ICC Gives Itself Authority to Adjudicate Israeli "War Crimes:"

 Video Of The Week - ICC - MK. Bennet says "Charge me First" https://tinyurl.com/1egc9tmn

For the full article by Daniel Pomerantz go to -  https://tinyurl.com/i5c70jic 

Last Friday the International Criminal Court (also referred to as “the Hague”) announced its decision to exercise jurisdiction over Israel and within “Palestine” for the purpose of prosecuting Israel for alleged war crimes.

Despite the legalistic sounding name of the “court” it actually functions as a political body: in this case a body that on Friday granted itself the authority to bring politically driven prosecutions against any country in the world, whether or not that country has agreed to be a part of the ICC’s activities.

This prosecution will set a dangerous precedent not only for the Jewish state, its leaders, soldiers and private citizens, but also for citizens of all nations that may potentially become the next victims of this growing international populism. Friday’s decision may change the very nature of international law in a manner that stands to harm our growth as a global community.

The International Criminal Court is not a “court”

The words “International Criminal Court” are seductively misleading: they give the impression that the ICC is a body that interprets legislative law. It is not.  Certainly, in theory, the ICC is supposed to perform like a court. In practice, however, it functions as political body that carries out decisions based on the interests of its members.

Case in point: prosecutor Fatou Bensouda came to the ICC after her tenure as Minister of Justice of Gambia, where she presided over and enforced the country’s laws and practices in favor of torture, arbitrary arrest, legal rape, sex trafficking and female genital mutilation.  Despite a 2018 US State Department report detailing these practices, and despite the fact that Gambia is a signatory to the Rome Statute, prosecutor Bensouda has not seen fit to prosecute the leadership of her homeland, including herself.

Other parties who have never been prosecuted at the Hague include leaders of Syria who are responsible for the largest loss of human life in recent history, Turkey, which in the last decades murdered thousands of Kurds; China, which is holding millions of Muslims in “reeducation” camps; Iran, which is behind the war crimes being perpetrated in Yemen, and many more.

The sheer number of human lives that might have been saved by a proper application of the ICC’s mission is in the millions.  Instead,  the ICC, an unelected, undemocratic political body is attempting to apply unchecked global power based on political agenda. This stands to injure global trust in international institutions and the very nature of international law, thus posing serious and long-term harm to our world’s growth as a cooperative global community.

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ICC and War Crimes

Video Of The Week “BREAKING THE SILENCE”- https://tinyurl.com/seqh7l5

 By JPOST EDITORIAL   DECEMBER 22, 2019

Israel does not commit war crimes.

That is the message Israel needs to send the world, in light of the recommendation on Friday by the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, to investigate Israel regarding alleged war crimes stemming from 2014’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza; settlement activity since then; and the IDF’s response to weekly riots along the Gaza border fence.

Bensouda, in what seems like little more than a fig leaf, wrote that there is also a “reasonable basis” to believe that Hamas and “Palestinian armed groups” committed war crimes. As if there is any doubt that the indiscriminate firing of thousands of rockets on Sderot, Ashkelon and communities nearby – or purposefully setting alight thousands of dunams of agricultural land and forests – is anything but a war crime.

But it is obscene for Bensouda to place Israel and terrorist organizations on equal footing. Unlike Hamas – and what Bensouda called in sanitized language “Palestinian armed groups” – Israel does not intentionally harm civilians in Gaza or anywhere else.

Yes, civilians are harmed in Gaza by IDF actions, but they are not the target.

In 2015, a blue ribbon panel of former top military leaders and generals from eight democratic countries wrote a report after conducting an investigation into Operation Protective Edge. Their conclusion: Israel’s conduct in the conflict “met and in some respects exceeded the highest standards we set for our own nations’ militaries... The IDF not only met its obligations under the Law of Armed Conflict, but often exceeded these on the battlefield at significant tactical cost.”

Jews living at the site of the biblical Shiloh, or in the shadow of the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, are not committing war crimes. One can argue the political wisdom of their living there, and one can say that making peace with the Palestinians is more difficult because they live there, but to say that a Jew living in Judea – the cradle of Jewish civilization – is a war criminal, is ridiculous.

And that absurdity needs to be highlighted as Israel fights Bensouda’s recommendation and works to get the court to not pursue this case. Or, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting: “To turn the fact that Jews are living in their land into a war crime is an absurdity of unimaginable proportions.”

There are many arguments Jerusalem will use to convince the Western democracies – first and foremost the US – to put pressure on the ICC to drop this case.

One argument will be that the court lacks jurisdiction in the matter because it only has standing when a state that is a signatory to the 1998 Rome Statute – which established the court – turns to it to take action. Israel’s position is that despite Palestinian claims to the contrary, and even though the Palestinian Authority signed the Rome Statute, there is no Palestinian state.

Jerusalem will also argue to the world’s democracies that what starts with Israel will not end with Israel, and that if today Israeli politicians and soldiers will be charged with war crimes for the unintentional death of innocents during a military campaign, then tomorrow the politicians and soldiers of other countries will also find themselves so accused.

Those arguments – which are strong and sound – are legalistic. They need to be presented, and they will be presented. But as they are being presented, a simple truth must be repeated over and over, because the lies about Israel committing war crimes are repeated over and over: Syria intentionally commits war crimes, Iran intentionally commits war crimes, Turkey intentionally commits war crimes – Israel does not.

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