ICC Deserves To Be Gutted With Sanctions After Lawless Arrest Warrant For Bibi Netanyahu
My Take: This substantive overreach is why the U.S. refused to join the ICC in the first instance, and the jurisdictional overreach poses a threat to the United States. If they can issue an arrest warrant for Bibi Netanyahu, they can issue an arrest warrant for an American president.
There has been a lot of commentary about the abusiveness and unlawfulness of the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
I think British writer and columnist Andrew Fox has it right: “international law smoulders in the ashes of the Palestinian drive to burn it to the ground.” (See also his article, The case against Israel is built on lies.)
Yet another institution destroyed by embracing Palestinian fanaticism and rejectionism, sacrificing truth for propaganda in the service of the war against the Jews.
The ICC move has been described as “October 7 legal style”.
But the ICC is more than a corrupted institution, it’s a dangerous institution. Not only were its claims substantively contrived, it reached way beyond its jurisdiction, as Israel (like the U.S., China, Russia, India, and others) is not a member. This substantive overreach is why the U.S. refused to join the ICC in the first instance, and the jurisdictional overreach poses a threat to the United States. If they can issue an arrest warrant for Bibi Netanyahu, they can issue an arrest warrant for an American president.
The ICC needs to be gutted, treated and sanctioned the way we treat and sanction terrorist organizations.
Here’s my ‘take’ excerpted from our full weekly podcast:
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Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity)
The International Criminal Court was created by the Rome statute, I believe in 1998. So it is an international treaty.
Who is not a member of [ICC], who did not join it? The United States, China, India, and several other countries, including Israel.
Why did they choose not to join it? Because they knew that you were creating … an international body accountable to nobody, who would have the right to arrest leaders of countries on war crimes and crimes against humanity charges. And what would go wrong with it is exactly what you’re seeing go wrong with it with Israel, a biased prosecutor with the history of being anti-Israel, who curiously sought the arrest warrants right when he was being charged with sexual harassment. Nice way to distract from that.
A biased international organization, which like almost every, if not every, international organization has been corrupted from within. Like the United Nations. The United Nations Human Rights Council has some of the worst human rights abusers on it.
The US said, we’re not going to submit ourselves to the jurisdiction of this thing. And in fact, it is against United States law to enforce any of the judgments or any of the warrants the ICC issues.
And so [the ICC] decided that they were gonna bring this against Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and, I’m forgetting his first name, Gallant, the Defense Minister, for the actions of the IDF post-October 7 in Gaza.
They have, the best we can tell, relied almost entirely on corrupt international human rights groups, which are nothing like you would think they were. Amnesty International is corrupt as anything now. It’s just an anti-Israel group. Human Rights Watch. The founder of it resigned because it had become so obsessed with Israel. These are groups that published misinformation and a few others, there’s even one or two Israeli human rights groups that just produce fabricated or distorted information, and that’s who they rely on. They did no independent investigation.
And the charge, the main charge they’ve brought against them is using starvation as a tactic, as a military tactic. There’s been no starvation in Gaza. Not a single person has died of starvation. The picture [image here] that Bernie Sanders and others showed on the floor of the House and the Senate, are not of a starving Palestinian child. It’s a Palestinian child, child who has a debilitating neurological condition [more details here] for which Israel gave him medical attention. And so what you see in that picture is a child withering away from a neurological condition. And Bernie Sanders, one of the most despicable people in this country, holds that up to show that Israel is starving children to death in Gaza. A really terrible man. Terrible, terrible man…. it’s a complete fabrication. It’s a complete hoax. It’s a complete corruption.
And I think what you’re going to see, and what I hope you see, is the U.S. under Trump and the Senate and the House under Republicans, gutting the ICC with sanctions. Nobody affiliated with it being allowed to enter the United States. Anyone who cooperates with it being treated the way we treat somebody who gives material support to a terrorist group, criminalizing it. Really need to collapse that court because the fears we had when we refused to join it have come true, and it’s even worse.
It’s even more of a threat now because they don’t even have jurisdiction over Israel because Israel’s not a member. So if they can issue an arrest warrant for Bibi Netanyahu, they can issue an arrest warrant for Donald Trump.
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Comments
The ICC is heading for the same cliff that the UN is heading for. Like Lemmings, they continue to ignore truth and common sense, along with lies and misplaced loyalty
on their way to oblivion. I hope Trump will either reform both or help dismantle both.
I do t want an ambassador to the UN I want the UN out of America
Lagos is the perfect place for the new UN building. Diverse cusi
Law depends on a lot of unwritten conventions that can’t be written, only violated in one way or another. Law can’t found itself – a byproduct of Godel’s theorem by the way.
Congress started falling apart that way in the 90s.
The ICC can issue an “arrest warrant” for a US politician or military officer, but every country knows that the USA will treat any attempt to enforce such a warrant as an act of war. So nobody would try it.
Israel needs to tell the Europeans the same thing; try to enforce the warrant against Gallant (whom Netayahu fired so he hasn’t got the same security detail he had as defense minister) and the IDF will rescue him and retaliate.
There is a very big difference between what the US could do to Europe vs what Israel could do to Europe. Reality is that US influence holds a lot of sway, even more now with a very US centric leader about to shake shit up in the new year.
I expect it would take the form of some assassinations and a small scale rescue than an invasion.
Ideally here’s how things should be handled for now: Bibi stays home (no traveling outside the country) until Trump is sworn in. Then Trump effectively says “We have Bibi’s back on this”. This tells anybody who has any notion of trying to enforce this warrant “DON’T”. The smart ones will get the hint and then all Israel has to do is be smart with Netanyahu’s travel plans and not go anywhere or even close to nations that might try to push their luck.
Unless you’re talking France or the UK, Israel should also (even if quietly) threaten the use of nuclear weapons.
Israeli news, I don’t remember exactly, but in several instant’s of the have mentioned nukes. I don’t think they want to use them, but if backed into a corner it seems possible.
Senator Lindsey Graham was on Hannaty’s (Sp?) show Friday and was pretty explicit about this. In summary he said, as did our host, the ICC was a corrupt organization, anti-Israel, and that any nation that attempted to act on any such warrant from ICC should, will be sanctioned by the US. He said he has already begun with legislation to that effect. He specifically included Canada, France, Great Britain, among others, in his comments.
Graham said that if you act in support of the ICC “we will destroy your economy”. He looked very serious when he said that. [I haven’t looked for a clip for that on YouTube yet today, it may be there soon]
Ms. Lindsay is infuriating sometimes, but there are times like this where he’s exactly right. And not just the ICC, but select other UN and other international NGO’s need to be handled the same way.
He is our Fetterman! 😂
Found it. Disregard my last sentence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o1NvoP_yH8
The entire clip is about 8:30 long, Graham on ICC and Israel starts at about 4:40:00, lasts 4 min. To save you a post, I misquoted him: he said “..crush your economy” , not “destroy”. My bad.
The lead prosecutor at the ICC who requested these warrants is named Karim Khan, a name most news organizations have avoided. (Except the BBC.). So it seems a Muslim has brought these charges against the President of Israel. It apparently did not occur to anybody at the ICC that having a Muslim bring these charges would be a bad idea. But it was a bad idea. A very bad one.
Thank God the USA is coming to its senses in this bizarre world of ours. But Europe, deep in pretense that the ICC has any authority, and intent on controlling Russia, seems headed into deep trouble. So much for the EU having been founded to prevent another European war. Looks like they just can’t help themselves.
Douglas Murray: “A judge accused of sexual harassment rushes an outrageous war crime case against Israel”
https://nypost.com/2024/11/21/opinion/a-judge-accused-of-sexual-harassment-rushes-an-outrageous-war-crime-case-against-israel/
Miss Lindsay has often talked the right talk, but he doesn’t believe in walking the walk.
Put no reliance there.
We need to leave the UN; other than supplying rapists with blue helmets, what good has the UN actually done over the years?
Hear, hear!!
And that goes for all the individuals involved, too. They should be hunted down. That is the sort of stuff that the CIA is actually supposed to do.
There is no such thing as “international law”. There is no world government. And any state or organization that tries exercising jurisdiction over the whole world offers itself up as a pariah and criminal of the worst kind that calls for any and all measures to subdue and eradicate.
There IS public internaltional law, and there should be. It simply has its limits and too often it exceeds in areas where abuse become prevalent.
Sorry, but there is no such thing as “international law”. It is a fantasy – and a dangerous one, at that.
Maybe not “international law,” but certainly international law. People would not have an issue with it if it was not abused by do gooders and bad actors.
People certainly SHOULD have an issue with any entity/ideology that makes a claim of governing the world.
That is how it plays out in some instances with certain entities, but it’s not the ideology. It’s the actors, state and non-state, that act in bad failth in a system based on good faith. No doubt the sysyem is broken. However, it existed before these entities and in the right circumstances with the right participants can work again.
“It” never existed. All that ever existed was those with the military might dictating what the “rules” are. That is how it has always been and that is how it shall always be. The world is just supremely lucky that the United States has been the super-power of the atomic age, with not only the military might to enforce our own concept of a world open to business and trade but the wealth and culture to do it. The “world” as it were, had nothing to do with it. They just drafted off of us. Now, they are pretending that they had some part in it … like the French play-acting in WWII in the retaking of Paris.
There is no “;law” that governs nations. Nations are sovereign entities that can do what they want and have to defend their own actions. They can do whatever they can defend doing – militarily and economically. That is just a fact of life.
There is no such thing as international law. There is no international government and there certainly should not be even any attempt to construct one.
It basically involves treaties and relations between states and “it” pre-existed the IGOs that are now the problem. “It” was never meant to govern the world, but protect the sovereignty of states. It’s not much different than good intentioned wokesters that align with antisemites that abuse power and make things worse.
Treaties between states are not “law”. The desire to call it “law” is the issue, because that implies a governmental architecture existing under which this law is created, enforced and adjudicated and none of that is true.
Treaties are just treaties. Don’t call them “law”. You don’t call contracts between people “law” (and the difference in those contracts is that there IS a governing body existing to monitor and enforce the conditions of the contract. But people do not “make law” by creating contracts between each other.
In the USA treaties are law. They rank equal with statutes. But that’s only relevant within the context of US law; it doesn’t mean foreign counties can sue the USA in its own courts to enforce them.
No offense, but you are not the one that decides what law is, and how it is developed and defined. Contracts between people are law, actually, as are contracts between states, aka treaties. Most of public international law is not about crimes or individuals, but matters between states and states’ obligation to citizens. It is far removed from the myriad civil and criminal statutes of a particular sovereign state.
You people are INTENTIONALLY confusing US law ans your idiotic, fanciful “international law”.
It is amazing that you either don’t understand the difference or think it is clever to pretend that you don’t.
There is no such thing as “international law”. There is no world government. A treaty may be treated as law inside a sovereign nation but it is not “international law” that hangs over the entire world.
WTF is so difficult to understand about this??
Maybe someone else is confused about what constitutes law, by restricting it to ONLY his narrow definition, and the ascribing motives to people that do not conform to his black and white thinking. The latter is in poor taste.
Contracts between people are not “law”. You are probably thinking of “contract law” which is the law that governs contracts. But the bindings of a contract, itself, do not constitute “law”.
Come on. You’re just being silly, now. You can call a skyscraper a “chair” if you want, because someone can sit on top of it, but we all know that it’s not a chair.
Contracts are not “law”. They are subject to law. Treaties are not “law”, but they can be incorporated into “law”. There is no jurisdiction of any state outside of the sovereign territory of that state – which is a good part of what “sovereign” actually means.
And, in the end, the one who is mighty enough can do whatever he wants and can force others to do what he wants, which is the “law of nature”, which is the (metaphysical) law that rules the world, actually.
Again, in the USA all treaties are laws.
Treaties are not law? Article VI of the U.S. Constitution says “ This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
ahad haamoratsim,
this discussion is about the fanciful concept of “international law”. No, treaties are not “international law” in any sense. Of course, they could not be because … there is no such thing as “international law“.
This is not about American law. We all know that American law exists. It is operative in the sovereign territory of America. Of course, America is strong enough and wealthy enough to force anything we want, pretty much, on everyone anywhere on the planet – but that is not the sort of “international law” that people like to have fever dreams about. That is just the regular old, “he who has the gold (and arms) makes the rules” fact of real life.
Whò that I voted for or against passes these “laws”? Who enforces these laws?
There is not one way to skin a cat. Unelected judges also make laws by deciding cases. International law is just another type of law, and some of it is surely out of control and unfixable.
So ICC is associated with terrorists, I believe Israel knows how this should be handled, overtly or covertly.
States should immediately invoke Article 127 of the treaty, especially the ones that pay for the digs.
Of course, this blows the whole idea to smithereens. How ridiculous that the world has allowed Palestinians to be nothing but a destructive force while pretending that funding its terrorism would turn them peaceful.
The whole idea being the regime of international criminal law for true heinous behavior. The greater idea being the feasibility of public international law itself. There is a need, but subsidiarity should be a dominant theme. FWIW.
And Biden just gave about 127 million to Palestinians, right, Hamas , on the way out the door
International Criminals have their own Court now… Mmmkay
Since the Senate of the United States of America did NOT ratify the treaty giving the International Criminal Court jurisdiction over US citizens, nor did the Knesset (Parliament) of the State of Israel giving the ICC jurisdiction over Israeli citizens both for the same reason—lack of protection of its citizens under a common concern of due process of law and civil liberties, should the ICC try anything so absolutely f**king stupid, whatever country would try to nab Netanyahu or the former defense minister should pay an extremely high price. And I don’t give a good goddam if that other country were to be a US “ally” or not. Being a US “ally”, they should good and well know damned better than that.
While Israel might not have signed on to the ICC this warrant is now a threat to Netanyahu whenever he travels outside of Israel. He and his security now have to take extra precautions with where he goes, which countries he visits or passes through during his travels for fear that authorities in those countries may try to enforce this warrant. It’s an enormous threat to have hanging over the head of anyone, let alone the leader of a nation. I’m viewing it as an attempt to either get Israel to back down in it’s efforts to end Hamas, Hezbollah, and other threats to it’s nation or to force Bibi out of office, possibly both.
The entire idea of “international law” is a farce. It only exists because just countries (first Britain and then the USA) take on the mantle of world leadership and back it up with their militaries. Without countries like these, “international law” is simply another form of arbitrary rule totally unaccountable to anyone other than corrupt bureaucrats. Plus, these countries ignore UN or ICC corruptocrats and only enforce “international law” to the extent it is in their interest to do so. The warrants drummed up against Netanyahu and Gallant are proof of the thorough corruption of the ICC, and mark it as an enemy of justice.
The U.S. also needs to pull out of the U.N. and then boot them out of our country.