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The Dangerous Fantasy of "International Law"

(It Can Always Get Worse) Kyle Orton - There is little point delving into the International Criminal Court (ICC) charges against Israel as legal or factual matters because they were arrived at using neither law nor fact. The political nature of "international law" is easier to see with the UN's own International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Israel is currently fending off disgraceful proceedings accusing it of "genocide." The UN has been openly hostile to Israel for decades, and the "charges" are being brought by South Africa, run by the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC invited Sudan's Umar al-Bashir onto its territory while he was under an ICC indictment for genocide and the ANC recently announced it would refuse to implement an ICC arrest warrant for Russia's Vladimir Putin if he landed in South Africa. This has made it difficult for anyone of good faith to take the ICJ case seriously as a "legal" matter. As with so many things that start as problems for Jews, "international law" of the modern kind, embodied in the ICC and the ICJ, is a problem for us all. The ICC has claimed the right to remove and imprison the leaders of democracies if the ICC does not agree with their national security policies. Granting the ICC such powers is absurd in theory, and gruesome in practice. Only the law-governed states will be affected by this. Putin and other tyrannical rulers who genuinely offend against international norms are entirely unaffected by the whims of the ICC. It is not incidental that "international law" functions to restrain the West and arbitrarily single out Israel: anti-Westernism and antisemitism are the core political commitments commanding a majority in the international system. A clear, collective response from the West rejecting the ICC's actions against Israel can avert the worst of the damage in the short-term. Over the longer term, the solution lies in formulating policies that roll back the bloated infrastructure of "international law" that allows anti-Western forces to interfere with Western policy and persecute Western citizens.
2024-05-26 00:00:00
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