Table Of Contents:
Canada’s Role at the U.N.: David Bensoussan, Isranet, Dec. 31, 2019
The ICC has Some Nerve to Target Israel: Josh Hammer, NY Post, Dec. 29, 2019
The ICC Decision on Israel Would Make Himmler Proud: Richard Kemp, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 26, 2019
A 5-Step Plan to Fight the ICC: Caroline B. Glick, Israel Hayom, Dec. 24, 2019
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Canada’s Role at the U.N.
David Bensoussan
Isranet, Dec. 31, 2019
In the wake of the recent, ritual anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations, Canada’s supporting vote there has called into question the continuity of its policy. This has consisted in generally not participating in the unilateral anti-Israel resolutions of this body. Indeed, since 2004, the Canadian government (then under Paul Martin) withdrew from resolutions singling out Israel, with the aim of reforming the U.N.
The questions that arise now are: how much credit should be given to the United Nations when it comes to Israel? What kind of resolutions in fact contribute to the advancement of Middle East peace? What, indeed, would be the best way to achieve peace?
The Fantasy-World of Anti-Israel Resolutions at the U.N.
The U.N. has passed more than 300 anti-Israel resolutions and not one that criticizes neighbouring countries. These all-or-nothing resolutions even include a ban on Israel digging a canal from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, that would supply electricity to the entire Middle East! Passed with blocks of pre-decided votes, these resolutions suggest the following analogy: imagine that all the Montreal police stationed at each crossroad follow your every step, measuring the idle time at a stop or the speed of your vehicle, while completely ignoring systematic violations of the Highway Code by other drivers and the serious accidents they cause. This is exactly what the U.N. is doing by completely ignoring the massacres and human rights abuses of the countries bordering Israel.
What credibility should be given to this body, the U.N., in which the states that are the worst violators of human rights are elected to the Council for Women’s Rights or Human Rights? It is true that important resolutions are taken in the Security Council. However, the veto power of one of the five powers of the Security Council can also paralyze this body when the problem tackled does not suit everyone.
Canada’s Votes at the UN
As in the past, it has been and is argued that Canada’s vote at the United Nations precludes it from obtaining a non-permanent seat on the Security Council. As of October 19, 2010, the author of this article, in a piece entitled: “Canada and the UN: Diplomatic Setback?”, in the newspaper La Presse, that noted “It is a great honor for Canada to speak out against the hypocrisy that reigns on a planetary scale. The UN is paralyzed by the automatic and blind votes of the General Assembly. It is high time that all Canadian parties support Canada’s position by calling on friendly countries, including Arab and Muslim countries, to show more discernment and impartiality and to make the United Nations a place of conflict resolution, rather than one of vicious ostracism. What is more, in the present case, the representatives of the United Arab Emirates have openly campaigned against Canada because of Canada’s refusal to further open its airspace to their carriers. “
It has been argued that Canada, in voting for the General Assembly’s anti-Israel resolution, is now taking a more “balanced” position. What value should we give to this argument, when we know that the scale of U.N. justice is disproportionately unbalanced when it comes to Israel? A truly balanced position would in fact consist precisely in denouncing this state of things. This would, no doubt, bring more serenity and credibility to the United Nations, whose agenda has been taken hostage by these anti-Israeli resolutions, at the expense of finding solutions to the many conflicts and miseries of a planet in distress. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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The ICC Has Some Nerve to Target Israel
Josh Hammer
NY Post, Dec. 29, 2019
Among the institutions of the so-called international community, anti-Israel bias is so prevalent and obvious, it’s taken for granted and almost funny. The year-end statistics from the UN General Assembly tell nearly the whole story: Of the 25 condemnatory resolutions passed this year, 18 targeted the world’s sole Jewish state.
As I said, almost funny.
But now a more serious threat looms. The United Nations, for all its institutionalized anti-Semitism, remains a toothless body. Not so the Hague-based International Criminal Court, whose judgments can make life miserable for Israeli leaders and soldiers, rendering them vulnerable to arrest abroad.
On Dec. 20, Fatou Bensouda, a Gambian who has served as the ICC’s chief prosecutor since 2012, announced her intention to formally investigate the “situation in Palestine” and alleged Israeli war crimes that “have been or are being committed there.”
Bensouda served as a prosecutor and later justice minister under Gambia’s iron-fisted former dictator Yahya Jammeh. Speaking before a Gambian truth-and-reconciliation commission, one dissident accused her of “masterminding” the torture he suffered. (Bensouda has denied knowledge of this torture.)
No wonder she is bent on making a scapegoat of Jews. Specifically, she wants to probe Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip during the last full-scale war against Hamas, in 2014. She also plans to investigate the Jewish state’s response to Hamas’ attempt last year to infiltrate the border fence that separates Israel from the terrorist-run territory.
Bensouda’s prosecution is utterly lawless. As a political matter, the West must push back against this encroachment on the sovereignty of a democratic nation-state.
For starters, the ICC is structurally biased against Israel. As international-law expert Eugene Kontorovich noted when the Palestinian Authority sought formal ICC membership in 2015, the Rome Statute, which created the ICC, included language at the behest of the Arab states specifically designed to demonize Israeli “settlement” activity in the West Bank.
That should have given away the ICC game. But even under the ICC’s own terms, Bensouda’s attempted prosecution doesn’t pass muster. It lacks jurisdiction. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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The ICC Decision on Israel Would Make Himmler Proud
Richard Kemp
Jerusalem Post, Dec. 26, 2019
SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, architect and director of the Holocaust, would be proud of the latest move by Fatou Bensouda, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Intent on the total elimination of the Jewish race, Himmler supported Amin al-Huseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in his plans to eradicate the Jews in Palestine.
Now Bensouda and the ICC have joined the international campaign aimed at eliminating the Jewish state, led by al-Huseini’s successors. In a grotesque inversion, the ICC, heir to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, has become a propaganda weapon of anti-Semitic hate. This represents a shameful betrayal of its honourable anti-Nazi progenitor. Its path more closely resembles that of the Nazis’ notorious People’s Court, the Volksgerichthof, than the Nuremberg trials.
Nuremberg laid low many of the Nazi monsters that perpetrated the Holocaust. The ICC chief prosecutor’s hand is now controlled by organizations linked to the 3rd Reich. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Al-Haq, Addameer and Al-Dameer.
Palestinian NGOs backed by EU and Swiss funds, have been lobbying the ICC to bring prosecutions against Israel for more than a decade according to the Israeli research institute NGO Monitor. All are connected to the Palestinian group PFLP whose founding leaders in the 1970s were trained in terrorism and political warfare by former SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny and Dr Gerhard Hartmut von Schubert, once of Josef Goebbels’s propaganda ministry.
Instigator of the ICC investigation was Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas, a man so immersed in Jew hate he wrote a doctoral thesis denying the Holocaust. He published it as a book in Arabic entitled The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, in which he suggested that Jews killed by the Germans were in fact victims of a Nazi-Zionist plot. Today Abbas presides over an administration that incentivises terrorists who kill Jews by paying them salaries as well as openly endorsing their murderous crimes.
Abbas’s book betrays one of the main tactics used in the political warfare campaign against the Jewish state, branding them with the very war crimes that were perpetrated against their people: genocide, mass murder and forcible population transfer.
Joining this campaign, Bensouda says that, after a five-year preliminary examination: “I am satisfied that war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip”. But no objective examination of the facts could have led her to that conclusion. It could only have reached this point after false accusations of war crimes became normalised over many years of political warfare, just as the Nazis normalised warfare against the Jewish people in Germany. As Hitler wrote: “Propaganda tries to force a doctrine on the whole people… Propaganda works on the general public from the standpoint of an idea and makes them ripe for the victory of this idea.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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A 5-Step Plan to Fight the ICC
Caroline B. Glick
Israel Hayom, Dec. 24, 2019
Last year, then MK Tzipi Livni convened senior officials from the Justice Ministry and Military Advocate General’s international affairs departments at the Knesset for a conference. The purpose of the conclave was to provide the officials with the opportunity to justify their interference with security decisions that by law are the exclusive purview of the IDF’s field commanders and Israel’s elected leaders.
As is their wont, the officials used the opportunity to proclaim, “the legal system is the IDF’s legal Iron Dome against accusations of war crimes in foreign and international forums.”
Following International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s decision over the weekend to prosecute Israel – including its armed forces and elected leaders – on phony war crimes allegations, we see that their conceit was a lie. The idea that Israel’s legal fraternity is Israel’s protection against the likes of Bensouda and the lawfare gang she runs with was first concocted in the 1990s by then Chief Justice Aharon Barak. The purpose of this fantasy was and remains to justify interference by the various components of the legal fraternity – the High Court, the Justice Ministry, the Attorney General and the Military Advocate General and others – in the decisions of IDF commanders and elected officials.
As Prof. Avi Bell of Bar Ilan University Law School explained in Israel Hayomearlier this week, Bensouda’s decision exposed the colossal failure of the legal fraternity’s strategy for protecting the country from the lawfare gang. Bensouda’s decision is a horrible, strategic blow for Israel. It endangers the very lives of IDF soldiers, commanders and elected officials.
Members of the legal fraternity asserted their competence to direct Israel’s responses by presenting the ICC as a legal body. But as the Rome Statute of 1998, which founded the ICC made clear, the institution’s political nature was evident from the outset, as was its inherent hostility to Israel. Now that Bensouda’s biased ruling has exposed this state of affairs, Israel must replace the lawyers’ failed legal strategy with a political one.
A political strategy for fighting the political ICC has five components:
The first component of the political strategy is institutional. Responsibility for handling the ICC has to be transferred from the lawyers who facilitated Bensouda’s hostile decision to the people who have to clean up the mess they made – the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister. To this end, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to order all legal officials – from Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit to the Justice Ministry’s International Affairs Office to the Foreign Ministry’s Legal Advisor to the Military Advocate General’s International Law Department to cease and desist from all actions on the matter. These legal officials should be barred from making any statements to anyone about the ICC and prohibited from all communications with the ICC or regarding the ICC. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:
Refusing to Play the Palestinians’ ICC Game: Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 27, 2019 — On November 13, 1974, Yasser Arafat – the very symbol of international terrorism targeting Israel and Western states – was scandalously allowed to travel to New York and address the United Nation’s General Assembly. The PLO leader’s invitation was a disgraceful international low point, even for a discredited body like the UN.
Just another Way for the Palestinians to Avoid Peace: Jonathan Tobin, JNS, Dec. 24, 2019 –The announcement by Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, that she is prepared to begin an investigation into Israeli “war crimes” was a significant victory for those who have sought to use the court to help delegitimize the Jewish state.
Did ICC Engage with Hamas When Drafting Case Against Israel?: Lahav Arkov, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 30, 2019 — Prosecutors from the International Criminal Court did not deny that they engaged with representatives of the terrorist groups Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) when preparing their case to investigate Israel for alleged war crimes.
Canada’s Craven Gambit for Negligible Power on a Dysfunctional UN Security Council: Robyn Urback, Globe and Mail, Dec. 11, 2019 — Among the many promises delivered in its Throne Speech last week, the government reaffirmed its commitment to securing a seat on the 2021-2022 UN Security Council. It’s one of the leftover pledges from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s first term when he declared that the peacekeeping country of our collective memories (or perhaps our collective imaginations) was “back.”
