A few weeks ago, British lawyer and International Criminal Court Prosecutor, Karim Khan announced that he was requesting arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant.
The accusations he and his team had assembled were risible and exposed the anti-Israel and antisemitic bias of this court. If you have the stomach to hear the Goebbels-ian mangling of the truth that Khan spewed forth, read on. If hearing evil on a par with Dr. Goebbel’s mega lies will raise your blood pressure to dangerous levels, skip the next paragraph.
Among other claims, Kahn accused Israel of starving civilians as a weapon of war. This ignored the truth and statistics about food and medical supplies the Israelis had in fact been getting to the Gazans. His allegations were built on Hamas figures and testimony of Hamas-supporting and sympathizing NGOs.
Khan made nary a mention of Hamas stealing food and supplies from Gazans nor Egypt locking its border to those supplies arriving from its side. Nor was there any hint that Hamas’s claims of casualty figures have been proven to be lies of preposterous proportions.
Melanie Philips, the English journalist and BBC contributor wrote at length of Khan’s repeated flouting of the ICC’s own rules and procedures.
Particularly laughable is the fact that the ICC is only supposed to act when the country’s own courts are incapable of investigating their governments. Israel’s courts, and in particular Supreme Court, are famous (or infamous) for attacking Knesset laws it deems at odds with their openly liberal bias. That is particularly true about Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
The Wall Street Journal in a recent opinion piece by Eugene Kontorovich entitled, “The ICC’s Brazen Anti-Israel Bias,” wrote that the House passed a bill to impose sanctions on officials of the International Criminal Court if it goes ahead and issues arrest warrants. Professor Kontorovich wrote that the bi-partisan outrage is justified.
He pointed to the fact that Khan had hand-picked consultants all of whom have a long history of anti-Israel animus. They then “advised” him to seek the arrest warrants.
They include Amal Clooney (actor George Clooney’s Arab wife); an English Jewish Barrister, Danny Friedman; and an Israeli, Theodore Merton.
There was one phrase that puzzled me in the Melanie Philips article. She wrote about Prosecutor Khan… “Khan himself was not previously known for anti-Israel views. He is a cautious individual and an Ahmadi Muslim. Ahmadis are themselves victims of persecution within the Islamic world.”
I scratched my head reading those words, especially as she went on to try and identify what on Earth could have happened to this otherwise, jolly good chap? She seemed genuinely baffled, after all he may be a Muslim but he’s a British Muslim and he went to a good English university like she did!
But Jew-hatred, is a welcoming, diverse and inclusive sort of evil. Its very inclusivity helps to make it particularly popular in woke circles. People will find fellow Jew-haters from every conceivable background and class. There are as we have seen, Ahmadi Muslims and of course every other kind of Muslim too. The same applies to Christians, Hindus and people with the academic prowess gained from a good university.
Race is something else you will find is no barrier. Jew-haters come from every possible ethnicity, shade and color. They even include as we have seen Jews, like Danny Friedman, whose pronouncements on Israel’s war against Hamas could be written word for word…by Hamas. The same is true of Israeli Theodore Merton, serial critic of the Israeli government’s policy in the West Bank and Gaza.
So my solution to Melanie Philips’ struggle to explain what could have happened to good old Karmin Khan lies in the old aphorism, “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck…it’s probably a duck.”
I don’t believe for one moment, as Melanie suggests, that Khan has been seduced by “human rights culture” which she explains “turned into a weapon against the Jewish people.”
I believe that Khan, Amal Clooney, Friedman, Merton. et al., have been affected by the oldest hatred for a very long time. It’s just that Melanie Philips and perhaps others, might not have been listening carefully enough for the sound of quacking and were simply startled at how very loud it was when they did.
A not too dissimilar development occurred the day before I sat down to type this column, the resignation of Benny Ganz from Israel’s war cabinet.
I recall writing once in these pages that there is a tradition in the British Parliament which I believe to be both noble and right. It is that when British soldiers, sailors and airmen are engaged in armed combat, members of parliament mute any criticism they may have of the war or action that is being fought. Support for and of British soldiers’ lives and crucially morale must be paramount.
Videos of groups of Gazans cheering at their television sets upon hearing the news made it crystal clear that Ganz’s decision had infused them with new hope of victory. The corollary is that it must have robbed Israelis of the joy and elation they felt just twenty-four hours before from the heroic rescue of four hostages.
Since the second Israel invaded Gaza, the world has united to call out “Cease Fire!” the call has come loudest of course from the Khans and the Clooneys and antisemites of every kind. It has even become deafening from a White House content to see Israel lose its war if it wins its election… for as most Israelis know, if Hamas survives, Hamas has won.
The hundreds of thousands waving rainbow and trans flags and Palestinian flags in Tel Aviv before October 7, dwindled to hundreds as a nation facing existential threat found its unity and purpose again.
Ganz may offer justifications to try to explain his position as will those creeping back to Tel Aviv’s streets to wave their flags once more. His and their real motive is all too obvious and the threat to our essential unity undeniable.
Despite their self-indulgent justifications, if they look and act as they did before October 7 and sound as they did then too…they haven’t changed and they haven’t learned anything from October 7 at all.
