RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/equating-israel-with-hamas-isnt-the-worst-of-the-iccs-turpitude/

The only thing surprising about the decision by International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan on Monday was that it included Hamas, alongside Israel, as deserving of target. Otherwise, it shouldn’t have come as a shock to anyone who’s been paying attention.

Given the ongoing harassment of the Jewish state by the similarly named International Court of Justice, also situated in The Hague, it was just a matter of time before the ICC would spring into abhorrent action.

Coupled with U.S. Secretary of State Blinken’s recent remark about the reasonableness of assessing that “in certain instances, Israel acted in ways that are not consistent with international humanitarian law,” Khan’s move was facilitated. His election to the post in February 2021 was backed by the United States, after all.

To grasp the depth of his perversion of justice, no more than a glance at his announcement is needed.

“On the basis of evidence collected and examined by my office,” he wrote, “I have reasonable grounds to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, the minister of defense of Israel, bear criminal responsibility for … war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on the territory of the State of Palestine (in the Gaza strip) from at least 8 Oct. 2023.”

The “crimes” he listed were: “Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare; willfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health … or cruel treatment; willful killing … or murder; intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population; extermination and/or murder … including in the context of deaths caused by starvation; persecution; and other inhumane acts.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/opinion/israel-iran-raisi-death.html
The danger to Israel from moves at the ICC, or from campus protests, boycott and divestment efforts or various kinds of arms embargoes, are minimal.
    Contrary to some opinions, Israelis are not “settler-colonialists.” Jews believe they are originally from the Land of Israel because they are.
    And Zionism, far from being a colonialist project, is the oldest anticolonialism struggle in history, starting during the Roman era, if not the Babylonian Captivity before it.
    The idea that Israeli Jews should return, like the Algerian French, to the lands of their forebears misses the point. The Israelis have nowhere else to go, a fact underscored by the waves of hatred now engulfing Jewish diasporic communities.
    They will not return to the lands of Russian pogroms, or Arab massacres, or the Holocaust.
    The more pressure is exerted on Israel to relent in the face of its enemies, the more Zionism it will generate.
    Nothing so crystallizes Jewish identity as the daily reminders of bigotry.
    Jews have the right to rule themselves as a sovereign state in their original homeland.

http://www.PaulSchnee.com

Everyone knows, even if they do not want to admit it, that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) is known throughout the world for taking more care to avoid civilian casualties than any other military in the history of warfare.

Mrs. Clooney would be far better off pursuing Mahmoud Abbas and the leaders of Fatah for crimes against humanity who have boasted they took part in the October 7th. massacre and who, like Yahya Sinwar, have vowed to carry out similar attacks again and again until Israel is annihilated.

That over 70% of Arab Palestinians in Gaza and in Judea & Samaria have declared their support for this historically obscene massacre is lost on Mrs. Clooney.

Her Druze father must have told her Sunni Muslim mother that the Druze community was constantly persecuted by the Sunni Ottoman Empire including forced conversion to Islam. This should have given Mrs. Clooney some pause.

Not much has changed since then so one has to ask why Mrs. Clooney, a British barrister mind you, would attempt to claim the moral high ground by approving a charge of war crimes by the International Criminal Court against Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli cabinet without a morsel of evidence. Of course, for some people being associated with any organization that has “international” in its title is just too tempting to resist.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/21/amal-clooney-admits-to-advising-icc-on-arrest-warrant-for-netanyahu/

Left-wing activist Amal Clooney, wife of actor George Clooney, admitted on Monday to advising the International Criminal Court (ICC) when it came to the arrest warrant that was issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, alongside several other high-profile warrants.

According to The Hill, Clooney was one of several activists who was assembled onto a panel by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan to discuss his requests for the arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Netanyahu’s defense ministers, and three Hamas leaders. Clooney detailed her involvement in a statement posted to her Clooney Foundation for Justice website.

Clooney said that the panel came to a unanimous decision that there were “reasonable grounds” to announce the warrants for Netanyahu and the rest.

“We have unanimously determined that the Court has jurisdiction over crimes committed in Palestine and by Palestinian nationals,” said Clooney. “I served on this Panel because I believe in the rule of law and the need to protect civilian lives. The law that protects civilians in war was developed more than 100 years ago and it applies in every country in the world regardless of the reasons for a conflict.”

Other members of the panel include: Theodor Meron, former president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia; Adrian Fulford, a former ICC judge; and Helena Kennedy, a member of the House of Lords with the Labor Party.

In addition to Netanyahu, arrest warrants were issued for three leaders of the Islamic terrorist group Hamas: Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s main political leader; Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza; and Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, the commander of Hamas’ military wing.

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=8t06w&next=

Israel got hit hard again this week when Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Karim Khan said he was requesting arrest warrants, pending the approval of three judges, against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant for their conduct of the war against Hamas in Gaza.

Most egregiously, Khan charges the two Israeli leaders with “extermination and/or murder…including in the context of deaths caused by starvation, as a crime against humanity.” In international law, crimes against humanity are second only to genocide in severity.  

Simultaneously, Khan asked for arrest warrants against Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Muhammad Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh for charges including “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention.” Khan did not stint to publicly bracket the two democratically elected Israeli leaders with the three heinous Hamas terrorists.

The charges against Netanyahu and Gallant are outrageous on a number of counts. As the Wall Street Journal notes in a stinging editorial (paywall):

Khan alleges “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.” Hamas lists 31 Gazans who it claims died of malnutrition and dehydration in seven months of war. That’s out of 2.3 million whom Egypt won’t let out over its border.

Israel has facilitated the entry of 542,570 tons of aid, and 28,255 aid trucks, in an unprecedented effort to supply an enemy’s civilians, even while Hamas steals the aid and tries to frustrate delivery. Israel has begged Egypt for two weeks to let in aid at Rafah, while Egypt refuses. Is this the behavior of an Israeli government bent on starving Gazans?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20658/gaza-aid-stolen

Close to three-fourths of the humanitarian aid transported from a new $320 million floating pier built by the U.S. military off the Gaza coast was stolen on Saturday en route to a U.N. warehouse, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

Eleven trucks “were cleaned out by Palestinians” on the journey to the World Food Programme warehouse in Deir El Balah in the central Strip, with only five truckloads making it to the destination.

“They’ve not seen trucks for a while,” a U.N. official told Reuters. “They just basically mounted on the trucks and helped themselves to some of the food parcels.”

According to the United Nations, no aid was delivered to the warehouse from the U.S. military’s pier on Sunday and Monday.

The United Nations said that 10 truckloads of food aid from the pier arrived at the warehouse on Friday, its first day of operation. It was transported by U.N. contractors.

“We need to make sure that the necessary security and logistical arrangements are in place before we proceed,” said the U.N. official.

According to Israeli estimates, Hamas has been stealing up to 60% of the aid entering the Gaza Strip, and a Channel 12 report last week revealed that the terrorist organization has made at least $500 million in profit off humanitarian aid since the start of the war on Oct. 7.

The pier was pre-assembled at the Israeli port of Ashdod before being anchored to a beach in the coastal enclave on Thursday. No American troops went ashore during the installation of the pier, according to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). Some 1,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors helped build the floating pier.