The Right of "No-Return"

Is the Israel escape hatch from consequences really so special? Probably not. But the anger over Tom Alexandrovich is partially about a far more malignant absurdity.

It was 1997, and the murder shocked Maryland.

From CBS News . . .

High school student Samuel Sheinbein and his friend targeted 19-year-old Alfredo Tello Jr. Sheinbein used a stun gun on his victim inside a vacant home in Aspen Hill, then sawed off his arms and legs and wrapped the remaining body parts in trash bags.

"He was six foot tall. Six foot tall but they couldn't tell because his legs were cut off," said Eliette Ramos, the victim's mother.

Try living with that image for the rest of your life.

But what made the situation worse, as if it could be, was that this was no spur of the moment action.

"Up to that point in time, there is nothing that touches the horror of this particular case," Montgomery County State's Attorney John McCarthy said. "We actually obtained a document we called the recipe for murder where he wrote out all the details of the crime he was about to commit and what he needed to gather before he committed the crime."

Sheinbein’s alleged accomplice would hang himself in the jail before he faced trial, but Sheinbein? Well, that’s what made this story truly “special.”

Sheinbein's father arranged for him to flee to Israel, where an international fight ensued to get him back.

The fight was not successful. Sheinbein would remain in Israel, where he would be tried in an Israeli court and sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. Though his story doesn’t end that happily as well.

He was nearing his release date when, over the weekend, he somehow obtained a gun and was killed in a wild shootout with guards.

McCarthy believes he did it because he was depressed and wanted to die but couldn't bring himself to commit suicide.

Turns out he was an even bigger coward than his “friend.”

So why do I tell you about Sheinbein?

Because it was and is hardly an isolated incident.

From Jacobin magazine . . .

The “right of return” is a recognized human right of everyone to return to the country they are from.

Now the difference with Israel is that any Jew anywhere can “return” to Israel even if they are not from there and their families have never lived there and even if they were never ethnically or racially Jewish, but simply converted to Judaism.

Now what does this have to do with Sheinbein?

He was an American. His family were Americans, who lived and worked here in America. He fled to Israel, and because he had “the right of return,” Israel refused to send him back.

Back to the Jacobin article, for a brief time and under a more sane prime minister, the “right of return” had limits.

The brief government of the second Israeli prime minister, Moshe Sharett, stipulated in a 1954 amendment to the Law of Return that the once “unlimited” right of Jews to become citizens of the Israeli state should exclude persons “with a criminal past, likely to endanger public welfare.”

I suspect it was “brief” because it was a bit saner.

But in 1978 . . .

Prime Minister Menachem Begin, out of concern that Jewish defendants could face antisemitism abroad, legislated against extraditions in favor of Jews having a right to be tried in Israeli courts instead.

Ah, yes, the old “anti-semitism” excuse, because we all remember the late 1970s as a hotbed of Jew hatred.🙄

But Sheinbein’s case was an awakening . . .

The case prompted a change in Israeli extradition law in 2005, undoing the obvious laxity of the 1978 legislation, so that a case so clear-cut as Sheinbein’s could not be repeated.

Actually, my guess is it had to do with something far more calculating. From an Israeli source . . .

The legal wrangling caused outrage in the US, and Congress even threatened to withhold aid from Israel due to its intransigence.

Cha-ching. But whatever gets the job done.

So in theory, things changed.

I said “in theory.”

This is a CBS article from roughly six years ago.

A CBS News investigation has found that many accused American pedophiles flee to Israel, and bringing them to justice can be difficult.

Jewish Community Watch (JCW), an American organization that tracks accused pedophiles, has been trying for years to find Karow and help bring him to justice.

JCW says Karow and other wanted men and women have been able to exploit a right known as the Law of Return, whereby any Jewish person can move to Israel and automatically gain citizenship.

Since the small organization started tracking accused pedophiles in 2014, it says more than 60 have fled from the U.S. to Israel. Given its limited resources to identify these individuals, JCW says the actual number is likely much larger.

It looks like Epstein himself nearly exploited this little loophole, when he fled to Israel, only returning when he got a sweetheart plea deal.

And that brings us to the recent blowup over an “alleged” Israeli pervert who got caught up in a sting operation in Las Vegas . . .

Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, 38, was arrested earlier this month and is facing a felony charge of luring a child with a computer for a sex act, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said Friday. He has since been released from custody after posting a $10,000 bail, court records show.

Alexandrovich was one of eight people arrested in the past two weeks as a result of the operation, police said.

A lot of people have asked why no one took his passport, why they let him leave the country, why they let him out on bail at all given that he was a known flight risk, being from another country.

And it’s not as if no one was aware of where Alexandrovich was from and who he was.

Now was this all true about his meeting with the NSA and the “Bureau”? 🤷‍♀️ I can’t find anything one way or the other. And what’s the first thing a connected foreign person does when caught doing something illegal in the US? They demand to speak with their embassy.

None of this really strikes me as extraordinary, and everyone here knows how I feel about Israel.

But then things started to get interesting.

The Trump appointee who serves as the acting attorney general for the District of Nevada laid Alexandrovich’s escape at the feet of a “liberal” DA and state court judge.

And then everyone learned a little more about Chattah, and she immediately deleted a Twitter account she had set up when she was running for Nevada state AG.

Why?

If that’s not yikes enough, here is her campaign video.

I think I figured out why she was pointing away from herself.

She thought everyone would, reasonably, blame her, given that her allegiances are somewhat in question.

But she was not the one left in charge of the case. The local DA was. And he claims nothing was done differently . . .

Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson, whose office has jurisdiction over Las Vegas and Henderson, called the situation “standard” in comments, to the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Tuesday.

Reuters was unable to reach Wolfson or a representative of his office. But during his interview with the newspaper he said that the “standard bail for this charge was $10,000, so anybody, upon being booked on that case, can post that bail and get released with no conditions, and that’s what happened in this case.” . . .

Under Nevada law, Alexandrovich was able to post bond and be released prior to seeing any judge, and no restrictions were placed on his release, according to a report from 8 News Now, in Las Vegas.

Now I’m going to tell you something very horrific: that may well be the truth of it. The system is what it is. Alexandrovich was not an American citizen. There may have been no way of demanding his passport. And while the crime may carry a hefty sentence (one to ten years in jail under Nevada law), he attempted to do something more than he did something.

I can see how he might quietly slip through the cracks, especially if he had the connections to lawyer up, which he did, given that one of his lawyers was appointed to the Homeland Security Council by Donald Trump, and the locals flatout didn’t want to deal with it when they had enough on their plates.

I really doubt that Israel is handing him back, given his position. But, admittedly, that would not be that unusual. Plenty of countries are reluctant to turn over their own for prosecution in other countries.

So Alexandrovich’s case is more about the weaknesses in our own system than about Israel, but . . . it reminds people of two malignant absurdities that are unique to Israel.

If you’re an American Catholic and you flee to Italy, Italy is not going to protect you. If you’re an American Buddhist and you flee to Thailand, the Thai government is not going to protect you. If you’re not already a Chinese citizen, just an American citizen of Chinese descent, and you flee to China, China is not going to protect you.

However, if you’re an American Jew and you flee to Israel, you have the right of return, and Israel may very well protect you.

In the case of Samuel Sheinbein above, the victim’s mother summed up the situation perfectly in an op-ed in the Washington Post in 1999.

Samuel Sheinbein's escape to Israel meant that he could be tried as a juvenile -- cutting his possible jail time by three-fourths -- live in a prison complex more akin to a college campus, receive weekend passes to spend with his family and have face-to-face visitors while in prison. . . .

After the Holocaust, Jewish and human rights organizations around the world sought Nazi war criminals to bring them to justice for their horrendous crimes. Now the tables are turned: Samuel Sheinbein is an American citizen, his victim was an American citizen, his alleged crime was horrendous and was committed on U.S. soil. How can there be any justice or any sense in this situation?

There can’t be. That’s the answer.

And that leads to the second far more malignant absurdity and the context for the growing anger about all perceived or real injustices when it comes to Israel, Israelis, and Zionism in general.

Juxtapose the following . . .

And this . . .

And this . . .

Alongside this . . .

I say we send Lindsay Graham to Gaza for a while. Don’t worry. Even if the starving locals mistake him for a pig in a suit, they don’t do pork. Well at least the Muslims. He might want to stay away from starving Christians.

Yes, that’s cruel. No, I don’t care.

Megyn Kelly has recently gone through a little bit of a turn, though I have questions about how real it is.

Click on the link if you like. The gist is this: some pro-Israel people got upset at Megyn Kelly, supposedly, because she’s not giving Israel 100 percent glowing coverage because she’s independent.

Now why do I think this turn is more performative than heartfelt?

Eighteen thousand dead children versus roughly seven hundred. I don’t think the Palestinians have to try that hard. In fact, I think you’re seeing only a fraction of the devastation.

The IDF has admitted that 83 percent of the casualties are civilian, and roughly 70 percent of the civilian infrastructure has been leveled, and thousands of aid trucks are being held up at the border while the IDF runs “aid” sites where they shoot at civilians who are already starving. But the real problem is the algorithms that let this “misinformation” get about. So we must censor those videos and kill even more people more quickly to get the war over with.

Because it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

But Ms. Megyn is willing to entertain MTG because, well, we all know. Megyn Kelly is the Bari Weiss of the right, and she’s trying to save her party from the rising tide of anger.

Of course, so far, she hasn’t gone quite as far as Bari Weiss, though to be fair Ms. Weiss has a whole country to save, and it isn’t this one.

You see, recently the New York Times got brave and committed an act of journalism, mainly because it had to. The pictures were too widespread to ignore.

And Bari Weiss’s publication was right there . . .

Now commonsense question for you: who is the first to die in a famine? The old, the young, and the already sick (i.e., those with cystic fibrosis or “other serious ailments”). As for rickets . . .

So children who are starving also have a condition caused by nutritional deficiencies.

But the absolute worst example?

Yup, he might have died of hunger, but first Israel tried to blow him up, so you know, it doesn’t really count that he starved to death. Those lying, sloppy, antisemitic bastards at the NYT didn’t tell you that, did they?

And it is sociopathic. It’s all sociopathic.

And people understand it’s sociopathic. The cognitive dissonance is jarring.

So what does that have to do with Alexandrovich and the “right of no-return”?

Alexandrovich was one more way our government seemed to choose Israel over its own citizens.

He was one more straw on the camel’s back.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of cracking.

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I haven’t been watching the calendar well, so I just realized that next weekend is Labor Day. I’ve got some stuff to catch up on, and we’re hoping to get out of town for a four-day weekend. So there may or may not be a Friday and Saturday post.

I know, what will you do without me, besides live in blissful ignorance?