The Folly of the ICC’s Arrest Warrants Does the U.S. have the right to take military action against the Court? by Jason D. Hill
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-folly-of-the-iccs-arrest-warrants/
The International Criminal Court (ICC) on Thursday, November 21, 2024, issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense chief Yoav Gallant. Arrest warrants were issued also against slain Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri. All three are charged with alleged war crimes against humanity in the ongoing Gaza conflict.
The ICC judges have stated that there were plausible grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Galant were responsible for criminal acts that include murder, persecution, and starvation as a weapon of war as “part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza.”
The judges have insisted that the blockade on Gaza that facilitates the lack of food, water, medical supplies, and fuel has “created conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the civilian population in Gaza, which resulted in the death of civilians, including children due to malnutrition and dehydration.”
Masri was charged with spearheading the mass killings during the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that initiated the Gaza war. He is also indicted on charges of rape and the kidnapping of hostages. He is also dead, having been killed by the Israeli Defense Force.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has called on member states to execute the ICC’s arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant as well as Hamas’ military commander Mohammed Deif. Borell has said that neither side can achieve total victory in the Gaza war.
Observe that Netanyahu and Gallant are accused of committing crimes against humanity, while the terms of Deif’s warrant were classified as secret to “protect witnesses and safeguard the conduct of investigations,” according to the court.
On the day that the warrants were issued, President Joe Biden released a statement declaring, “The ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. Let me be clear once again: whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”
I submit that the United States has not gone far enough in response to the gratuitous behavior of the ICC. In an implacable defense of its alter-ego in the Middle East and one of its most strategic allies, the United States must insist that the ICC retract its arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant immediately. And further: since Josep Borrell has called on any member state to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant should they set foot on the soil of any member state, the United States must threaten military action against any such unilateral violation against the sovereign head of the state of Israel and his former senior cabinet member.
If the ICC can have the infernal impertinence to threaten Prime Minister Netanyahu with arrest and authorize its signatories to arrest him should he enter their countries, then the ICC can and will eventually issue an arrest warrant against any U.S. president engaged in lawful warfare.
A promise to inflict military action against any country that fulfills the arrest warrant would serve to undermine the legal and jurisdictional reach of the court and its member surrogate states. A military intervention would be both a preventive and preemptive strike against the court that would neutralize its ability to ever dare (regardless of context) to issue any arrest warrants against any American political official. I suspect that in the global imagination, the ICC is a symbolic international legal institution with little causal efficacy.
But let us take a step back for a moment and analyze the sheer effrontery of the court in issuing arrest warrants against the leader of the free world in the Middle East, and leaders of Hamas, one of the most violent and nihilistic terrorist organizations in the world. To begin with, to treat the two Israeli leaders and Hamas leaders as moral equivalents is not a case of moral obfuscation or clouded judgment. It is a deliberate anti-Semitic and virulently anti-Israeli ideology and sentiment that drives such a crusade. A country that was brutally attacked and defends itself by attempting to excavate a terrorist leadership whose charter calls for the elimination of Jewry and the obliteration of Israel, that is, a country that is fighting under the moral principle of self-defense, is equated as no better than (in fact, worse than) an illiberal and permanent jihad organization.
Indeed, speaking at Jordan University on Wednesday, November 20, Mr. Borell stressed that there was a limit to the right of defense. If we were to apply this to the personal sphere of one’s life: what is the limit of a right of defense of a man holding a gun to your head demanding your money or your life? What limited right of defense to protect your life do you possess? And what principle secures that right? The moral principle is a compromise. In any compromise between your right to life, and a gunman’s assertion of his right to your life, the only logical outcome is your death.
Since most people in Gaza support Hamas, and since the people of Gaza democratically elected it, what right of restraint supersedes Israel’s right to vanquish its enemy totally?
The motives here are obvious. It is to equate a lawful right of defense held by Israel, with the savage and criminal behavior of an outlaw and rogue region (Gaza) and its political leaders (Hamas). Since as far as the ICC is concerned, the right to defend oneself is as equally wrong as an unprovoked attack by a foreign entity, all objective standards of appraisal are eroded. All that is left are baseless accusations of genocide, unlawful retribution, and deliberate starvation on the part of Israel.
But as Mr. Borrell demonstrated further in his speech, this entire legal and moral onslaught against Israel involves a clash of competing narratives. He states:
There is a narrative trying to present the problem as a fight between the West and the East or against the South, or against the Muslim World. This is a caricature that has to be deconstructed and rejected. We have to avoid any clashes based on religion, civilization, or ethnicity.
Has Mr. Borrell ever read the charter of Hamas? It is not Israel that has declared a religious war. It is the uncivilized Islamic extremist group Hamas that has waged and continues to wage a religious war against Israel and the West. Mr. Borrell, though, is right about one thing: the war in Gaza does not constitute a clash between civilizations. It is a fierce clash between a civilization and a nihilistic and apocalyptic counter-civilizational force that threatens to undercut the possibility of any continuance of freedom, individualism, liberty, and liberal values in the Middle East and anywhere else in the world.
A closer inspection of Mr. Borrell’s lecture betrays an appeal to a plethora of double-talk, equivocations, platitudes, appeals to emotional bromides, and myriad linguistic and rhetorical ruses that are meant to silence independent thinking and dissent. He states:
Do not listen to the ones who claim for total victory. The victory is never total. Let us talk about inclusion. Any message of hate whether from an Israeli minister as much as it comes from the voice of an extremist from any field must be rejected.
The slur and the swill directed against Israel are illimitable. Israel’s claim of achieving total victory against a rapacious and maniacal enemy is as destructive and morally wrongheaded and as extremist as is the implied Jihadist extremism whose perpetrators are never explicitly named.
Extremism in pursuit of the good — that is, in pursuit of a moral victory by Israel in a war visited upon it by Hamas — is just as nefarious as extremism in pursuit of the annihilation of innocent young people enjoying a music festival, or of families gathered in their home for prayer and meals who are brutally tortured, raped and murdered. If ever there was a case of a person perverting language and committing linguistic evil to demonize Israel and trigger anti-Semitism, this is as ostensive an example as one is ever likely to find.
Mr. Borrell has not committed a false equivalence here. He has intentionally destroyed objective moral standards and smuggled in alleged crimes of genocide and intentional starvation attributed to Israel as legitimate arbiters of a reality that can be used to accuse, judge, and announce an irrefutable verdict against Israel.
He and the ICC are successful in their endeavors. As of this writing, a day after the arrest warrants were issued, the city of Montreal is burning as violent protestors clash in anti-Israel protests. They have set cars ablaze, looted, rioted, and burned Netanyahu effigies.
The ICC is a sham institution. Its goals as far as Israel are concerned are not to achieve justice in crimes against humanity, genocide, crimes of aggression, and war crimes. It is a propaganda machine meant to inflame the passions of Anti-Semitism sweeping the West. One could be more accurate here: anti-Semitism does not motivate it. It is enlivened and made relevant by its open, naked show of sheer Jew-hatred.
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