RUTHFULLY YOURS

Today they are celebrating and congratulating US President Donald J. Trump on the release by Hamas of the living Israeli hostages as part of his Gaza peace plan. Yesterday they were trying to come up with any means they could to disregard him and undermine Israel.

On October 1, after Israel’s interception of Greta Thunberg’s Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro said:

“The free trade agreement with Israel is cancelled immediately. The entire diplomatic delegation of Israel must leave Colombia immediately.”

The Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a press release that read:

“Colombia reiterates its solidarity with the Palestinian people and reaffirms its compromise with multilateralism, with respect to international law and global justice.”

Hamas was, unsurprisingly, delighted, saying:

“We salute the positions of the Colombian government and President Gustavo Petro, and their steps opposing the criminal Zionist policy and supporting the rights of our Palestinian people, especially in light of the brutal war of extermination.”

The inference to be drawn from Petro’s statement is that Israel had breached accepted standards of “global justice.” Hence, ostracizing Israel and deporting its diplomats from Colombia must have appeared to him a valid judicial act.

While there exist various categories of justice, such as due process justice (pursuant to rule of law), distributive justice (economics), social justice (the supposed basis of DEI activism), and so on, invoking a concept of “global justice” bereft of context — after all, it was Hamas that had started the Gaza War on October 7, 2023 by invading Israel, torturing and raping, murdering 1,200 Israelis, and kidnapping 251 others — seems to be just another leftist pretext for castigating Israel and the Jews.

Given the populist inversion of truth and justice on the world stage, the American engineer and author Stephen Pimentel contends that certain regimes are no longer anchored in their traditional Judeo-Christian founding principles.

Various governments seem to have become de-Christianized to some degree, and reflect a relativist worldview. Canada, Australia, France and Spain, for instance, exhibit such a political stance. Presently, Columbia is no exception.

Pimentel writes:

“This new type of regime is a postliberal creation, retaining the vocabulary of democracy but redefining it as a set of outcomes, including equality, diversity, health, and safety, to be engineered by a credentialed elite. Democracy is no longer self-government but indoctrination.

“A regime of this nature requires a new language, or rather a corruption of the old one. Words must be unmoored from their historical meanings to serve the present.”

“Serving the [populist] present” is the outcome, one without emphasis on justice, truth, fairness, due process or objective inquiry to assess innocence or guilt.

For global justice to be relevant, like all other categories of justice, it must incorporate legal underpinnings. So, the question can be asked, “Have the actions of Hamas contravened principles of international law in their attacks against the innocents of Israel?” Answer: Yes.

Secondly, “Are Israel’s actions in defending itself and securing its homeland against a seven-front attack justified?” In other words, “Is Israel fighting a just war – by which is meant, are they justified in their retaliatory actions and the necessity of defending themselves?” Answer: Yes.

The events of October 7, 2023, one recalls, began on a quiet, peaceful holiday morning. Innocent Israelis near the Gaza Strip were either still asleep in their homes, had just started going about their day, or were enjoying the Supernova music festival. All at once, thousands of rockets launched from Gaza came raining down, terrorists flew in on motorized paragliders, and bulldozers crashed through the Gaza border fence, followed by pickup trucks and motorcycles pouring over the border carrying murderous hordes intent on slaughtering them. As a result, Israelis of all ages, babies included, were cut down, raped, burned alive, and beheaded – for no reason other than living in Israel.

Israel retaliated, as any normal nation would have done. Nonetheless, it was viciously blamed, starting the next day, for defending its people and homeland, and pursuing the perpetrators of atrocities. This is the purported reason for Israel’s condemnation on the world stage, especially the charge of breaching a concocted idea of “global justice.”

In Western legal thought, justice is derived from the Judeo-Christian concept of biblical justice and generally applied to the realm of individuals. Penalties cannot summarily be applied to nations.

In the Western arena, far-leftist such as BLM, gender ideologues, DEI activists, and other tribal causes claim a narrow version of social justice, sometimes dependent on race or melanin for their identity affiliations — and legal privileges. It seems as if recently, this sense of justice is to apply globally, to nations.

This attempt to globalize “social justice” – itself a discredited concept that elevates the power of race or melanin rather than empirical evidence — presumably based on a wish for retribution — not from the people who committed the alleged prior injustice, but from whoever happens to be at hand.

In the eyes of many socialist-communist-Islamic ideologues, global justice has been — and may still be — a rationale for justifying a murderous onslaught against Israel’s people, and all Jews.

Palestinians presumably need to be delivered from Israel’s alleged historic “oppression” — never mind that Jews have lived on the land under dispute for nearly 4,000 years. The use of the term “global justice” for charges against Israel is therefore an artifice — a slogan designed to deceive the public into believing an invented people is a “just cause,” as the late senior Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official, Zuheir Mohsen, admitted in 1977:

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”

Israel’s war against terror, if one regards it as a fight between a civilization with laws vs. seventh-century terrorism with machetes, is the quintessence of a just war. Unfortunately, for its critics, it happens to be a righteous, justifiable, act of self-defense — worse, one conducted with unprecedented morality. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee remarked in an interview on CBS News:

“If Israel is committing genocide, they’re really, really bad at it. They could have had genocide on October the eighth…. It’s absurd. If they were trying to commit genocide, it would not have taken them 22 months.”

So, why not the cry for “global justice” on behalf of Israel? Simply stated, the reason is Jew-hatred. Bias — and perhaps jealousy at so many accomplishments — by Western leaders reflects a hatred against a minuscule population group, and an endeavor to deprive them of their ancestral land.

The assumed intent of global justice is to achieve peace between two warring parties in a conflict. However, with Islamists and Israelis holding totally opposing ideological worldviews, any accommodation can only be temporary, destined to rise again in the future. The new Arab supervisors of Gaza might not have armaments, but it does not mean that they will stop hating Israel. They might like Trump’s sales pitch for prosperity, but that does not preclude retaining a deep, indoctrinated wish to eliminate the “infidel.”

It is irrational to believe that any global justice can be achieved when a group committed to peace is excoriated for defending itself by a group committed to domination by terrorism.

The professed arbiter of international affairs, including global justice, is the United Nations, which pretends to have enforcement authority through its affiliate, the International Court of Justice, for charging aberrant nations, and the associated International Criminal Court for allegedly miscreant individuals, even if they have not signed on. Sadly, the UN and its affiliates such as the Security Council, the Human Rights Council, and UNRWA, have lost all credibility on the world stage. Calls escalate for its disbandment.

The UN, apart from a few service agencies with narrow scope – perhaps such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) — no longer serves any legitimate purpose. It contravenes its own charter, protracts wars, and has been hijacked by radicals who have a majority platform for their hatred of Israel and the West. The UN has lost relevance; the world would be better without it. The same ossification has infiltrated the European Union, which has likewise become a leftist authoritarian forum, dictating to its member nations suicidal policies, such as muzzling freedom of expression.

Due to the unfortunate circumstance that certain Western nations have been rewarding terror in the pursuit of a tenuous ideology of global justice against Israel, the end result will inevitably be an escalation of militant Islamism worldwide, notwithstanding peace agreements or cessation of hostility between warring parties. Western leaders continue to bring this socially and politically destructive scenario upon themselves as well as others. If they continue, soon there might not even be a Europe as we have known it. Much of the old continent will resemble downtown Amman.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters,” wrote the Italian politician Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). It is “monstrous” that Israel can be accused, especially by its so-called allies, of contravening principles of global justice when in fact it was Gaza’s murderous Islamist hordes, seeking Israel’s demise, who crossed the boundaries of decency, just war, restraint, compassion, and the thin line separating civilization from barbarism.

Stimulated by a perverse leftist theory of “social justice,” and an aggressive agenda by Islamists for power in the Western political ecosystem, the traditional values of Western civilization are quickly receding.

The Catholic philosopher Romano Guardini (1885-1968), foresaw this eventuality, writing: “Everywhere we see true culture vanishing, and what is replacing it is barbaric.”

Many of Europe’s leaders, in pandering to terrorists for votes, can be considered complicit in the rise of Jew-hatred and are therefore culpable for the consequences – which, ironically, look as if they will be worse for their countries than for Israel, the country they have been trying to undermine.

Gramsci’s “monsters” are arriving with a vengeance.

Nils A. Haug is an author and columnist. A Lawyer by profession, he is member of the International Bar Association, the National Association of Scholars, the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. Dr. Haug holds a Ph.D. in Apologetical Theology and is author of ‘Politics, Law, and Disorder in the Garden of Eden – the Quest for Identity’; and ‘Enemies of the Innocent – Life, Truth, and Meaning in a Dark Age.’ His work has been published by First Things Journal, The American Mind, Quadrant, Minding the Campus, Gatestone Institute, National Association of Scholars, Jewish Journal, James Wilson Institute (Anchoring Truths), Jewish News Syndicate, Tribune Juive, Document Danmark, Zwiedzaj Polske, Schlaglicht Israel, and many others.