So it’s a crime now to defend yourself against fascist violence? Some of the imperious prosecutors of the International Criminal Court (ICC) seem to think so. Just 226 days after the Jews of southern Israel were subjected to the worst act of anti-Semitic slaughter since the Holocaust, the chief prosecutor of the ICC says he’s seeking arrest warrants for Israeli officials. The preening overlord of international law says he has ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe they’ve committed crimes against humanity. Behold the great moral inversion of our times: the victims of a crime against humanity are themselves suspected of crimes against humanity. The targets of fascism are treated as fascists. Rarely has the moral decomposition and blind arrogance of globalist institutions been so graphically illustrated.
This is the news that Karim Khan has applied for arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant. He also wants arrest warrants for Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar. He says all have possibly committed war crimes. In Israel’s case, there has been questionable military activity ‘from at least 8 October 2023’, he says. One of his examples is Israel’s closing of the Kerem Shalom and Erez border crossings that link the Gaza Strip to Israel on 8 October, ‘for extended periods’. Yes, that’s because the day before an army of anti-Semites crossed the border and raped women, murdered children, slit the throats of migrant workers and massacred entire families. Are the people at the ICC okay? Name me one state on Earth – one – that would not secure its borders in the aftermath of such a devastating experience of racist barbarism.
The moral equivalence in Khan’s statement is especially galling. To speak of Hamas and Israel in the same breath, to treat them as equally suspect, is to abandon entirely the fundamentals of morality and even Enlightenment. There is no equivalence between Hamas’s intentional targeting of civilians on the basis of their race and Israel’s subsequent war on Hamas in Gaza. In the former, civilians – let’s say it: Jews – were sought out for murder. In the latter, as with every war in history, civilians are tragically dying in the violent maelstrom. The former was a war crime, the latter is war. The former was a villainous transgression of the norms of conflict, the latter was a response to that transgression. That the ICC seems unable to distinguish between war and war crimes, between democracy and terror, between the Jewish State and a movement devoted to the mass murder of Jews, is truly alarming.
The consequence of the seeking of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders will be to embolden Hamas. Anyone who thinks this is a fair development because it targets both sides in the war is delusional. For Hamas, the annoyance of being looked upon as criminals by the ICC will be outweighed, incalculably, by the moral gain of warrants being sought for Netanyahu and Gallant. For Hamas, the burden of being tried for crimes against humanity – a trial that will probably never take place – pales into insignificance in comparison with the propaganda win of seeing Israel frogmarched before the world as a potential war criminal. Indeed, already the Israelophobic wing of the influencer set – which is pretty much all of it – is buzzing with bigoted triumphalism over the possible arrest of Netanyahu. What do you think Mr Sinwar is thinking in whatever dank tunnel he’s holed up in: ‘Oh no, I might have to go to The Hague’ or ‘Yes, another blow to the Jews’ moral authority’? We all know.
The most nauseating thing about today’s development is the depiction of it as a great blow for equality and diversity. Globetrotting barrister Amal Clooney, who was on the Panel of Experts who advised Karim Khan on the Israel-Hamas matter, has issued a most gauche and grandstanding statement. She brags about the ‘diverse personal backgrounds’ of the panel members. She describes how she and her fellow brilliant minds ‘unanimously conclud[ed]’ that there are reasonable grounds to think Israeli officials have committed war crimes. I can’t be the only person wondering who the hell these people think they are. Who died and made them God? What earthly right do they have to meddle in a sovereign state’s military pursuit of a terror movement that murdered more than a thousand people? They pose as woke but they’re the Judge Dredds of global affairs, stamping their vain writ on the little peoples of faraway warring nations.
The Clooney vision of the ICC and its brainy advisers as gallant defenders of decency is a grotesque lie. Clooney, in her statement, says ‘I will never accept that one child’s life has less value than another’s’. Big words from a barrister who’s advising prosecutors for a court that is notoriously selective in which wars it investigates and which wars it leaves alone. So Israel is threatened with being dragged to The Hague, but Bashar al-Assad was not, despite overseeing a war that killed hundreds of thousands. Neither were Saudi leaders over their killings in Yemen. And this isn’t to mention Western leaders – in the US, Britain, France – whose warmongering has caused far greater death and destruction in the Middle East than Israel ever has. I would really like to ask all those legal eagles why killings by the Jewish State seem to cause them greater angst than killings by ‘white’ states.
The ICC is infamous for its disproportionate targeting of the leaders of black Africa. To see a map of ICC investigations is to behold neo-imperialism in all its shameless pomposity. Most of its investigations have been in Africa, with a smattering in Latin America and Asia. No wonder the African Union has advised African states to cut ties with the ICC on the basis that it is a ‘neo-colonial force seeking to further empower Western political… interests in Africa’. That ‘anti-racist’ leftists are now cheering a court, riddled with racist double standards, because it has lumped the Jews in with the blacks is a testament to how fried their brains have become as a result of Israelophobia. Even the neo-colonial powers of the postwar globalist order are treated as allies by the woke left, as ‘good guys’, if they make moves against Evil Israel.
There’s a special cruelty to the seeking of arrest warrants against the Jewish State. The ICC has its origins in the postwar discussion about the need for ‘international law’ to deal with criminals like the Nazis. So grave were the crimes of fascism against the Jews that new legal systems are needed to punish such crimes, the argument went. Eventually, the ICC emerged. Fast forward to 2024 and this court that was founded on the principle that fascistic murder must never again go unpunished now threatens to punish a state whose only crime was to fight back against fascistic murderers. The postwar ideal of protecting the likes of the Jews is now weaponised against the Jews. The seeking of arrest warrants against Israel is a grotesque betrayal of the promises and principles of the entire postwar era. It is the self-negation of everything the modern, liberal West claims to represent.
I see it as a judicial pogrom, to go alongside the militant pogrom launched by Hamas and the intellectual pogrom pursued by Hamas’s apologists in the West. Militarily, politically and now legally, the Jewish State is under attack. We are fast reaching a situation where it isn’t only Israel’s military actions that are viewed as crimes against humanity but Israel itself. The Jewish homeland itself is this close to being redefined as a crime. This should be intolerable to anyone who believes in nationhood, self-determination and the equal right of Jews to go after the armies that butcher their people. Screw the ICC. It should enjoy no jurisdiction over Israel or any other independent nation.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
The moral equivalence in Khan’s statement is especially galling. To speak of Hamas and Israel in the same breath, to treat them as equally suspect, is to abandon entirely the fundamentals of morality and even Enlightenment. There is no equivalence between Hamas’s intentional targeting of civilians on the basis of their race and Israel’s subsequent war on Hamas in Gaza. In the former, civilians – let’s say it: Jews – were sought out for murder. In the latter, as with every war in history, civilians are tragically dying in the violent maelstrom. The former was a war crime, the latter is war. The former was a villainous transgression of the norms of conflict, the latter was a response to that transgression. That the ICC seems unable to distinguish between war and war crimes, between democracy and terror, between the Jewish State and a movement devoted to the mass murder of Jews, is truly alarming.
The consequence of the seeking of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders will be to embolden Hamas. Anyone who thinks this is a fair development because it targets both sides in the war is delusional. For Hamas, the annoyance of being looked upon as criminals by the ICC will be outweighed, incalculably, by the moral gain of warrants being sought for Netanyahu and Gallant. For Hamas, the burden of being tried for crimes against humanity – a trial that will probably never take place – pales into insignificance in comparison with the propaganda win of seeing Israel frogmarched before the world as a potential war criminal. Indeed, already the Israelophobic wing of the influencer set – which is pretty much all of it – is buzzing with bigoted triumphalism over the possible arrest of Netanyahu. What do you think Mr Sinwar is thinking in whatever dank tunnel he’s holed up in: ‘Oh no, I might have to go to The Hague’ or ‘Yes, another blow to the Jews’ moral authority’? We all know.
The most nauseating thing about today’s development is the depiction of it as a great blow for equality and diversity. Globetrotting barrister Amal Clooney, who was on the Panel of Experts who advised Karim Khan on the Israel-Hamas matter, has issued a most gauche and grandstanding statement. She brags about the ‘diverse personal backgrounds’ of the panel members. She describes how she and her fellow brilliant minds ‘unanimously conclud[ed]’ that there are reasonable grounds to think Israeli officials have committed war crimes. I can’t be the only person wondering who the hell these people think they are. Who died and made them God? What earthly right do they have to meddle in a sovereign state’s military pursuit of a terror movement that murdered more than a thousand people? They pose as woke but they’re the Judge Dredds of global affairs, stamping their vain writ on the little peoples of faraway warring nations.
The Clooney vision of the ICC and its brainy advisers as gallant defenders of decency is a grotesque lie. Clooney, in her statement, says ‘I will never accept that one child’s life has less value than another’s’. Big words from a barrister who’s advising prosecutors for a court that is notoriously selective in which wars it investigates and which wars it leaves alone. So Israel is threatened with being dragged to The Hague, but Bashar al-Assad was not, despite overseeing a war that killed hundreds of thousands. Neither were Saudi leaders over their killings in Yemen. And this isn’t to mention Western leaders – in the US, Britain, France – whose warmongering has caused far greater death and destruction in the Middle East than Israel ever has. I would really like to ask all those legal eagles why killings by the Jewish State seem to cause them greater angst than killings by ‘white’ states.
The ICC is infamous for its disproportionate targeting of the leaders of black Africa. To see a map of ICC investigations is to behold neo-imperialism in all its shameless pomposity. Most of its investigations have been in Africa, with a smattering in Latin America and Asia. No wonder the African Union has advised African states to cut ties with the ICC on the basis that it is a ‘neo-colonial force seeking to further empower Western political… interests in Africa’. That ‘anti-racist’ leftists are now cheering a court, riddled with racist double standards, because it has lumped the Jews in with the blacks is a testament to how fried their brains have become as a result of Israelophobia. Even the neo-colonial powers of the postwar globalist order are treated as allies by the woke left, as ‘good guys’, if they make moves against Evil Israel.
There’s a special cruelty to the seeking of arrest warrants against the Jewish State. The ICC has its origins in the postwar discussion about the need for ‘international law’ to deal with criminals like the Nazis. So grave were the crimes of fascism against the Jews that new legal systems are needed to punish such crimes, the argument went. Eventually, the ICC emerged. Fast forward to 2024 and this court that was founded on the principle that fascistic murder must never again go unpunished now threatens to punish a state whose only crime was to fight back against fascistic murderers. The postwar ideal of protecting the likes of the Jews is now weaponised against the Jews. The seeking of arrest warrants against Israel is a grotesque betrayal of the promises and principles of the entire postwar era. It is the self-negation of everything the modern, liberal West claims to represent.
I see it as a judicial pogrom, to go alongside the militant pogrom launched by Hamas and the intellectual pogrom pursued by Hamas’s apologists in the West. Militarily, politically and now legally, the Jewish State is under attack. We are fast reaching a situation where it isn’t only Israel’s military actions that are viewed as crimes against humanity but Israel itself. The Jewish homeland itself is this close to being redefined as a crime. This should be intolerable to anyone who believes in nationhood, self-determination and the equal right of Jews to go after the armies that butcher their people. Screw the ICC. It should enjoy no jurisdiction over Israel or any other independent nation.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
10 comments:
Fully agree with your statement. The ICC is akin to the WHO, WEF, UN, ISO etc. Personally I would very much like to see NZ (among most other countries) withdraw from these crass, self-proclaimed centres of intelligence and authority. Here you have the WHO Director-General from Ethiopia, where he is accused of causing starvation in Tigray Province, WHERE HE WAS FORMERLY A HEALTH WORKER, demanding the power to declare pandemics or the likelihood of them, anywhere in the world and forcing member countries to follow WHO instructions. Countries must not sign that "Agreement" with WHO. No country should ever give up its sovereignty. The statement from ICC regarding seeking warrants of arrest for Israel's leaders, is blatant example of the arrogance of these organisations. Perhaps Amal Clooney would be more suited to advertising coffee instead of her husband doing it.
There is one thing we should all be able to agree with Benjamin Netanyahu on: Any comparison between Israel's war crimes and those of Hamas is, as the Israeli prime minister put it, "absurd and false" and a "distortion of reality
Here's why:
* Israeli war crimes have been ongoing for more than seven decades, long predating Hamas' creation.
* Israel has kept the Palestinians of Gaza caged into a concentration camp for the past 17 years, denying them connection to the outside world and the essentials of life. Hamas managed to besiege a small part of Israel for one day, on October 7.
* For every Israeli killed by Hamas on October 7, Israel has slaughtered at least 35 times that number of Palestinians. Similar kill-ratios grossly skewed in Israel's favour have been true for decades.
* Israel has killed more than 15,000 Palestinian children since October – and many tens of thousands more Palestinian children are missing under rubble, maimed or orphaned. By early April, Israel had killed a further 114 children in the West Bank and injured 725 more. Hamas killed a total of 33 Israeli children on October 7.
* Israel has laid waste to Gaza's entire health sector. It has bombed its hospitals, and killed, beaten and kidnapped many hundreds of medical personnel. Hamas has not attacked one Israeli hospital.
* Israel has killed more than 100 journalists in Gaza and more than 250 aid workers. It has also kidnapped a further 40 journalists. Most are presumed to have been taken to a secret detention facility where torture is rife. Hamas is reported to have killed one Israeli journalist on October 7, and no known aid workers.
* Israel is actively starving Gaza's population by denying it food, water and aid. That is a power – a genocidal one – Hamas could only ever dream of.
Upgrade to paid
* Israel has been forcibly removing Palestinians from their lands for more than 76 years to build illegal Jewish settlements in their place. Hamas has not been able to ethnically cleanse a single Israeli, nor build a single Palestinian settlement on Israeli land.
* Some 750,000 Palestinians are reported to have been taken hostage and jailed by Israel since 1967 – an unwelcome rite of passage for Palestinian men and boys and one in which torture is routine and military trials ensure a near-100% conviction rate. Until October 7, Hamas had only ever managed to take hostage a handful of the Israeli soldiers whose job is to oppress Palestinians.
* And, while Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by western states, those same western states laud Israel, fund and arm it, and provide it with diplomatic cover, even as the World Court rules that a plausible case has been made it is committing a genocide in Gaza.
Yes, Netanyahu is right. There is no comparison at all.
I don't know how many shekels Brendan O'Neill receives for his pro-Zionist diatribes, but he's earning every one of them.
Yes, it is very ironic that, following the claims made by Jews about what happened to them at the hands of the Nazis, they got an entire international system of governance to ensure "Never again," as they are fond of saying.
They even have (quite bizarrely, when you think about it) a vast network of Holocaust museums/shrines to the Jewish people across much of the world designed to guilt the goyim all into feeling sorry for them and to give them latitude to act as dubiously as they please vis a vis the original inhabitants of modern day Israel.
But "never again" really means "never to US again." Obviously, the Israelis see very little wrong with ignoring international law when it cramps their style, even if it was established at their urging and on their behalf to begin with.
It becomes very hard to maintain the myth of the 20th century (that Jews are the inexplicable victims of the pathologies of others) when for the last 6 months the Israelis have been systematically victimising the inhabitants of Gaza.
"Never again" may well become the guiding principal for those of us who are no longer fooled by the kind of intense and hysterical Jewish propaganda espoused by people like Brendan O'Neill.
The same Western officials who cheered on the Hague-based ICC when it issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin are now aghast that it would do the same for US ally Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Biden administration has condemned the pending formal arrest warrant applications, which also targets Israel's defense minister, as "outrageous".
Benjamin NETANYAHU, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav GALLANT, the Minister of Defense of Israel, bear criminal responsibility for the following war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on the territory of the State of Palestine (in the Gaza strip) from at least 8 October 2023:
• Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Statute;
• Willfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health contrary to article 8(2)(a)(iii), or cruel treatment as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);
• Willful killing contrary to article 8(2)(a)(i), or Murder as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);
• Intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as a war crime contrary to articles 8(2)(b)(i), or 8(2)(e)(i);
• Extermination and/or murder contrary to articles 7(1)(b) and 7(1)(a), including in the context of deaths caused by starvation, as a crime against humanity;
• Persecution as a crime against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(h);
• Other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(k).
Please stop republishing Brendan O'Neill's views on Israel here. We're tired of war propaganda.
To Fred H.
The UK will not sign the WHO Treaty amendment coming up round 25 May 2024 ....... let us hope NZ has heeded the concerns of its citizens over this.
You always present Israel as the victim - Israel takes no responsibility for where its bombs land, why crossing allowing supplies to Gaza are attacked and or closed, why little or no food gets into Gaza, why water pipes, electricity and hospitals are systemicaly destroyed. The world is watching and largely agrees with the ICC. And I havent mentionned the horrors going on by settlers in the West Bank against Palestinians. Israel is losing this battle and becoming more desperate by the day. I believe those in power in Isarel are crazy enough to reach for the nuclear option.
Thank you, Brendon O'Neill. You are bringing both reason and factual information to bear on this human tragedy following the 7th October massacre. The pile on against Israel (a country of just over 7 million Jews) that left wing propagandists bring to the debate is truly nauseating.
Just 5 weeks ago Iran, one of the main funders of Hamas fired over 300 missiles at Israel, Over 100 were precision guided ballistic missiles carrying payloads of up to 1000kg of high explosive.
How many Iraelis were Iran and Hamas hoping these 300 missiles would kill ? Another 1300 perhaps ? Or maybe 13,000 ? Or maybe 313,000 ? These missiles certainly could have achieved that. And that was certainly Iran's intent.
Oh the joy there would have been throughout the Islamic world had they succeeded !
But they didn't succeed so we must just forget about it should we ? We just pretend it didn't happen . We must ignore that had these missile strikes succeeded there could easily have been the worst massacre of civilians in a single day in history
Some in the West might wish them better luck next time perhaps? And go back to the top of Queen Street and join the croud in the next chorus of the Hamas death chant.
But none of us heard a chorus of Arab state leaders demanding that Hamas accept the repeated Israeli offer of a two state solution in return for a guarantee of peace. None of us heard a chorus of Arab state leaders offering to enforce that peace . Or even to withdraw their funding of Hamas and Hezbollah.
None of us heard Hamas abandon their threat of exterminating all the Israeli population.
It's not that there are many that don't see clearly, or that they are a little one eyed, there are clearly many that are blind in both eyes.
To Brendan, please keep publishing the truth mate. Nothing drives a leftie more mad than hearing the truth. As they say.....if you want to piss off a conservative, lie to them....if you want to piss of a leftie, tell them the truth.
It seems a couple of lefties have crawled out from under their rock and turned up here. They probably have just had a good dose of tvnz 1 news and believe it's the truth so are parroting it back here. Shame on them.
The problem with these people is that they don't understand the value of credibility. Once you've lost it, it's almost impossible to get it back.
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