Chief Judge of International Court of Justice Has Long Anti-Israel History

The presiding judge of the ICJ is one Nawaf Salam, a Muslim from Lebanon. That body, which is the UN’s highest legal body, recently demanded that Israel stop its offensive in Rafah, which would mean that Hamas’ four battalions in that city would remain intact, Israel’s goal of “destroying Hamas” would be unachieved, and Hamas could plausibly declare itself the victor in the Gaza War, managing to regroup and to attack the Jewish state, just as it did on October 7, “again and again.” Many of those outraged at that ruling — which Israel has no intention of obeying, and the ICJ has no enforcement mechanism — have noted Judge Salam’s long history of anti-Israel remarks. More on that history can be found here: “President of UN’s top court has long history of anti-Israel bias: ‘Conflict of interest,'” by Benjamin Weinthal, Fox News, May 26, 2024:

The controversial International Court of Justice (ICJ) is not only facing severe criticism for its Friday order declaring that Israel should stop its military offensive in Rafah to root out Hamas, but also for the well-documented anti-Israel bias of the U.N. court’s presiding judge.

Put simply, the U.N.’s highest legal body is a political tool of global antisemitism. The presiding judge in this case was ICJ [International Court of Justice] President Nawaf Salam. He is from Lebanon, a country that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. And in his spare time, he has tweeted such things as a meme that reads ‘unhappy birthday to you: 48 years of occupation.’ “He is a politician – a rabid anti-Israel politician – dressed up by the U.N. as a judge,” Anne Bayefsky, the director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, told Fox News Digital.

Bayefsky, a legal expert on the U.N. who oversees Human Rights Voices, said, “And from where did his kangaroo Court get its ‘facts’ in this case? Well, the United Nations, of course. An institution whose highest bodies – the Security Council, the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council – have never even condemned Hamas terrorists and their October 7 atrocities.”…

According to an article in the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) Salam wrote on social media in 2015, “When we criticize and condemn Israel it is never because of the Jewish character of the majority of its population,” [in other words, the critics of Israel are never engaged in antisemitism] and in another post said, “Portraying the critics of Israel’s policies as antisemites is an attempt to intimidate and discredit them, which we reject.”

Later that same year, JNS quoted him as tweeting “…#Palestine’s full membership in #UN & ending #Israel’s occupation remain long overdue.“

Does Judge Salam strike you as “unbiased”? For at least a decade, he has been routinely posting anti-Israel messages on social media. He has done this both during his tenure as UN ambassador, and in his political campaigns for high office in Lebanon. He has rejected the claim that anti-Israel remarks may reflect, or descend into, antisemitism, a charge that he insists is “in an attempt to intimidate and discredit” the critics of the Jewish state. In 2015, he called for “Palestine” to be given full membership in the UN, and said that Israel’s “occupation” — a loaded term that is used by those who want the world to forget Israel’s rights, according to the Mandate for Palestine, to all the land “between the river and the sea” — must end. As Lebanon’s ambassador to the UN from 2007 to 2017, Salam was deeply involved in crafting and promoting numerous anti-Israel resolutions, including casting votes against Israel’s military conduct in its ongoing wars with the terror groups Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Salam continually railed at the UN General Assembly against Israel’s “occupation” of “Palestinian territories.”

Judge Salam has for nearly two decades — at least since 2007, when he first began serving as Lebanon’s U.N. ambassador — been an “advocate” for the Palestinians, railing against Israel both as an ambassador to the UN and as a member of the Lebanese political establishment. He has thus violated the ICJ charter by participating in this decision of a case against Israel. But what country, other than Israel, will protest against Nawaf Salam’s violation of the charter?