After Hamas raped, tortured, burned, kidnapped, and murdered innocent Israelis on October 7, the worst genocidal act against Jews since the Holocaust, it is astonishing to see how so much of the world has turned to blame the victims and reignite the historic scourge of anti-Semitism.
Are you perplexed by the pro-Hamas demonstrations and the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, the democratically elected prime minister of the State of Israel, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s former defense minister, and Mohammed Al Dief, a leading Hamas official, who has been dead for four months? Let me offer a few thoughts.
Demonstrations
Pro-Hamas and anti-Jewish demonstrations are meant to terrorize, muzzle and isolate anyone who is Jewish or who supports Israel. It’s a pretense of unearned power. Some of those who join in — particularly in places like the UK — have been deliberately gaslit by the media. The BBC comes to mind, but it is an international phenomenon. On campuses, some of the same mind distortions by faculty who equate all the troubles of the world on fantastical notions of white oppression and “colonization,” ignore the fact that their safe, padded perches were — like all the technological advances of the modern age which improved the lives of everyone on earth — products of the very people and cultures they attack. The press and faculty who play such an important and destructive role are, in my view, people with chaotic minds, and such people inexorably work to recreate a world as chaotic as the one in their own psyches. In places like London where these have not been kept in check by law enforcement, they grow and become ever more lawless. Ignoring rational laws about harassment, destruction of property, and assault by mobs only encourages more of it. In places like Calgary which doesn’t allow this, they quickly cease as unproductive.
Regardless of the size and endurance of these mass thuggish displays, they are not winning where it counts — at the ballot boxes. Instead, they are provoking ever stronger enmity almost everywhere. As for the campus outbursts, weak administrations have only begun to taste the bitter gall coming their way as donors flee, top students apply elsewhere, and a new national administration will certainly give them a jolt when federal funding is sharply reduced and an effective Justice Department starts enforcing civil rights laws on the books, which the current administration has steadfastly ignored.
The ICC
The ICC is an international tribunal in the Hague with authority to prosecute individuals in signatory states for war crimes and genocide. It was created in 1998 by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Neither the U.S. nor Israel is a signatory to this agreement. It does not have universal territorial jurisdiction. Like most international organizations, it has exceeded its authority and, indeed, become organs of anti-Western, anti-democratic states. The ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, who issued the arrest warrants, for example “is an Ahmadiyya Muslim who focuses on missionary work to spread Islam and considers the Qur’an the ultimate and unalterable word of God.” He has faced allegations of sexual misconduct, and his prior legal work included representing William Ruto, the Kenyan vice president who killed 1200 in post-election violence. He was “appointed earlier for his roles in the UN by none other than Antonio Guterres — a world-renowned racist and anti-Semite and puppet of the Islamic Republic.”
Under the established definition of genocide, there is no possible interpretation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Take it from those of us who have prosecuted people for participating in genocide:
[quote] Last month, protesters in our nation’s capital burned American flags and defaced memorials, including with pro-Hamas slogans, while asserting that Israel is committing genocide — and that it is doing so with American complicity.
These accusations have spread on America’s campuses and elsewhere since Israeli forces commenced their defensive response last year to the murderous, indeed genocidal, rampage committed in Israel on Oct. 7 by Hamas. [snip]
The six colleagues who join me in writing this essay — Bruce J. Einhorn, Kathleen N. Coleman, Clarice R. Feldman, Joel K. Greenberg, Jeffrey N. Mausner, and Philip L. Sunshine — worked as U.S. federal prosecutors of perpetrators of Nazi genocide who fled to this country after the war. {snip]
In our work at the U.S. Department of Justice as prosecutors of Hitler’s henchmen, we meticulously investigated acts of genocide — and then we proved them in court. We feel impelled to declare that any fair review of the verifiable, publicly available facts shows that the accusation of genocide against Israel is false and indeed outrageous.
Simply put, we have seen no evidence of Israeli commission of genocide, and there is much evidence that disproves that charge — including the recent report that, since October, Israel has facilitated the entry of more than 870 metric tons of food and other humanitarian aid to Gaza’s two million inhabitants. [snip]
Genocide is defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) as killing and other specified acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Israel has targeted only Hamas and its terrorist group partners, not the civilian population of Gaza. Hamas is not a national, ethnical, racial or religious group; it is a designated terrorist organization that itself engages in genocidal acts.
Israel has, in fact, done more than any other military has ever done to minimize civilian casualties during large-scale urban warfare, even sacrificing the lives of many of its own soldiers in the process. [snip]
We are not alone in rejecting the false genocide accusation. For example, the German government, which is well familiar, of course, with the genocide committed by a prior German government in murdering millions of Jews and Roma, has declared that the accusation of Israeli genocide “has no basis in fact” and that Berlin “decisively and expressly rejects” it. The United States government too has rejected the claim.
Unfortunately, many voices nonetheless remain arrayed against Israel, and they have frequently overwhelmed… the analyses of qualified experts who have subjected the allegation to careful analysis and have found it wanting. [snip]
Israel and other signatories of the Genocide Convention have a legal obligation to stop Hamas’s genocidal actions; Article I of the Convention obligates all nations not just to refrain from committing genocide, but also “to prevent and to punish” that crime. That is exactly what Israel is doing… [snip]
The core truth is that the genocidal frenzy of killing, rape, torture, kidnapping, and mutilation that Hamas launched in Israel on Oct. 7 were crimes of monstrous evil that every American should stand against.
The November 21 public statement by three ICC Pre-Trial Chambers judges announced, without releasing, their decision to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and former Defense Minister in connection with Israel’s defensive military response to the grisly October 7 massacre of more than a thousand people in Israel perpetrated principally by Hamas, the openly genocidal de facto governing authority in Gaza. Unfortunately, the statement raises more questions than it answers, especially regarding the nature and reliability of the largely undisclosed evidence on which their decision is based.
Independent analyses, including those submitted to the judges and made public in August by the High Level Military Group and separately by the U.K. Lawyers for Israel organization, persuasively demonstrated that the publicly stated factual conclusions undergirding ICC Prosecutor Khan’s request for the issuance of arrest warrants were incorrect. In addition, although the amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief that I submitted the same month asked the judges to obtain explanations from Prosecutor Khan regarding numerous extremely serious irregularities and double standards evident in his office’s investigation and its request for issuance of arrest warrants (additional such deficiencies were identified in an important amicus brief subsequently submitted by U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham), the judges seem to have addressed none of them — precisely as Prosecutor Khan’s August 23 “responsive” brief had, quite outrageously, urged them to do. In effect, Mr. Khan asked that his office be permitted to avoid timely accountability for its official actions. Now the judges appear to have granted his unprofessional request.
As someone who, in my former official capacity at the U.S. Department of Justice (USDOJ), met several times with Mr. Khan in 2022-23, had high hopes for the success of his leadership, and participated in USDOJ’s efforts to assist his office’s investigations as authorized by Congress, it is enormously disappointing to see that his office’s actions in the Gaza matter and their unfortunate ratification by a three-judge panel have critically undermined the International Criminal Court’s credibility. Credibility, bolstered by appropriate transparency that is lacking in this instance, is indispensable to achieving the crucial and noble goal of the ICC, as set forth in the Preamble of its governing statute, “to guarantee lasting respect for and the enforcement of international justice.” Ironically, the handling of this matter to date instead serves the interests of those who have no regard for accepted principles of international justice and wish to see the Court fail as an institution.
Mosab Hasan Yosef, son of a founding member of Hamas who regularly exposes the lies about the organization, was clear about the bias expressed in this absurd action by the ICC’s Khan:
- The ICC issued an arrest warrant for the corpse of Muhammad Al Dief and did nothing about Hamas leaders who have been traveling freely between Qatar and Turkey.
- Hamas smuggles weapons using humanitarian aid trucks.
- Israel does everything within its ability to minimize the civilian casualties in Gaza, and Hamas does everything within its ability to maximize the civilian deaths.
- Hamas statistics are false and the humanitarian organizations depend on Hamas’s lies.
- The ICC is a corrupt organization working around the clock to pressure Israel to surrender.
- The Divided Nations failed to condemn Hamas under the Chinese and Russian pressure, giving terrorists a lifeline.
- Pressuring Israel to ceasefire will keep Hamas in power, and such a move will keep the vicious cycle of violence for eternity.
It does nothing about Turkey’s slaughter of the Kurds or the fact that it just cut off water and electricity to drought-parched Kurds, nothing about the genocide against the Yazidis, 500,000 of whom have been murdered by ISIS.
Leaders of Israel, Argentina, Hungary, and Czechia have spoken out against the ICC action as has party leader Geert Wilders of the Netherlands. Czechia has gone so far as to initiate the process of suspending their country’s participation in the ICC. Others like Jordan, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ireland, and Spain are A-OK with this. Pick your allies.
Netanyahu compared the warrants with the false accusations against Alfred Dreyfus, dismissing as false accusations of genocide:
“…despite the fact that we do everything in our power to avoid civilian casualties[snip]. The court in The Hague accuses us of a deliberate policy of starvation even though we supplied Gaza with 700,000 tons of food to feed its people. That amounts to 3,200 calories per day for every man, woman, and child in Gaza. These supplies are regularly looted by Hamas terrorists, who deprive their people of much-needed food. Just in the past few weeks, Israel facilitated the vaccination of 97% of Gaza’s population against polio. Yet, the court accuses us of genocide, what in God’s name are they talking about in The Hague? The truth is simple: no war is more just that the war Israel is waging I Gaza after Hamas attacked us unprovoked, launching the worst massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The decision to issue an arrest warrant …was made by a rogue prosecutor attempting to escape sexual harassment charges and by biased judges motivated by anti-Semitic hatred against the one and only Jewish state. These judges have done nothing — absolutely nothing — against the real war crimes committed by the dictatorships in Iran, Syria and Yemen, where millions have been murdered or uprooted. Instead, they falsely accuse the one democracy in the Middle East – Israel — thereby endangering the right of all democracies to defend themselves against murderers, terrorists, and tyrants.
I think the ICC just spelled its own demise by this outrageous effort. The incoming National Security advisor Michael Waltz indicates that both the ICC and UN can expect a strong response.
