An internationally acclaimed British barrister blasted the International Criminal Court after it issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Natasha Hausdorff, an expert on international law, foreign affairs, and national security policy, recently appeared on Dan Senor’s Call Me Back podcast.
She noted that the warrant was “principally an allegation of intentional starvation, which included a host of false allegations … my organization, UK Lawyers for Israel, went through that public summary line by line and in a further submission to the court, and a letter to the prosecutor proved, I should say, line by line, that every phrase of every sentence was, in fact, false.”
Hausdorff explained that when the Rome Statute — the treaty that established the ICC — was drafted, “a particular political agenda started to creep in,” adding that the agenda caused both the United States and Israel to refuse to join the ICC. She further explained the Rome Statute was manipulated so that the presence of Jews in the Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria could be considered a crime.
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“Bashar Assad, under his regime over the last, call it, you know, 10 to 15 years, there has been something in the order of over 600,000 Syrians slaughtered,” Senor noted. “Talk about a genocide, an orchestrated genocide with the use of chemical weapons and the complete shelling and destruction of whole Syrian towns, largely Sunni Muslim towns and villages, and some two million Syrians who have been displaced; some internally, but most of them externally displaced. You have talked about forced starvations. We can talk about what famines are like in places like North Korea. We can talk about the wave of human rights abuses in countries like Iran. So just take Kim Jong-un, Bashar Assad, and the Supreme Leader of Iran, Khamenei, as the three examples. The ICC has never, not once, I don’t think, targeted any of those leaders.”
“We are seeing a vicious cycle of the misreporting in the media and the false narratives, the blood libels, ultimately,” Hausdorff stated. “This is the modern blood libel, to accuse Israelis of killing Palestinian children while Jews were accused of killing Christian children in the Middle Ages in pursuit of their blood. This is no different, except that it now has the modern acceptable face of the hatred of the Jewish state. And I think that’s why it’s become so pervasive and it’s so effective at fueling this weaponization of international law against the Jewish state.”
“Members of the ICC have said, ‘We’re not going to participate. And we’re not going to comply,’ I think also chips away at the credibility of the institution,” Senor stated. “I know the U. S, with the new administration coming in and the new Congress coming in, are talking about taking some very strong action against the ICC. We could wind up a year from now with the ICC being a shell of itself.”
“All of these legal terms, genocide, apartheid, all of the Arab world is Jew-free,” Hausdorff noted. “And yet, this allegation is directed at Israel, where there is a 20% minority of Arabs that live as equal citizens. I mean, all of this is utterly extraordinary. But, outside of these exchanges that we’re having, it is becoming the received wisdom. The ICC isn’t launching this initiative in a vacuum.”