Brendan O’Neill
Spiked, May 20, 2024
“Anyone who thinks this is a fair development because it targets both sides in the war is delusional.”
So it’s a crime now to defend yourself against fascist violence? Some of the imperious prosecutors of the International Criminal Court (ICC) seem to think so. Just 226 days after the Jews of southern Israel were subjected to the worst act of anti-Semitic slaughter since the Holocaust, the chief prosecutor of the ICC says he’s seeking arrest warrants for Israeli officials. The preening overlord of international law says he has ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe they’ve committed crimes against humanity. Behold the great moral inversion of our times: the victims of a crime against humanity are themselves suspected of crimes against humanity. The targets of fascism are treated as fascists. Rarely has the moral decomposition and blind arrogance of globalist institutions been so graphically illustrated.
This is the news that Karim Khan has applied for arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant. He also wants arrest warrants for Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar. He says all have possibly committed war crimes. In Israel’s case, there has been questionable military activity ‘from at least 8 October 2023’, he says. One of his examples is Israel’s closing of the Kerem Shalom and Erez border crossings that link the Gaza Strip to Israel on 8 October, ‘for extended periods’. Yes, that’s because the day before an army of anti-Semites crossed the border and raped women, murdered children, slit the throats of migrant workers and massacred entire families. Are the people at the ICC okay? Name me one state on Earth – one – that would not secure its borders in the aftermath of such a devastating experience of racist barbarism.
The moral equivalence in Khan’s statement is especially galling. To speak of Hamas and Israel in the same breath, to treat them as equally suspect, is to abandon entirely the fundamentals of morality and even Enlightenment. There is no equivalence between Hamas’s intentional targeting of civilians on the basis of their race and Israel’s subsequent war on Hamas in Gaza. In the former, civilians – let’s say it: Jews – were sought out for murder. In the latter, as with every war in history, civilians are tragically dying in the violent maelstrom. The former was a war crime, the latter is war. The former was a villainous transgression of the norms of conflict, the latter was a response to that transgression. That the ICC seems unable to distinguish between war and war crimes, between democracy and terror, between the Jewish State and a movement devoted to the mass murder of Jews, is truly alarming. … [To read the full article, click here]