Tag: ICC

The I.C.C. Should Be D.O.A.

Their aim is not to secure justice; it’s something else.

November 27, 2024 by Bruce Thornton for Frontpage Magazine

The International Court of Justice, one of the many multinational institutions that comprise the “rules-based international order,” issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and a Hamas leader who was killed in July.

This geopolitical virtue signaling reminds us once again that the West’s feckless foreign policy idealism is bankrupt morally, intellectually, and practically––the latter except for the enemies of Western principles and interests. Our recent transformational election should usher that failed idealism into the dustbin of history.

First, the ICC exists by dint of a multinational treaty, and has jurisdiction only over those participating states. So how does Hamas, a terrorist gang to whom Israel handed the Gaza Strip in 2005, fall under the ICC’s jurisdiction? And on behalf of what “state” and government did the ICC started this litigation in the first place? One the court invented, a “State of Palestine.” As the Wall Street Journal explains, “It then deems the state’s borders to include Gaza and lets the Palestinian Authority sign for the territory Hamas has controlled since 2007. International ‘law’ is malleable when it targets Israel.

Next, the crimes alleged by the court are blatant lies. Israel is not inflicting a genocide on the Palestinian Arabs, an utterly shameless lie given that Hamas and other terrorists have explicitly called for genocide against Israeli “from the river to the sea.” No more credible is the accusation that Israel is “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.” In fact, rather than a wanton disregard for civilian lives, no army in history fighting a guerilla war among civilians has ever shown such concern for the lives of non-combatants that Israel has.

Indeed, as the Journal emphasized in March, “Israel doesn’t need prompting to provide humanitarian aid or to act with caution. According to retired British Col. Richard Kemp, the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in Gaza is about 1 to 1.5. This is astonishing since, according to the United Nations, the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in urban warfare has been 1 to 9.”

Rather than lying and demonizing Israel, maybe the ICC should do something about Hamas’s war crimes such as using their own civilians as human shields, as well as storing and boobytrapping munitions in hospitals, schools, homes, and mosques, in order to multiply civilian casualties and provide propaganda for functionally antiemetic international organizations like the UN and the ICC.

Moreover, such a concern or restraint for civilian casualties certainly has not been the norm when Israel is not involved in a battle, as David Goldman reminded us on Tablet:

“The Muslim world said nothing when between 9,000 and 40,000 civilians died in the 2016-17 campaign against ISIS in Mosul. That involved Muslims (the Iraqi Army with American support) killing Muslims. But Gaza is not merely a slaughter but also a humiliation, the reduction of Hamas, and the displacement of most of the Gaza population. Muslims can accept Muslims killing Muslims, but they can’t abide Jews humiliating Muslims.” Apparently, the ICC shares that double-standard.

Another blatant lie from the ICC is the charge that Israel is deliberately using starvation as a weapon. This claim, the Journal points out, “is absurd. Israel has facilitated the transfer of more than 57,000 aid trucks and 1.1 million tons of aid, even though Hamas’s rampant theft means Israel is provisioning its battlefield enemy, something the law can’t require.” Even Hamas itself has tallied only 41 deaths from famine. And how is Hamas’ theft of international aid to finance their terrorism and enrich their honchos, helping feed their countrymen?

Donald Trump’s election means that the ICC will face even more-punitive sanctions than those of 2020, which of course Biden canceled. As the Journal writes, “Cutting off the ICC and, say, its top 100 officials from the U.S. banking system via sanctions—with all that means for European bank accounts as well—could cripple the court.” Meanwhile, Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton are planning to persuade Chuck Schumer to call a vote in the Senate on the House Bill already passed in June to sanction the ICC. In any case, as Graham reportedly has said, “We will impose sanctions from hell on them.” (Raylan Givens @JewishWarrior13)

The ICC’s despicable lawfare against Israel illustrates yet again the irresponsibility of our foreign policy idealism, now entering its second century despite its long history of failure. The magical “rules-based international order” that privileges multinational treaties, agreements, laws, covenants, diplomacy, and treaties––along with globalist “we are the world” fever-dreams––has weakened our handling of the crises that now are rife with destructive consequences.

Take Russia’s war against Ukraine, which began with land-grabs that Vladimir Putin had previously made clear were the first step in restoring Russia’s lost empire. In 2014 he seized Crimea, facing only bluster and feeble sanctions from the West.

Barack Obama’s response, for example, replaced action with “rules-based order” boilerplate: “Russia’s leadership is challenging truths that only a few weeks ago seemed self-evident––that in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters, that people and nations can make their own decisions about their future,” for such aggression “is not how international law and international norms are observed in the 21st century.” Secretary of State John Kerry similarly begged several questions, and used the same school-marmish tone: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext.”

Obama and Kerry, however, were repeating the stale foreign policy idealistic clichés about “norms” and “rules” that comprise the foreign policy establishment’s institutional narrative.

During the Crimea failure Fareed Zakaria of The Washington Post conjured up “broader global norms––for example, against annexations by force. These have not always been honored, but, compared with the past, they have helped shape a more peaceful and prosperous world.” No, what created the peace there was in the postwar period were not “global norms” but the military and economic power of the free U.S.

Similarly, David Rivkin and Lee Casey in The Wall Street Journal declared “the three basic principles of international law, reflected in the United Nations Charter and long-standing custom,” which “are the equality of all states, the sanctity of their territorial integrity, and noninterference of outsiders in their international affairs.” All are good things devoutly to be wished, yet the hard facts of history show us that they are not universally esteemed in our densely diverse world of conflicting principles and cultures. And as such, these nations are rarely talked out of their destructive, illiberal “customs and norms.” Such malefactors will require lethal force to convince them to stop preying on their neighbors.

These statements provide a catalogue of “rules-based order” dangerous rhetoric and false assumptions. Where’s the evidence outside of the Nato Nation that the “borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force”? All of history down to the present is a record of nations and peoples seizing and occupying the territory of others.

In 1974, to take one of numerous examples, Turkey invaded northern Cyprus, ethnically cleansed it of the Greek Cypriot inhabitants, whose ancestors dated back 2400 years; destroyed hundreds of Christian churches; and repopulated the north with Turks. And 50 years later, 20,000 Greeks are still unaccounted for. Yet the same haters who smear Israel as practicing “settler colonialism” have said little or nothing about this egregious violation of “international law and norms.” Obama’s “truth” isn’t so “self-evident.”

Or where is the evidence that there exists, as Casey and Rivkin claim, “long-standing customs” that create principles like the sanctity of borders and national self-determination? In fact, as Robert Bork writes in Coercing Virtue, “There is nothing that can be called law in any meaningful sense established by custom. If there were, it would not restrain international aggression; it is more likely to unleash it . . . if custom is what counts, it favors aggression.”

This judgment is empirically validated by the incessant warfare, ethnic cleansing, civil wars, invasions and occupations of neighbors, and genocide that have attended the modern international order since its birth in the 19^th century, and that remains a serious threat today from autocratic aggressor states like China, Russia, and Iran and its proxies.

Next, the stench of mendacity surrounds the moral preening and hypocrisy of the “rules-based international order” and its champions. The belief that there’s a global “harmony of interests” that can form the basis of international law, treaties, and institutions, is at best naïve, at worst duplicitous. Politics domestic and foreign are driven by, and serve the political aims of every country’s national and security interests, and those of the ruling regime.

Principles and morality, then, seldom, if ever, factor in policy-making. But they do function as camouflage for pursuing political interests. As we’ve seen with Barack Obama’s comments above, political leaders subject to electoral accountability find “diplomatic engagement” and “rules-based international order rhetoric convenient substitutes for action, fraught as it is with unforeseen contingencies and political risks. Given, then, that “international law is not law but politics,” Bork writes, “it is dangerous to give the name ‘law,’ which summons up respect, to political struggles that are essentially lawless.” Rather than tailor our foreign policy to such “new world order” illusions, we should return to the realist wisdom of George Washington: “It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation can be trusted farther that it is bounded by its interests.”

Finally, multinational institutions like the ICC illustrate Bork’s point. Their aim is not to secure justice, but to serve the globalist “new world order” that despises nationalist and patriotic nations like the U.S. and Israel, and advances the multinational global elite’s interests that sovereign nations challenge. The Trump administration should thwart and punish such institutions, and see to it that American taxpayers aren’t fleeced to finance such outfits filled with “we are the world” grifters. Imposing “sanctions from hell on them” is a good place to start.