The International Criminal Court has decided that Jews are guilty of a terrible crime – the crime of living.
That is what the ICC actually meant in its announcement that it has accepted embattled Prosecutor Karim Khan’s request to issue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Khan’s actions were politicized from the start and never based in facts or reality, because in the antisemitic fantasy of the United Nations, the State of Israel and Jews in general are the most evil force in the universe.
The great crime of which Netanyahu and Gallant are guilty is not causing starvation or causing civilian casualties in Gaza. That is a proven lie. Their crime is not ordering 7 million Israeli Jews to surrender themselves to Hamas and stretch out their necks to be beheaded. Their crime is fighting a war so that their citizens are not massacred over and over again.
Their crime is attempting to prevent another Holocaust.
This has been obvious to anyone not infected with Jew-hatred since the start. The people accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ cheered the real act of genocide on October 7, have been calling for a genocide of the Jewish people since the massacre, and are more concerned with saving Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Iranian masters than they have ever been with protecting civilians in Gaza.
Khan has flaunted all norms and legal standards in his crusade against Israel, beginning with his deliberate disregard for the principle of Complementarity and his bizarre decision to announce the warrants on CNN rather than through the usual processes, continuing with his cancelation of fact-finding missions and his insistence on ignoring all new information and emerging facts that prove him wrong.
Whether Khan’s actions are the result of the accusations of harassment against him or because he actually believes in theblood libels is immaterial. He and the ICC have placed themselves squarely on the side of the Nazis and those who seek the genocide of the Jewish people.
Neither Khan nor the ICC will ever request arrest warrants against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for cutting off water to a million Kurdish people with his indiscriminate bombings. Nor will they seek arrest warrants against South African leaders for deliberately starving thousands of poor people in the abandoned Stilfontein gold mine, banning the provision of all food and water even as reports have emerged of people dying inside the mines and being too weak to leave. Both these nations have emerged as the biggest supporters of Hamas’ genocidal ambitions over the last year.
It's only a crime when Jews do it – even if the Jews did not do it at all, because the Jews committed the greatest crime of all just by being born Jews.
The ICC has effectively endorsed the pogromists who engaged in a Jew-hunt in Amsterdam. It has endorsed those who call for “10,000 October 7s” at Columbia University. It has endorsed those who assault Jews in Brooklyn and shoot Jews in the back in Chicago. It has endorsed the suicide bombers, the rockets, the Iranian nuclear bomb, and the Nazi gas chambers. It has endorsed every pogrom, every massacre, every act of persecution, and every act of murder committed against innocent Jewish people over the last 2,000 years.
The ICC has declared that it is not assault to attack Jews, it is not murder to deliberately kill Jews. It has declared that it is a crime for Jews to defend themselves and even to be alive. It has declared 1-year-old Kfir Bibas a criminal for the worst crime of all, being born to Jewish parents, and it has legitimized his kidnapping at the age of nine-months.
The results of the ICC decision will not be felt primarily in Israel, which will continue to fight for the right of its children to live. It will be felt by Jews around the world. There will be attacks on Jews as the direct result of these arrest warrants. Nazis, Jew-haters, and genocidal maniacs the world over have just been told that they are right, that they have the right and duty to oppose the existence of Jews, to harass Jews, attack Jews, and even to kill Jews.
The move to arrest Israeli leaders was foolish as well. With the Republican victories in this month’s elections in the US, America is set to impose crippling sanctions on the ICC for violating its founding principles and siding with Khamenei over the 101 hostages still held in Gaza. But history has proven time and time again that hatred of Jews is powerful enough to override common sense and can turn the smartest people into madmen.
This is just another attempt to turn back the clock to the 1930s, when the Jews were defenseless in the face of the coming Nazi slaughter. But it is not the same clock.
Karim Khan, the ICC, and the Nazis they support should know this: The days of impunity for attacking and murdering Jews are over. We will not go quietly into that good night, no matter how much you rage against our continued existence and survival. The Jewish people fought and died for the right to live in 1948 after the world had denied that right over the previous decade and a half, and we will not give up that right ever again. You cannot take away our right to live or our ability to defend our lives and the lives of our children.
When the ICC is a forgotten relic in the scrap heap of history, destroyed by its embrace of dictators and genocidal antisemites and disregard for law and human rights, three words will continue to ring out in the historic homeland of the Jewish people and around the world, those words feared and hated most by the antisemites who hunt Jews on the streets of Amsterdam, New York, and Chicago:
‘Am Yisrael Chai.’