US government officials have threatened the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague, telling its Prosecutor Karim Khan that if he issues arrest warrants against Israeli officials over their war crimes in Gaza, the US government could impose sanctions on him, other ICC personnel, and their family members.
US senators even threatened to invade the Hague if it tries to prosecute Israeli officials.
UN experts: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza
This April, Israel’s extreme-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a prominent member of the state security cabinet, called for “total annihilation” of Gaza.
Smotrich cited the Biblical nation of Amalek – a genocidal reference also made by far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
These invocations of Amalek are clear calls for genocide. In the Book of Samuel, God orders King Saul, “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys”.
The UN’s top legal body, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled this January that Israel could be investigated on “plausible” charges of violating the Genocide Convention. (The ICJ and ICC are separate institutions, although both are located at the Hague.)
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have stated that Israel is violating this ICJ ruling that demands that it abide by the Genocide Convention.
Top UN experts have publicly warned that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
In addition to bombing civilian areas and killing tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children, Israel has used hunger as a weapon, starving Palestinian civilians.
The US director of the UN World Food Program warned that Gaza is now suffering from a “full-blown famine”, after seven months of a suffocating Israeli blockade.
The US government has provided the vast majority of the weapons that Israel is using to bomb civilian areas in Gaza. If Israeli officials face charges over their war crimes, Washington would be complicit.
US senators threaten to sanction and invade the ICC
On April 24, a dozen Republican senators sent a threatening letter to the ICC prosecutor. The media outlet Zeteo obtained the document.
The missive was signed by major GOP leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Tom Cotton.
“You Have Been Warned.” Republican Senators including Tom Cotton, Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz threaten the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan over possible Israel arrest warrants in a letter addressed to him: https://t.co/r9x3irQpLI pic.twitter.com/ykwKVKSUtR
— Zeteo (@zeteo_news) May 6, 2024
In the aggressively worded letter, the senators pledged to “sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States” if Israeli officials face charges over their war crimes in Gaza.
“Target Israel and we will target you”, they threatened.
Issuing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu or other top officials would be seen “not only as a threat to Israel’s sovereignty but to the sovereignty of the United States”, the US politicians wrote, making it clear that they see Israel as a key part of the US empire.
“Our country demonstrated in the American Service-Members’ Protection Act the lengths to which we will go to protect that sovereignty”, they added.
The American Service-Members’ Protection Act is popularly known as the “Hague Invasion Act”. The legislation was signed into law in 2002 by President George W. Bush.
Human Rights Watch explained that this law “authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the court”.
By invoking the Hague Invasion Act in their 2024 letter to the ICC prosecutor, the Republican senators made it clear that the two-decade-old legislation is still valid: hawks in Washington are willing to invade the Hague to save Israeli officials if they are prosecuted.
Biden administration double standards on the ICC
It is not just Republicans who are threatening the ICC. This is bipartisan in Washington.
The Israeli press reported that, behind the scenes, the Joe Biden administration is also aggressively pressuring the ICC not to issue arrest warrants for Israeli officials.
In 2020, when Donald Trump was in the White House, the ICC opened an investigation into war crimes committed in the war in Afghanistan. The US and NATO forces were included in this inquiry.
In anger, the US government imposed sanctions on the Hague. Trump administration officials even threatened family members of ICC staff.
When Biden came into power in 2021, he sought to differentiate himself from his Republican predecessor. Secretary of State Antony Blinken publicly announced the end of the Trump-era sanctions and visa restrictions against ICC personnel.
However, despite the Democratic administration’s claims to support the so-called “rules-based international order”, the Biden White House is now also intimidating ICC staff – if only a bit more quietly and less extravagantly than Trump and the Republicans have done.
The Biden administration furiously opposes any efforts to hold Israeli officials responsible for the war crimes they have committed in Gaza, with US weapons and political support.
This demonstrates Washington’s glaring double standards, as Biden himself had praised the ICC for issuing an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2023.
Secretary of State Blinken urged ICC member states to arrest Putin if he entered their territory. But a year later, he is aggressively pressuring the ICC to stop it from charging Israeli officials.
US and Israel supported Karim Khan as ICC prosecutor
Ironically, it was the US and Israel who had lobbied for the election of Karim Khan as ICC prosecutor.
This is despite the fact that the US and Israel are not state parties to the Rome Statute, and therefore are not members of the ICC.
It keeps getting better: Now the report says Israel “worked hard behind the scenes” to get #KarimKhan elected to #ICC pic.twitter.com/rdSF3vaK59
— Noa Landau נעה לנדאו (@noa_landau) February 12, 2021
US and Israeli lobbying paid off. In 2021, Khan entered office as ICC prosecutor, and immediately dropped the investigation into war crimes committed by US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
But today, seven months into Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, the ICC is facing global condemnation for its inaction in the face of what UN experts say is clearly a genocide.
Global South leaders have long denounced the ICC as a colonial institution. Until 2016, only Africans had been tried for the worst crimes at the Court.
Khan is being forced to act, if he hopes to save face and salvage the legitimacy of the ICC. But his former sponsors in the US and Israel have turned against him.
It is not just justice for the Palestinian people, but the reputation of the International Criminal Court itself that is at stake.
Eric Arthur Blair
2024-05-08 at 01:39
ICC = International Clown Court
Putin evacuated children from a Ukrainian war zone then returned them to their parents, but the ICC declared him to be a criminal kidnapper.
Around 10,000 Palestinians are languishing in Israeli prisons (many are women and children), illegally kidnapped and detained by the IDF, but the LEMSO* mentions nothing of them.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/17/the-thousands-of-palestinians-israel-arrests-tortures-hold-even-in-death
The ICC must not prosecute any US or Israeli defacto genociders or the US will invade the Hague.
On US campuses, peaceful protesters against genocide are smeared as pro-genocide antisemite terrorists by the LEMSO*.
US definitions of freedom and liberty involve foreign aggressions that deny others of their freedom and liberty (and their lives).
USA fabricate 100% lies about China committing genocide in Xinjiang, while the US deep state, founded on genocide, is now 100% behind the genocide of Gazans.
Orwellian much?
‘War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.’
*Lying Establishment Media Sewer Outlets
Energieerhaltungssatz
2024-05-11 at 05:00
“International Clown Court” sounds good, I prefer Imperial Colonial Cord, because I think that it is more imperial than international and acts as a cord / leash for the colonies.
Criminals: “Genocide is such a broad term, it can be applied to everyone, not just the people we would like to see as the victims. Use “holocaust” instead, it´s more specific and we don´t look like the bad guys.”
If you have to de-monetize people for using the word “genocide”, then you know that you are on the wrong side of history. And I don´t give a damn about gender, race, skin colour, religion, sexual preferences or whether someone is right, left or whatever if they support Stepan Bandera loving Nazis in Ukraine or a Genocide in Gaza.
JonnyJames
2024-05-08 at 09:43
Typical hypocrisy, double-standards and vulgar display of lawless thuggery. If you can’t bribe officials into compliance, you threaten them personally, someone might have an unfortunate accident and end up with cement shoes. I have more respect for the Mafia, at least they are more honest.
There is no rule of law, only the law of the jungle. The pursuit of power and interests is the name of the game. The US has threatened ICC before, under the DT regime. Wannabe tough guy, bed-wetting coward John Bolton was huffing and puffing about it in his usual pathetic manner.
https://www.france24.com/en/20180910-usa-trump-threatens-arrest-icc-judges-american-soldiers-afghan-war-crimes
No matter who “wins” the sham no-choice elections, the policies continue. The US MassMediaCartel (MiniTrue, or what EAB calls ‘LEMSO’) shoves the DT and JB in our faces every day for years and years – it’s the same scary episode of Twilight Zone over again.
The contrived drama of the Freak Show continues. Which genocidal sociopath will the US “vote” for? At this point, instead of legitimizing an obvious sham, US dwellers should protest the polls and list direct demands instead.
Eric Arthur Blair
2024-05-08 at 15:15
In yet another disgusting perversion of all that is decent and true, lawyer David Mcbride, who bravely exposed the war crimes of the Australian military in Afghanistan, is being prosecuted by an actual Kangaroo court in the land of the kangaroos.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/05/07/whistleblower-david-mcbride-to-be-sentenced/#comment-484231
Fuck the AngloEuroZioNazi Neoimperialist Deep State.
Free Assange!!!!
Ziggy
2024-05-09 at 17:14
This sounds like a vile threat from a bunch of spychopaths. And strange it seems that these senators name mr. Assad in Syria, mr. Khameinei in Iran and also mr. Jinping in China even though those leaders have not by no means behaved in the same manner as the Zionist state – and no one can argue about that. Then these same senators support the ICC when it comes to its arrest warrants against Russian offilcials regarding events in Ukraine even though Russia is not a member of the ICC (same as the Zionist state and the US). Still these utter hypocritcal maniacs have the audacity to end this threatening letter by claiming ,,you have been warned.” Do these idiots dont even see their own blatant double standards when it comes to this???