lie which makes its way into the body politic and then persuades some people that they must act on this outrage. After all, if you knew of a friendly government which was wilfully engaged in the deliberate ‘indiscriminate slaughter’ of children, what would you not do to stop it?
Here, in a nutshell, you can see the moral sickness of a portion of the Left. For good form’s sake — and doubtless sometimes with sincerity — they stress how much they loathe anti-Semitism. But as they hold one hand up in a scout’s promise that they oppose all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism, there they are with the other hand busily feeding the furies. Anybody really concerned about avoiding anti-Semitism should take another course. An honest person would realise that if you stop the lies then, although you might never entirely stop the anti-Semitism, you may at least subdue it.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/03/a-very-eu-coup-martin-selmayrs-astonishing-power-grab/
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/03/a-very-eu-coup-martin-selmayrs-astonishing-power-grab/
A very EU coup Martin Selmayr’s astonishing power grab
A very EU coup: Martin Selmayr’s
astonishing power grab.
How a bureaucrat seized power
in nine minutes
Jean Quatremer
President Jean Claude Juncker and Martin Selmayr (image: Getty)
Martin Selmayr has always dreamed of being known beyond the Brussels bubble. His wish has now been granted, albeit in not quite the way he might have hoped. It has arrived in the form of a brilliantly executed coup that has handed this 47-year-old German bureaucrat near-total control of the EU machine.
The coup began at 9.39 a.m. on 21 February, when 1,000 journalists were sent an email summoning them to a 10.30 a.m. audience with Jean-Claude Juncker. The short notice suggested urgency — and for such a meeting to be happening at all was unusual in itself. Since becoming President of the European Commission, Juncker has held hardly any press conferences.
His news was the surprise promotion of Selmayr, his Chief of Staff, to the position of Secretary-General, in charge of the Commission’s 33,000 staff. The reaction from the journalists present was astonishment. No one had been aware of a vacancy. There was no sign that the 61-year-old Alexander Italianer had been thinking of retiring. But as Juncker announced other appointments, it quickly became clear what had happened. Selmayr had taken control, and anyone who resisted him had been unceremoniously fired. Juncker had handed the keys of the European house to his favourite Eurocrat.
Selmayr had served Juncker well — or was it the other way around? Rather than being a regular chief of staff, Selmayr acted like a de facto deputy president. Juncker, who looks increasingly tired and worn out, had been the perfect glove puppet for Selmayr. Juncker was happy to let his Chief of Staff do the work, and happy to thank him by giving him a job of even greater power.
In the first few days of his new job, Selmayr has left no doubt about how he intends to rule. Last week, all Commission staffers were sent a letter from their new Secretary-General — something that is, again, highly unusual, as such letters are sent only by the President. In his Urbi et Orbi, Selmayr proclaimed that the EU civil service ‘must not be satisfied with being the machine to run our institution’, which is odd, given this is exactly what the Commission is supposed to be for.
But Selmayr declared that the civil service (or, rather, he himself) would act as ‘the heart and soul of the Commission’. With that sentence, Selmayr reduced the role of the 28 European Commissioners to mere extras.
One commissioner who was present at the meeting where Selmayr was promoted later explained to me what happened (he spoke on condition of anonymity, which is in itself telling as he is supposed to be a heavyweight). They were called to a 9.30 a.m. meeting where Juncker presented them with nominations. Selmayr was named not as the Secretary-General, but as the deputy — a post that was known to be vacant. Selmayr’s promotion was unexpected, but Juncker assured them that all was above board.
Then came the coup de grâce. Having appointed Selmayr as deputy, Juncker announced that the Secretary-General — ltalianer — had resigned. So Selmayr, having been deputy for just a few minutes, would take his place from 1 March. ‘It was totally stunning,’ the commissioner told me. ‘We had witnessed an impeccably prepared and audacious power-grab.’ Before anyone else could find out about this unprecedented double-promotion, an email was sent out summoning journalists to the press conference — where Selmayr was confirmed. A fait accompli.
Why are the European Commissioners not making more of a fuss? Perhaps because Selmayr is preparing to give them a special present. Retiring commissioners are entitled to a generous ‘transition allowance’ of up to two-thirds of their basic salary for roughly two years, up to about €13,500 a month. Selmayr now plans to extend this to three, or perhaps even five, years. On top of the extra cash, they’d enjoy a series of benefits in kind: an office in the Commission headquarters (previously a perk to which only former presidents were entitled), a company car with a driver and two assistants. So thanks to Selmayr, a departing European Commissioner might receive double, if not triple, what he or she currently receives. All tax free, let’s not forget.
Selmayr’s manoeuvre would not have been possible without the complicity of Irene Souka, the European Commission’s Director-General of Human Resources. She has been amply rewarded for her efforts: last month, her job was extended beyond compulsory retirement age (as was that of her husband, Dominique Ristori, who is Director-General for Energy).
Only one mystery remains: why did Selmayr move when he did? Why not wait? Juncker will be President until October 2019: why would Selmayr not stay as chief of staff (or de facto president) until then? Or why not at least spend six months in the Deputy Secretary-General job? One answer is that Selmayr had to move before anyone could work out what he was up to. France, in particular, had its eye on the Secretary-General job, as two of the four great European institutions (the Parliament and the Diplomatic Service) are managed by Germans. Now, thanks to the Selmayr ascendancy, it’s three out of four. Rather a lot.
But there’s an even bigger reason for him to have moved. Precisely because Juncker will be gone next year, Selmayr needs to act now to line up a replacement — someone just as docile. And he believes he has found just the man in Michel Barnier. It’s thanks to Selmayr’s patronage that Barnier ended up as the Brexit negotiator in the first place. Selmayr’s next mission is to put Barnier top of the list of the European People’s Party (a grouping of centre-right MEPs), which means he’ll be in pole position for the job under the Spitzenkandidat system that Selmayr did so much to set up. Barnier is the ideal candidate because he is (in Selmayr’s eyes), weak, malleable and Macron-compatible.
Selmayr is now accountable to no one. Indeed, he has lost no time further consolidating his power. He has moved his office close to the President’s. I understand he will continue to chair meetings in the President’s office and even plans to put the hitherto independent European legal service under his command. So all he needs now is a new president as docile as Juncker has been and he’ll have achieved his aim: before his 50th birthday, and without ever having stood for elected office Selmayr will become the alpha and omega of the European Commission.
The Spectator Does A Smear Job On UKIP Using A Marxist Jew [ 2014 April ]
To be fair
about Cohen, he is an ugly Jew, who normally
writes for The Guardian, a left wing propaganda machine.
The
Spectator is aimed at the sort of people who vote
Tory
but war makes for strange bedfellows even if it is propaganda war, marketing
Cultural Marxism.
Cohen is a clever liar, who knows how to use
Disinformation.
Immigration Is Good For Us Alleges The Spectator [
22 May 2015 ]
The Spectator hired
Nick Cohen, an ugly
Marxist Jew to tell us that we are not fit to be
'British' if we like UKIP. He is an insolent liar,
the sort whose ancestors brought us the
Bolshevik Revolution, war, torture, the mass murder of 100 million, the
Gaza Massacres etcetera - then
The Spectator allows him a platform for his story. They have put
themselves on the same level as
Der Stürmer of
late unlamented memory. It was published by
Julius Streicher, who was hanged for his pains.
PS The comments are
puerile.
The Spectator Says The Alt-Right Is Right & Conservatives Pander To Marxist
Loud Mouths
[ 25 August 2016 ]
QUOTE
I got told off this week by a presenter on BBC radio for using a
four-letter word live on air. In my defence, I was merely quoting a
tweet from a black Hollywood comedy star called Leslie Jones which
said: ‘Lord have mercy… white people shit.’ And the only reason I
did so was that I thought it important that someone, somewhere,
spoke out against the double standards which seem to exist on social
media right now: one rule for progressives and accepted victim
groups; quite another for everyone else.
A good example is the ban recently imposed by Twitter on my friend and colleague Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo had got into a public spat with Jones when he goaded her over the awfulness of her new movie, an all-female remake of Ghostbusters. Nothing he said matched the borderline racism and incitement to mob bullying in some of Jones’s tweets. Yet guess which party it was that ended up being booted permanently off Twitter............
Should more mainstream conservatives be worried by this? Well
yes, of course, but they have largely themselves to blame. It’s why
the alt-right refers to them disparagingly as ‘cuckservatives’ —
that is, cuckolds whose spinelessness, compromise and me-too virtue
signalling has enabled the social justice warriors of the
progressive left to take so much territory.
UNQUOTE
The Spectator can tell the truth; it even does from
time to time. This is one such.
The Spectator Pretends Not To See Genocide In America [ 15 September 2016 ]
In the thirties
The Guardian chose to ignore
Joe Stalin's attack on the Ukraine, his
Genocide by starvation. Now
The Spectator is ignoring a disastrous reality.
Obama has opened the borders to new voters, the
parasites who will live on the dole, while producing
Anchor Babies to make them 'legal'. The
White Men who made America great are being bred
into hated minority status; it is the
Ethnic Fouling Of America.
EU Head Clerk Threatens England [ 15 September 2016 ]
QUOTE
Jean-Claude Juncker,
the European Commission president, insisted that Brexit does
not mean "the disintegration of the European Union," as he
warned that the UK may not be granted access to the single
market in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.
The European Union is facing an 'existential threat', its most senior official warned, as major splits emerge between East and West countries in the wake of Brexit.
He pointed to the murder of a Polish man in Harlow, Essex last month as an example of what could happen if Europe does not unite. [ What is the connection? None ].........
In a wide-ranging
46-minute speech, the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg
also scolded Theresa May for dragging her feet on triggering
Article 50, the legal mechanism which begins the process of
leaving the EU.
UNQUOTE
An arrogant little nothing is crowing from the top of his dung heap.
The Spectator Puts The Boot Into Donald Trump
[ 17 August 2017 ]
The Spectator can be very good but this mish
mash of vague allegations is just
Propaganda.
The left hate Donald Trump, so do what should
be his own, Republican politicians. The
Main Stream Media are full of hate and lies too.
They prove that he must be getting something right.
The Spectator Tells The Truth - Politicians Let Third World Parasites In
[ 17 August 2017 ]
And yes, they are at least 90% men of fighting age, largely illiterate,
uncivilised and dangerous to
Western
Civilization. It is why they are being encouraged.