Karim Khan’s Judicial Pogrom

Brendan O’Neill never has trouble telling us what he really thinks, and he has just done so again, about what he calls the “judicial pogrom” carried out by the ICC’s Karim Khan, who has requested the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue a warrant for the arrest of both Israeli and Hamas leaders — Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant, as well as Yahya Sinwar, Mohamed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh. “A judicial pogrom,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, May 20, 2024:

…The Clooney [Amal Clooney, who was one of the members of Karim Khan’s legal team] 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.

Faith and begorrah, Brendan. You’ve said it all.