Brothers-in-harms
The ICC and ICJ have destroyed any claim by the human rights establishment to the moral high ground
In a revealing Sunday Times (£) interview yesterday with the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, the journalist Christina Lamb wrote:
He said he did not understand the shock at his announcement, given the continued failure of Hamas to return the hostages and of Israel to allow aid into Gaza.
Khan, who looked “exhausted,” is clearly bewildered by the outrage he has engendered through his request to the court to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defence minister over their alleged “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” in Gaza. He also requested arrest warrants for the three leaders of Hamas.
This is a man who just doesn’t begin to understand what he has done. He doesn’t have a clue why his decision is so terribly wrong. He thinks he’s been fair and just. He really thinks he’s done the right thing.
And the interview reveals that the reason for his bewilderment is a quite stunning loss of moral compass. Stunning — but all too familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention to what the bien-pensant British and European world has been telling itself for decades.
In the interview, Khan compares the Hamas onslaught against Israel with the IRA’s terrorist campaign against Britain. He said:
There were attempts to kill Margaret Thatcher, Airey Neave was blown up, Lord Mountbatten was blown up, there was the Enniskillen attack, we had kneecappings … But the British didn’t decide to say, “Well, on the Falls Road [the heart of Catholic Belfast] there undoubtedly may be some IRA members and Republican sympathisers, so therefore let’s drop a 2,000 lb bomb on the Falls Road.” You can’t do that.
What?
True, the IRA was a murderous outfit that perpetrated heinous acts of terror in both Northern Ireland and on the British mainland. However, this was in pursuit of a united Ireland which — while objectionable to many — was in itself not an unconscionable aim. What the IRA did not aim to do was murder all British people and have Ireland conquer England, Scotland and Wales. Hamas, by contrast, wants to inflict precisely that unconscionable fate upon Israel and the Jews.
Moreover, the IRA didn’t site missile batteries and construct an underground infrastructure of terrorist warfare beneath apartment buildings, schools and hospitals as Hamas did in Gaza, deliberately using the civilian population as cannon fodder and human shields.
The aim of Hamas is genocide, Israel’s destruction and the conquest of the west. Yet to Khan, it’s just terrorism and therefore on the same level as other terrorism. To equate IRA terrorism with genocide shows that the ICC prosecutor doesn’t understand what genocide is.
This astonishing failing is underscored by his other remarks. He dismisses the suggestion that he has drawn an obscene moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. But that’s exactly what he’s done.
He says we should want to live in a world “where law is applied equally”. Equality under the law is indeed the prerequisite of a civilised society. But that means the law must protect victims equally and act against victimisers equally.
Instead, Khan means that killing is equally bad whether it’s deliberately perpetrated against civilians or whether civilians are inadvertently killed in a just war against a brutal aggressor. To Khan, all who are killed are equal victims and therefore all must be protected. Although Israel says it’s killed around 14,000 combatants — achieving a rate of civilian losses in Gaza vastly lower than achieved by any other country in time of war — Khan makes no distinction between civilians and combatants killed by Israel. Like Hamas, he doesn’t even mention the combatants Israel has killed. They’re all just “Palestinians”. He says:
Whether those are the rights of Jewish victims or Palestinians, whether Muslim, Christian or of no belief, we must have the same moral outrage, love, care and concern — the point is they are all human beings.
Certainly, killings of civilians in warfare are tragic and regrettable. But all war involves of necessity a number of civilian casualties. If no civilian casualties can be permitted, a just war to defend the innocent becomes impossible. If Khan had been around in 1939, he would presumably have tried to prevent the Allies from defeating Hitler. Today, his logic means that Israel must not defend itself against an enemy aiming explicitly to commit another genocide of the Jews.
Khan has revealed himself to be a slavish product of the western intelligentsia, which has embraced moral and cultural relativism and no longer recognises the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, victim and victimiser.
Those who subscribe to this mindset are incapable of seeing not just the mote in their own eye but in the eyes of all who think like them. Accordingly, Khan says of the panel he assembled to advise him:
These are great lawyers I respect hugely who have stood up for principle throughout their life.
But the panel contained several partisans for the Palestinian cause and vicious Israel-bashers. Khan says of one of them, the 94 year-old American-Israeli lawyer and judge Theodor Meron, that he can’t be antisemitic because he’s a Jew. But Meron has a history of virulent opposition to Israeli policies towards the Palestinians.
The one thing this panel was not was objective. But Khan can’t see that because he inhabits the same cultural bubble as they do. He assumes that the panel members are principled because, like himself, they are all part of the establishment that wears legal high-mindedness on its sleeve. Yet Khan and his panel have recycled murderous lies about Israel. They claim that it is
causing extermination and/or murder, deliberately targeting civilians in conflict and using starvation as a weapon of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies.
Since this evidence comes from bodies like the UN, NGOs and other humanitarian organisations — or doctors in Gaza’s hospitals — it doesn’t occur to Khan and his panel that these bodies and individuals are merely recycling Hamas propaganda (and that some doctors and UN workers are actually Hamas operatives).
Khan and his panel can’t imagine that they have been fed lies, because they can’t conceive that human rights lawyers and humanitarian NGOs and institutions are motivated by anything other than conscience and moral purity.
The ICC’s brother-in-harms, the International Court of Justice, itself kicked Israel in the head on Friday when it ruled that the “catastrophic humanitarian situation” in Gaza which it had noted in January had deteriorated even further and was now “disastrous”.
Even though Israel had achieved the astonishing feat of moving approximately one million civilians from Rafah to relative safety from the IDF’s attack on Hamas’s key Rafah battalions — as the world had demanded, while saying it couldn’t be done — the court was still not satisfied. “We are not convinced that Israel is taking measures to protect the civilian population,” said the ICJ president.
The majority ruling was supported by 13 to 2. The two dissenters were the veteran (and deeply divisive) Israeli judge, Aharon Barak, and the hero of the court, the redoubtable Ugandan judge Julia Sebutinde, who said the court’s directive would leave Hamas “free to attack without Israel being able to respond” and that it implicitly ordered Israel “to disregard the safety and security of the over 100 hostages still held by Hamas”.
However, on the key question whether Israel should be told to abandon its assault on Hamas in Rafah, the court appeared to have left room for Israel to manoeuvre. Its order states:
The Court considers that, in conformity with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, Israel must immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
There are two ways of reading this paragraph. It may mean that Israel should halt its military offensive in Rafah or any other action there if this would physically destroy Palestinian life in Gaza — which Israel is demonstrably not doing and has no intention of doing. Or it could mean that Israel must halt its Rafah offensive because this or similar actions may bring about the physical destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza.
Some, like the international lawyer Natasha Hausdorff, think the meaning of the paragraph is plainly the former — which makes the order pointless. And as she observes, the widespread media claim that the ICJ has ordered Israel immediately to stop its military operation in Rafah is demonstrably untrue — the second time the media has misreported the ICJ in order to bash Israel.
But as Joshua Rozenberg (in whom I declare an interest) points out on his Substack blog, a number of ICJ judges themselves criticised the paragraph as ambiguous — and some of their own comments merely added to the confusion. Since the ICJ’s final order is the result of a process of negotiation between the judges, the ambiguity may have been a deliberate way of reaching a compromise.
Whatever was in these judges’ minds, the charges against Israel brought to the ICJ by Hamas’s ally South Africa bore no relation to reality whatsoever and the court should have thrown them out in the first instance as malevolent and vexatious. Whether as an act of celebration or defiance, Hamas reacted yesterday to the ICJ ruling by unleashing a volley of rockets from Rafah towards Tel Aviv and other parts of central Israel with the aim of killing yet more Israeli civilians, an aim thwarted once again only by Israel’s Iron Dome missile shield.
Those who haven’t been paying attention over the years might well wonder how it can possibly be that Israel is the only country singled out by international bodies as not being entitled to defend itself adequately against exterminatory attack.
The answer, bizarre as this may sound, is that the entire global humanitarian and “human rights” establishment has been fashioned into a weapon of extermination against the one state in the Middle East committed to upholding democracy and human rights.
This is because “human rights” culture is not what it says on the tin.
'‘Human rights” doctrine provides what purports to be the defining creed of the modern world in a promise to perfect humanity. Its values are thus deemed to rise way above laws devised by mere mortals and to enshrine instead supposedly universal values.
But these aren’t universal at all. Most countries don’t subscribe to them; for every “human right” there is a contrary one; and they are adjudicated by courts which bring to bear subjective views about where the balance between competing rights should be struck.
Rights derive from obligations, without which rights are philosophically and intellectually incoherent. Detached from obligations, rights become demands.
Law derives its legitimacy from expressing the boundaries of behaviour agreed by a sovereign nation in accordance with its culture and rooted in the consent of the people channelled through democratically elected parliaments. Universal human rights law is rooted in no such national culture and democratic consent. Radically deracinated from any national jurisdiction, it was always going to turn into an instrument of politics and ideology rather than justice and the protection of the innocent.
As the supposed “conscience” of the world, it has consequently been hijacked by a global community dominated by tyrannies, gangster states and terrorist regimes and turned into their instrument of destruction targeted at Israel, the one nation that stands in the way of the rest by refusing to lie down and die.
The “human rights” culture has now revealed itself to be intellectually and morally corrupt — even as western liberals cling to the fig leaf it provides for the attempt finally to drive Israel and the Jewish people out of the liberal world, its mind and its conscience forever.
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