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Making it a crime for the Jews to defend themselves The ICC’s issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders is a vile act of moral inversion. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/22/making-it-a-crime-for-the-jews-to-defend-themselves/

Let’s speak plainly about what happened yesterday. Four hundred and eleven days after the Jews were subjected to the worst act of anti-Semitic barbarism since the Holocaust, arrest warrants were issued for the Jews who fought back. Thirteen months after Israel was invaded by the racist killers of Hamas, indictments were made against the men who pursued those racist killers. A little over a year since a species of fascism was visited on the world’s only Jewish nation, the Jewish nation’s own leaders found themselves turned into fugitives for the ‘crime’ of fighting that fascism.

When all is said and done, this is what the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant add up to: the creeping criminalisation of the Jewish State’s right to defend itself against the armies of anti-Semites that wish to destroy it. The ICC and its voluble cheerleaders in the Israelophobic set have just engaged in one of the most chilling acts of moral inversion of recent times: they have made criminal suspects of those who stood up to one of the gravest crimes of the 21st century so far.

It matters not one iota what we might think of Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, or Gallant, who was Israel’s defence minister until he was fired earlier this month. Everyone, from the ICC’s own activists-cum-judges down to the millions of tweeters gloating over the arrest warrants, knows full well it isn’t only those two men who’ve been indicted – all of Israel has. As a writer for the Jerusalem Post says, the warrants inflame the fashionable prejudice that says Israel is a ‘pariah state’, meaning the entire nation is likely to pay a ‘dramatic cost’ for what the ICC has done. This is right. A nation subjected to one of the most barbarous assaults of our era is indicted for being barbarous – truth and reason turned utterly on their heads.

There is much to discuss about the ICC’s cynical, dangerous stunt. There’s the ridiculousness of its issuing of a warrant for Mohammed Deif, leader of Hamas’s military wing, alongside Netanyahu and Gallant. Deif is widely thought to be dead, courtesy of an Israeli strike in July. Many suspect his name was only included to add a gloss of impartiality to the ICC’s imperious meddling with Israel’s right to wage war on the anti-Semites who attack it. What’s more, what an outrage to imply moral equivalence between the fascist who butchered Jews and the democratic Jewish nation that pushed back against him. It terrifies me that a chief institution of the ‘rules-based order’ is so bereft of moral reason that it seemingly cannot distinguish between fascism and fascism’s target, between the man who started a war and the men who responded in kind.

Then there’s the staggering cant of Western leaders puffing themselves up to say they will obey the ICC and arrest these wicked Israelis should they set foot on their soil. Behold the grim audacity of Justin Trudeau saying he will ‘abide’ by the ICC’s decision. Canada took part in the post-9/11 Afghan War whose consequences were far more devastating than what is happening in Gaza. Tens of thousands perished in that calamity. Millions were plunged into ‘acute food insecurity’ – what we used to call starvation. Address your own nation’s ‘crimes’, Justin.

Keir Starmer has indicated that Britain, too, will abide by the ICC. Oh, will we? The nation that was a key player in Afghanistan and Iraq – wars that killed more people than every war Israel has been involved in since 1948 combined – will arrest these suspected ‘war criminals’? Who’s buying this? Who’s falling for this posturing of politicians who lead states whose warmongering makes Israel’s look like small fry in comparison? I know who: the myopic Israel-haters of the woke left and hard right who have convinced themselves, in the absence of anything resembling evidence, that Israel is a ‘uniquely murderous’ state. So deep are these people in the poison well of Israelophobia that they will gladly cheer anyone – even nations with higher kill counts than Israel’s – who agrees to treat Israel as the great untouchable of world affairs.

Then there’s the infantile treatment of war as a crime. The ICC charges Netanyahu and Gallant with such ‘crimes against humanity’ as withholding food, water and medicine from Gaza and thus causing ‘severe suffering’ to its people. I hate to say this, but this is what happens in war. Normalcy ends, things run out, people go hungry, people suffer, people die. It is dreadful. It is why, ideally, wars should not be started. It is why Hamas should not have started this one, this infernal clash that has doomed so many Palestinian innocents alongside Israelis.

All wars contain such horrors. Acute malnutrition doubled in Iraq in the year after the allies’ invasion in March 2003. A savage famine has ravaged Yemen as a result of the Western-backed Saudi war there. And yet Mohammed bin Salman still swishes around his palaces, mingles with Western leaders, and rarely troubles the consciences of the West’s woke loathers of Israel.

For 24 hours straight we’ve been treated to the nauseating spectacle of states and even terror groups that are genuinely murderous welcoming the ICC’s indictment of Israel’s ‘murderers’. Turkey, violent suppressor of the Kurds, described the arrest warrants as an ‘extremely important step’ towards ‘justice’. Jordan, the state that fought a vicious year-long war against the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the 1970s, said it will implement the ICC’s ruling. Even Hamas is now in love with the ICC, despite its indictment of Deif, cheering it for sending an important message to ‘every war criminal’. Guilt by association is bad politics, I know, but, seriously, if your actions make the fascist terrorists of Hamas grin from ear to ear, it is time for a moral rethink.

Penalizing the criminal international court Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/penalizing-the-criminal-international-court/

Senate Majority Leader-elect John Thune (R-S.D.) on Thursday called the International Criminal Court’s issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant “outrageous, unlawful and dangerous.”

Thune then demanded that current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) “bring a bill to the floor sanctioning the ICC,” warning that “if he chooses not to act, the new Senate Republican majority next year will.”

The double threat—aimed simultaneously at Schumer and the kangaroo court at The Hague—was significant for two reasons.

First, Thune has good reason to finger-wag at his Democrat counterparts, thanks to their disturbing attitude towards Israel. Professing an “ironclad commitment” to the Jewish state’s “right to defend itself” while withholding crucial arms shipments to America’s key ally and only democracy in the Middle East has made them deserving of suspicion by the likes of Thune and the rest of the unflinchingly pro-Israel Republicans.

The fact that a whopping 19 Democrat senators voted this week to advance resolutions put forth by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to block the transfer to Jerusalem of offensive weaponry necessary for its self-defense is a case in point.

Though Schumer—like President Joe Biden and other members of his party who have been critical of Israel’s prosecution of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon—opposed those resolutions, they’ve been openly hostile to the Netanyahu government since its inception; so much so that they’ve never concealed their desire for it to be toppled.

Second, there are concrete steps that the powers that be in D.C. can take against the ICC, such as the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act, passed in May by the U.S. House of Representatives. House Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday reiterated his demand that the Senate vote on it “immediately.”

Similar to Thune, Johnson pulled no punches.

A LETTER FROM A CANADIAN FRIEND LEON K. FROM TORONTO

The international criminal court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for the PM of Israel (Bibi) and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity. Apparently defending your country from animals who raped, murdered, tortured and kidnapped babies, Holocaust survivors and other innocent civilians constitutes a war crime.

In the ICC’s defence, in order to show how unbiased they are, they also issued an arrest warrant for Hamas leader Deif who the IDF killed in a raid a while back. So they’ll arrest a dead guy, great. 
And our PM here in Canada, the leader of the Liberal party said the following:

“We stand up for international law, and we will abide by all the regulations and rulings of the international courts,” Trudeau said, when asked if he would allow Netanyahu and Gallant to be arrested if they come to Canada. 

“This is just who we are as Canadians,” he said. 

I’m a Canadian and I would sooner arrest Trudeau! I sincerely doubt that most Canadians would agree with him. In fact most Canadians would consider him a vile, antisemite for saying what he just did. I certainly do. This is by far the most obscene and overtly antisemitic act he’s done to date. He previously called out Israel for creating a genocide in Gaza. How any Jewish citizen voted for him is beyond me. He can’t leave office soon enough. At this rate he’ll arrest me because I support Bibi. (As long as the ICC makes such a decree).

Regime-Change: Prerequisite for Iran’s Policy-Change Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

http://bit.ly/40Xe8QQ

According to the State Department’s annual human rights report on Iran: “Iran’s restrictions on human rights worsened in a number of areas during the year….[For instance], transnational repression against individuals, femicide, forced sterilization, early and forced marriage, trafficking in persons, recruitment of child soldiers, worst forms of child labor, violence targeting ethnic minorities [e.g., Shiite Arabs, Sunni and Shiite Kurds and Sunni Balochis], severe restrictions on freedom of expression and religion [e.g., Sunnis, Baha’is, Jews], criminalizing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons, enforced disappearance, torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government….”

The UN High Commissioner of Human Rights adds: ”Human rights violations by Iran… amounting to crimes against humanity…. Women and girls subjected to rape and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence, including gang rape, rape with an object, electrocution of genitalia, forced nudity and groping…. State authorities at the highest levels encouraged, sanctioned and endorsed human rights violations through statements justifying the acts and conduct of the security forces….”

*Since its February 1979 violent rise to power, the Ayatollahs’ regime has been intensely committed to its 1,400-year-old fanatical vision, as documented by its Constitution, school curriculum, mosque sermons and the daily enforcement of its Islamic Revolution, domestically and globally.  The Ayatollahs’ vision – which transcends financial and diplomatic considerations – has transformed Iran from “The American Policeman of the Gulf” to the leading global epicenter of anti-US terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and the proliferation of advanced military systems.

Why they refuse to see Jews as victims The left’s pitiless cynicism about the pogrom in Amsterdam confirms how morally lost they are. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/20/why-they-refuse-to-see-jews-as-victims/

It was the speed with which the racism fearmongers became racism deniers that was most unnerving. Virtually overnight, as men whose only crime was their Jewishness were still being patched up in Amsterdam hospitals, the preening racism denouncers of what passes for the Euro-left were saying this wasn’t racism. The very people who see racism everywhere could not see it here, in the broken teeth, black eyes and bloodied faces of Israelis who became the prey of a self-described Jew hunt earlier this month in Amsterdam. Confronted with beaten, bruised Jews, they said, for the first time I can remember, ‘Maybe it wasn’t a hate crime. Maybe it was something else.’

It has been extraordinary. The people who wring their hands over the racial microaggression of asking a woman in African garb ‘Where are you from?’ were positively blasé about the racial macroaggression of a mob smashing in a man’s face because he ‘helped a Jew’. The people who cry ‘Islamophobia!’ when a schoolkid lightly scuffs a page of the Koran struggled to see the Judeaophobia in a gang of self-styled Jew-hunters accosting men and asking them: ‘Are you Yehudi? Are you Jewish?’ The people who madly insist that every tabloid piss-take of Meghan Markle is an act of unforgivable ‘racist bullying’ refused to accept that ‘Jew hunters’ on mopeds who fired fireworks at Israelis might have been racist bullies.

The zeal of the downplayers felt alarming. There are prominent British and American leftists who for a whole week devoted every waking hour to disproving the claim that Israeli Jews were the victims of a mass, coordinated racist attack. The moral energy they normally reserve for proving that the West is institutionally racist they now expended on proving that a pogrom did not take place in Amsterdam. That was their main beef: the use of that p-word by Dutch and Israeli politicians, Jewish groups and sections of the media. ‘There were no “anti-Semitic pogroms” in Amsterdam’, they cried, as noisily as they normally cry that racism is the disease our societies will never shake off.

China Puts Trump, Trade, and Foreign Business in the Crosshairs by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21135/china-trump-trade

AstraZeneca confirmed this month that Chinese investigators had detained Leon Wang, president of the company’s China business.

[I]t is highly unlikely that AstraZeneca is the only pharmaceutical company guilty of shenanigans. Selective prosecution of foreigners is a Communist Party specialty.

Xi Jinping… hits foreign companies whenever he can. He took down the U.S.-based Mintz Group in March of last year and has not let up since.

[F]oreign pharmaceutical businesses are at special risk because they occupy a sector that Xi Jinping is determined to control. He is, infamously, the driving force behind Made in China 2025, the predatory ten-year plan to achieve dominance in ten key technology areas. One of those ten sectors is medicine and medical devices.

He [Xi Jinping] does not really believe in free trade, however: He really wants China to have unfettered access to other markets while denying others access to China’s.

So Trump, despite his tariff promises, is not the one attacking the rules-based trading order.

The real culprit is Xi Jinping.

“The attempt to block economic cooperation under all sorts of pretexts and break up the interdependence of the world is nothing but backpedaling,” declared China’s President Xi Jinping at the just concluded APEC summit in Peru.

“Stand up to protectionism and unilateralism,” said Ren Hongbin, a former Commerce Ministry official and now chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, also at APEC. “There is the rhetoric of the decoupling and derisking,” he warned. “The artificial severance of the global supply chain is detrimental for everyone”

Beijing’s campaign against the next president of the United States has just begun. China is trying to position itself as the defender of free trade and tar Donald Trump as the global disruptor.

Putin Lowers Nuclear-Strike Threshold as Ukraine Launches Long-Range Missiles into Russia James Lynch

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/putin-lowers-nuclear-strike-threshold-as-ukraine-launches-long-range-missiles-into-russia/

Russian president Vladimir Putin revised Russia’s nuclear doctrine Tuesday, reducing its threshold for using nuclear weapons just as the Russian military announced that Ukraine had launched long-range missiles supplied by the U.S. into Russian territory.

Putin’s new nuclear doctrine proclaims that Russia can use nuclear weapons in response to an attack from a non-nuclear state with support from a nuclear state, a clear reference to U.S. support for Ukraine. The doctrine formalizes a policy Putin announced in September during a televised meeting with top officials.

“[Russian] President [Vladimir Putin] gave the relevant instructions prior. The president himself stated that the preparation of the amendments was in the final stage. The updated document was released on schedule,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to the state-run Tass news agency.

Peskov was addressing a question about whether the document’s publication coincided with news reports that Biden would allow Ukraine to launch American missiles deep into Russia.

He also said Russia’s nuclear doctrine stipulates that a Ukrainian attack with western missiles could trigger a nuclear response. Throughout Russia’s war against Ukraine, Putin has threatened to escalate the war into a nuclear conflict against Ukraine and its western allies.

Criminals Linked to Sinaloa Cartel Arrested in Spain Posted on by Allan Wall

https://mexiconewsreport.com/index.php/2024/11/20/criminals-linked-to-sinaloa-cartel-arrested-in-spain/

In a recent article I reported on criminals linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel arrested in California.

Now some have been arrested across the pond in Spain, Mexico’s madre patria.

From CBS:
“Spain has arrested 14 people suspected of links to the powerful Mexican Sinaloa cartel as part of a kidnapping and murder probe, police said Sunday [November 17th]. The ring busted by Spanish investigators was mainly made up of Mexican nationals. It was connected to the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is based in northwestern Mexico and has been shaken by weeks of gang infighting.”

“ ‘The dismantled criminal network, which is based in Catalonia, is believed to be involved in the kidnapping and death of a man whose body was found in a wooded area’ in the northeastern Spanish region in August, police said in a statement. The victim, whose nationality was not specified, allegedly worked with the gang and ‘had come from Italy for a meeting with several chiefs.’ The victim’s family in Kosovo reported his disappearance to the police after he was abducted between late May and June. The family received a 240,000-euro ransom request ($253,000) and a total of $32,000 was paid in cryptocurrency.”

Canada: ISIS arrests spiking, with youths driving the threat Christine Douglass Williams

https://jihadwatch.org/2024/11/canada-isis-arrests-spiking-with-youths-driving-the-threat?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=canada-isis-arrests-spiking-with-youths-driving-the-threat

The exclusive report below from Global News paints a grim and disturbing picture of what is developing in Canada, and developing rapidly. ISIS arrests are spiking, with youth driving the threat. The problem is so grave that Global News titled its report The Return of ISIS.

Recently, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, expressed concerns about the terror risk from Canada, and warned Ottawa of “tough conversations” ahead.

Canada didn’t suddenly descend to this point. It has been a gradual process.

ISIS jihadis were invited to return to Canada by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who not only set out a welcome mat for them in the name of “diversity and inclusion,” but praised what he claimed could be their future “contributions,” saying:

We know that actually someone who has engaged and turned out from that hateful ideology can be an extraordinarily powerful voice for preventing radicalization in future generations, and young people within the community.

Never did he stop to think about the victims of the Islamic State, nor about their future possible victims.

The woke establishment has been equating opposition to open-border policies with opposition to all immigration. Canada’s government has encouraged this bizarre thinking.

In 2018, CBN published a telling article, “Canada Becoming a Potential Base for Terrorists to Attack the US.” A year before that, it emerged that dozens of jihadis were walking free in Canada, yet authorities wouldn’t charge them. Leaked documents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) also showed a greater threat of Islamic terror inside the country than the government was admitting.

Now the power of social media in recruiting youngsters is a growing factor:

According to police and experts, today’s ISIS devotees are younger and more immersed in social media and gaming platforms, where they are connecting with propaganda, recruiters and fellow extremists.

Can Trump End Ukraine’s ‘Endless War?’ How he could pull that unlikely deal off. Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/can-trump-end-ukraines-endless-war/

Trump was elected in part on promises to avoid “endless wars” of the sort that cost American blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq but without resulting in strategic advantage or civilized calm.

Yet as a Jacksonian, Trump also restored American deterrence through punitive strikes against ISIS and terrorist thugs like Baghdadi and Soleimani—without being bogged down in costly follow-ups. During the last four administrations, Putin stayed within his borders only during the Trump four years.

But upon entering office, Trump will likely still be faced with something far more challenging as he confronts what has become the greatest European killing field since World War II—the cauldron on the Ukrainian border that has likely already cost 1-1.5 million combined dead, wounded, and missing Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and civilians.

There is no end in sight after three years of escalating violence. But there are increasing worries that strategically logical and morally defensible—but geopolitically dangerous—Ukrainian strikes on the Russian interior will nonetheless escalate and lead to a wider war among the world’s nuclear powers.

Many on the right wish for Trump to immediately cut off all aid to Ukraine for what they feel is an unwinnable war, even if that abrupt cessation would end any leverage with which to force Putin to negotiate.

They claim the war was instigated by a globalist left, serving as a proxy conflict waged to ruin Russia at the cost of Ukrainian soldiers. They see it orchestrated by a now non-democratic Ukrainian government, lacking elections, a free press, or opposition parties, led by an ungracious and corrupt Zelensky cadre that has allied with the American left in an election year.

In contrast, many on the left see Putin’s invasion and the right’s weariness with the costs of the conflict as the long-awaited global proof of the Trump-Russian “collusion” unicorn.