By: Yair Jolovitz

The national news spotlight, in an almost one-dimensional show of unity and in lock-step with the self-declared progressive voices of America – those who seem to relish in exploiting some of the recent shooting tragedies – senses that the 2020 Presidential election has finally found the issue which offers the Democrats an advantage. Dead Americans. Not the ones that fall in unimaginably great numbers daily in Chicago, in St. Louis, in Baltimore, in Detroit, or in Washington, DC, but rather those who are gunned down by the certifiably insane that walk among us. We aren’t talking about the political murders committed by Muslims during the past two decades, nor by Black men in their own neighborhoods. We’re talking about shootings by anyone who looks like they might need sun block in a summer day’s sun. Of course, there are always exceptions. For instance, when that White shooter is an avowed Leftist.

What is to be done? While the debate rages on without any meaningful end in sight, this much can be stated as fact: The Democrats never miss an opportunity to seize an opportunity. Rahm Emanuel’s “You never let a serious crisis go to waste; and what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before” has become the prescriptive order of the day. Never mind that the obsession to exploit these tragedies has led to the irrational erosion of the nation’s civil rights. On the contrary – they are intended to.

During these trying times, everyday Americans desperate to find answers to difficult questions and hoping to hear a few voices of clarity through the endless fog of the politicization of these tragedies, tune in to talk radio, television cable news, and search their favorite websites. Their choices are invariably those news commentaries, replete with rabid partisanship and treacherous tribalism, that have replaced true news journalism. It comes with a cost – too often, either the truth, common sense, or both.

Let’s illustrate the point.

Disappointingly, but not surprisingly, we listened as many widely recognized and popular FOX News hosts, considered to be intellectuals – influencers on the right, agents representing the clarity of mind and adherence to reason that conservatism ostensibly represents – surrendered principled ideology and conceding to madness.

Time for a commentary about their commentary. About the betrayal by a spurious intellectualism of a better-reasoned common sense.

All of a sudden, they and everyone else are experts on constitutional law.

These intellectual half-wits, clearly running an ethical deficit, are entirely open to the prospect of confiscatory red flag laws, magazine capacity limits, further limiting access to arms and a whole host of onerous restrictions on our most precious and precarious right. None of which would move the proverbial needle in the slightest.

This willful surrender, underscored by a frantic and desperate desire to correct a problem that is beyond their capacity or that of the exploitative and shameless politicians on Capitol Hill to solve, will not end well.

How short are their memories? Have they forgotten the political weaponization of the IRS against conservatives? Did they not shutter at the swift abandonment of the principle of due process, and the presumption of innocence throughout the fraudulent and despicable display that was Justice-designee Brett Kavanaugh’s political lynching? Let us ask them – to whom do you suppose we grant the authority to determine who poses a public threat based on nothing more than anonymous denunciation? Please, do tell – which government bureaucracy are you willing to empower with the authority to confiscate legal property from citizens that committed no crime – let alone arrested, tried and convicted of one. Which other inalienable rights, earned with blood and sacrifice, are you willing to willfully nullify to appease the insatiable and ravenous Left?

For those not fully paying attention, perhaps we should ask those decent law-abiding citizens who were purposefully and venomously targeted by Congressman Joaquin Castro, brother and campaign manager to Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro (yes, that same radical La Raza activist). Let’s ask those folks-outed by a “Nixonian enemies list”, whose employers, home addresses, and personal information was publicly tweeted by Castro’s official campaign, if they feel comforted by the notion of having their guns taken from them during such a hyper-partisan and dangerous time. A time when yet another congressman, Tim Ryan, of Ohio’s 13th congressional district, led a self-described “caravan” of blood thirsty activists who protested at Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell’s private residence, publicly exclaiming they were there for their own political blood-letting. How would Mitch McConnell feel about the notion of being alienated from his inalienable rights? Ask these innocents, standing at the political precipice of having their rights sacrificed on the altar of hysteria and self-congratulatory pats on the back by politicians trying to outdo one another in stripping their own constituent citizens of their Constitutional rights.

Second Amendment concessions to the rancorous and unforgiving Left will only serve to further appetize their insatiable and unquenchable thirst for power. McConnell’s mistake, and that of many on the Right, is the false notion that these are powerless, basement dwelling goons, with no real political capital or influence. McConnell and his ilk are reassured and self-consoled by the belief that the Left doesn’t even know which bathroom to use and can’t agree on how many years planet Earth has before returning to its primordial state of molten iron, and are therefore, not to be taken seriously.

Are we really that stupid? Is our society in such a state of post-rational hysteria, in such a frenzy of delusion, that we are willing to abandon our most crucial and critical human rights simply because the pundits have successfully pretended to know something we don’t? Those inalienable rights that have served to protect us. Rights so brilliantly enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. It reminds us of the famous quote from Thomas Jefferson, that public admonition of those very fools, unwilling to preserve the very thing that made them citizens rather than subjects: “Those who sacrifice liberty to purchase a little temporary security, deserve neither.”

In our hasty and reflexive efforts to assert our control over the malevolence and wickedness which seems to have overtaken us, and in our shortsighted attempt at creating a more equitable society, we have willfully abandoned the very principles which guard against tyranny and make us all equal. Citizen equal to citizen – and a government accountable to those citizens.

When they disarm us, they axiomatically disarm us from these rights as well. The connection is symbiotic.

It is so much more than our right to embrace, hands clenched around our Second Amendment, those basic safeguards of a free society. It’s about rejecting the charlatans. Summarily, and expeditiously.

As Charlton Heston had forcefully declared, all Americans should be boldly embracing this instrument of equality, this humble apparatus of wood and steel. We should pledge our commitment, and if necessary – our lives, to safeguarding and sanctifying the only object that truly makes free men free.

Yair A. Jolovitz is the Security Manager of a Global Fortune 500 corporation and a commentator on political and public affairs.

By: Amir Taheri

In 2015 when President Hassan Rouhani advertised his “nuke deal” with the Obama administration as “the greatest diplomatic victory in the history of Islam,” few people realized that he had, in fact, endorsed a neo-colonial document that put key aspects of Iran’s economic, industrial, scientific and security policies under the tutelage of six foreign powers led by the United States.

For several reasons, the “nuke deal” did not provoke the popular explosion in Iran that some analysts expected. To start with, no one had signed that deal, which meant it was neither a treaty nor a binding international agreement but a wish list. Nor was it put through the legislative process to give it legal authority. More importantly, perhaps, the text did not offer a readily recognizable and concrete image of the humiliation the “Islamic Republic” had accepted in the name of Iran.

Rouhani’s euphoria that “even the Americans have recognized our right to enrich uranium” sounded good to some who did not know that the right to enrich uranium is recognized for all nations by international law. Having got away with that odious exercise, Rouhani and his team decided to do a similar favor to Vladimir Putin. This came last year when Rouhani flew to Kazakhstan to sign a Russian text on the Caspian Sea.

The text, in 24 articles, suffers from a crisis of identity.

It is not clear whether it is a treaty or a draft for a future accord. It offers no definition of the Caspian, either as a lake or a sea — a definition that would automatically establish its status under existing international maritime laws and conventions. It pretends to establish the legal status of the Caspian Sea without tackling the crucial issue of sovereignty.

In its preamble, the text refers to “changes and processes that have occurred in the Caspian region at the geopolitical and national levels”, and insists on “the need to strengthen the legal regime of the Caspian Sea.”

Leaving aside the confusion between “Caspian region” and “Caspian Sea” the text implies that a legal regime already exists but needs to be strengthened.

So, what is that legal regime?

It is shaped by three treaties between Iran, Tsarist Russia and, finally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the 19th and 20th centuries. Under those treaties, Iran and Russia (in its two epiphanies) have joint sovereignty over the Caspian Sea. The treaties do not mention the figure 50-50 and, in reality for many decades, the Caspian was a Russian lake for all practical purposes. Nevertheless, the treaties show that Iran and Russia were the only two sovereign powers in the Caspian.

That could be challenged with the internationally recognized legal principle of change, notably by the emergence of “successor states” or “rebus sic stantibus” in Latin.

The Russian text does not do so. For if it did, it would have to accept that the four Caspian littoral states that emerged from the disintegration of the USSR would have to share their half of sovereignty among themselves, leaving Iran’s share as unchanged.

To muddy the waters, the text, which, according to its first article, is the exclusive work of the Department of Navigation and Oceanography of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, ignores the issue of sovereignty altogether and goes straight for ascertaining the share of littoral states in the ownership of the body of water.

In that context, Iran, with the shortest coastline on the sea, ends up with the smallest share, just around 11 percent.

However, sovereignty and ownership are two different concepts.

You may own an apartment in Paris and be recognized as proprietor. However, the sovereignty of the area in which your apartment is located belongs to the French Republic. Several Scottish islands are owned by individuals but are still under British sovereignty.

The relationship between sovereignty and ownership comes in numerous forms. The entire state of the Vatican is sovereign but located in the middle of the Italian capital Rome and subject to its municipal rules. The Republic of San Marino, on the Italian coastline, has a similar status while Monaco’s real estate is 80 percent owned by foreigners without the princely family losing their sovereignty. Andorra is owned by Andorrans but under joint French and Spanish sovereignty. Initially, the Congo was the private property of Leopold I, the Belgian King, who, in the absence of a sovereign status, treated the vast territory as he pleased.

Sovereignty could also be exercised long-distance. New Caledonia, in the Pacific Ocean, is under French sovereignty, as are the Falkland Islands under the British, both being thousands of miles away from their respective sovereign authorities. Closer to the Caspian we have the Shah-i-Mardan enclave in Kyrgyzstan that is under the sovereignty of neighboring Uzbekistan to the west.

To make sure that this is an exclusively Russian document, the text uses Russian terminology, measurements and even pseudo-legalistic shibboleths instead of internationally recognized concepts, terms and references codified in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

What is the good of ownership, and property rights, if we do not know which sovereign authority shall enforce them?

Because this is a Russian text, in the preparation of which other littoral states played no part, the implication may be that Russia is the sole sovereign power, and thus ultimate arbiter of disputes in the Caspian Sea. If that assumption is correct, we may conclude that Russia has acquired a colonial advantage that it could not obtain even when Iran was weak, famine-stricken and war-broken under the Qajar Dynasty.

With this text, Russia secures two other advantages.

First, it gains control of pipelines transiting the Caspian Basin’s immense oil and gas reserves to world markets, notably Europe. That would push Iran, which is the economic route for those pipelines, out of competition. Russia will retain its principal card in facing Western powers.

Russia, already the only significant military force in the Caspian, will retain its monopoly by forbidding other littoral states to build a military presence with the help of non-littoral allies.

In trying to push this text through, President Vladimir Putin is acting like a tactician seeking quick advantage even though that may produce a strategic loss. Shaken by the consequences of their childish adventures, the mullahs of Tehran may swallow this Russian brew. However, I doubt that any future Iranian government worth its salt would not spit it out.

(Gatestone Institute)

Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist forAsharq Al-Awsat since 1987. He is the Chairman of Gatestone Europe.

This article was originally published by Asharq al-Awsat and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.

A mysterious criminal dies a mysterious death

By: Daniel Greenfield

New York City’s Civic Center is a maze of courts, prisons, and offices that begins where Chinatown ends; past relics like a 17th century Jewish cemetery and an 1819 seaman’s church. Park Row is barricaded and blocked off by the brutalist infrastructure of One Police Plaza (which contains the remnants of a British prison used to house American prisoners during the Revolutionary War). Surrounding it are massive federal courthouses in front of whose facades the various important malefactors you see on the evening news are photographed, followed by the neoclassical façade of the New York County Supreme Court.

The placement of these buildings in what used to be the Five Points, New York City’s worst and most violent criminal slum run by gangs who made their own laws, where police never ventured, is not an accident. Nor is it an accident that these buildings blocked off the slum area from nearby Wall Street.

The massive gray and brown towers of Civic Center make a statement about the might of the law.

The Metropolitan Correctional Center is the most obscure of the Civic Center buildings (except to its inmates and their families), its brutalist mass huddling in a blockaded zone, even as it has housed countless famous inmates from John Gotti to Bernie Madoff, from the Blind Sheikh to El Chapo.

New York’s Alcatraz skyscraper has hosted some of the most dangerous and infamous criminals in the world, and its security is as painfully tight as its slitted windows. MCC inmates are bound for one of the federal courts in Civic Center. Some of them will testify. Many only reluctantly. And some of them will be the targets of international gangs, terror groups and crime families who don’t want them testifying.

Somebody did not want the inmate in a cell on one of the top floors of the MCC testifying, even though the job of MCC personnel isn’t just to lock them up, but to keep them from dying. Before Jeffrey Epstein, Mafia kingpins, drug lords and terrorists had come and gone. A helicopter rescue operation had failed.

And then Epstein had somehow managed to impossibly hang himself in his cell.

Epstein was in MCC’s Special Housing Unit. A former warden described the security in SHU or the “hole” or “box” as only second to those of supermax prisons. Inmates eat and shower in their cells. Their hands are cuffed behind their backs whenever they step outside. No objects that can be used to harm anyone fall into their hands. They’re not allowed to make physical contact with even their own lawyers.

According to a former MCC inmate, suicide watch inmates are supposed to wear straitjackets. The sheets are paper thin, the ceiling is 9 feet high and there’s nothing to attach a rope to.

But Jeffrey Epstein has a long history of being able to do what he wasn’t allowed to do in prison.

Instead of going to prison, after his original conviction, he spent time in the Palm Beach Stockade, checking himself out to go to his office, where he hired Palm Beach Sheriff’s Deputies to act as his security, referring to him as client, and keeping watch as women and girls went into his office.

“I am authorizing that his cell door be left unlocked,” a county supervisor had written back in Florida.

In MCC, someone had authorized that Epstein be left alone in his cell while he died.

MCC was supposed to be different. After suborning the justice systems of Florida, New Mexico, and New York, not to mention the Federal system, he was finally going to get what was coming to him.

And he did. Just not by way of the justice system.

If you believe the official story, the night Jeffrey managed to hang his body in a cell designed to prevent any of the prisoners from doing that, his fellow inmate was removed, in CNN’s words, “for reasons unknown”, and the guards weren’t monitoring him every 30 minutes as they were supposed to.

For reasons unknown.

Despite allegedly trying to commit suicide a few weeks ago, he was taken off suicide watch, again, where he would have been monitored in a special cell every 15 minutes for… reasons unknown.

Reasons unknown ought to be Epstein’s epitaph. He wasn’t prosecuted by Florida or the Feds for raping numerous girls for reasons unknown. The signatures that allowed him to leave prison whenever he wanted to are wrong for reasons unknown. Three states failed to register him as a level 3 sex offender for reasons unknown. And now, security in New York’s Alcatraz failed… for reasons unknown.

Except we do know the reasons.

Jeffrey Epstein enjoyed a vast amount of influence and discretion because of his connections. Wealthy men and women have gone to prison and even passed through MCC before. Epstein’s money and influence both came from sources that have yet to be sufficiently nailed down. And now never will be.

Isn’t that convenient?

But don’t worry. There will be investigations. In Palm Beach, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, has promised to investigate how Epstein was able to use his stockade as a hotel and his deputies as private security even though the logs have been destroyed.

There are investigations in New York City and you can bet they’ll be every bit as thorough and useless.

And they will include some variation of, “For reasons unknown.”

Epstein’s death was perfectly timed. His death ends the trial and buries all the remaining grand jury evidence in a file cabinet somewhere in Civic Center. And good luck ever getting to that cabinet.

Various authorities have promised to dig into the circumstances of his death and his crimes. But with Epstein gone, there will be no legal limits on them and no way to know where the truth lies. They can and will be able to present whatever claims and documents they like to the public. The lawyers for the victims will work to recover funds from the estate. But the truth has passed beyond recovery.

The truth died on the top of a prison skyscraper whose administration and guards flagrantly violated their own rules, removing Epstein from suicide watch six days after a supposed suicide attempt, leaving him alone in his cell, and failing to check on him until it was too late. Blame will be passed around. Conspiracy theorists will cash in on it for years. And the questions will remain unanswered.

Who could possibly penetrate Manhattan’s most secure detention facility? Who had the political influence to manipulate events within MCC’s walls? Who could do what Chapo’s confederates couldn’t?

These questions join others, such as who in the DOJ had allegedly told Alexander Acosta that Epstein was protected by intelligence figures, and who had corrupted the justice systems of three states?

The answers are gone, but the damage to our political system will linger.

What little we can know is that Epstein’s political connections extended far beyond Palm Beach. At the height of his power, Epstein enjoyed the patronage of figures in the federal government. And now, when he had been brought down in an attack on a federal official, he died in federal custody.

Epstein had become collateral damage in an attempt to inflict glancing harm on President Trump. The campaign failed to accomplish much of anything, but it got Epstein on track to an actual trial.

A trial that will never happen now.

Someone at the federal level had protected Epstein. And someone at the federal level may have decided that he was better off dead. It would have taken a political network with access to career officials in the DOJ to have protected and killed Epstein. We only know of one political network within the federal government linked to a political family closely tied to Jeffrey Epstein. Their name begins with a C.

But that’s speculation.

The Clinton network has faded since its main two figures lost any hope of running the government. And there are other networks whose key figures aren’t as famous or easy to name and define.

The swamp is deep and dark. And there are creatures lurking within it whom very few know.

Perhaps Jeffrey Epstein did die by his own hand. And a chain of coincidences enabled it to happen.

Anyone can come up with conspiracy theories. But there is no escaping the fact that Epstein’s career was one long conspiracy of mysterious money, a private island, the subversion of justice systems in three states, and the federal system, followed by a death that should have been impossible.

A corrupt system enabled Jeffrey Epstein to abuse numerous girls. And now a corrupt system, somewhere in the shadowy maze of Civic Center, has drawn a final curtain over his death.

If you stand in an alley looking up at the dingy walls of the MCC, you can peer through the tiny black slits of its windows looking for answers. But the only thing behind the MCC’s windows is darkness.

             (Front Page Mag)

(Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism)