Marco Rubio gunning for the ICC could take an object lesson from Trump’s learning curve. The longer he sought to make Tehran’s Mullahs and Mafiosi respect his MOM (Memorandum of Misunderstanding) the more he realised they were “scum” “liars” and “sick”
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The Secretary of State has begun the sacred duty of dismantling the International Criminal Court. To make it succumb he must keep sneers from the lips of sour sceptics.
The directive is equally valid for the United Nations and craven diverse bodies, not forgetting The Hague. All were meant to make atrocities costly for monsters who commit or enable genocide among other crimes against humanity.
Could it be President Trump deftly realigning America’s allies and enemies?
“Meant to” is the operative term. In reality global bodies have played the shameless part of atrocity-enablers and abetters. A preeminent figure of this perfidy is the UN Secretary-General himself—António Guterres.
The Portuguese’s inbuilt revulsion for Jewish lives is free for the use of any terrorist group which wants to use it. Musing that “Oct. 7 did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres as good as told Hamas to adopt that theme for talking points.
As enabler of terrorism, British barrister and disgraced ICC Prosecutor, Karim Khan isn’t much better. He stalled warrants of arrest for the masterminds behind Hamas: Mohammed Deif, Yahya Sinwar, and Ismail Haniyeh, until the mass murderers were safely deceased.
His arrest warrants for Israeli “warlords” conveyed their own point: Netanyahu and his war cabinet were as evil as the Oct. 7 perpetrators.
The ICC prosecutor, lately dismissed, was an ugly character.
For one thing, Khan was typical of the Israel-hating international lawyer who professes to act for the greatest good of humanity yet who covers for the greatest evil. Khan was not merely accused of serious sexual misconduct, but it is hard to contest his critics’ allegations that he sought political cover by pursuing arrest warrants against Israeli leaders—a move they argue shifted the conversation from his own conduct to one of the world’s most contentious geopolitical disputes.
In other words, after the ICC became increasingly viewed as a “kangaroo court” as allegations of Khan’s sexual misconduct surfaced, Khan targetted Israeli leaders to divert attention from his own criminal conduct.
Impulsive swings between humanitarianism and putting himself at the beck and call of barbarity was all in the day’s work of the accused sexual harrasser. Dismissed for praying on a staffer, Khan’s exploits discredited the ICC more than ever. His victim had no motive to invent such a complaint.
Hence it came as no shock when ICC’s member states voted to remove the baddy. Khan was the first chief prosecutor to be removed from office. The scandal won’t simply die and let the embattled court go on in the merry old way.
And the winners will be? The dirt bag out of the picture won’t invalidate the arrest warrants he issued, but Netanyahu in particular and the Likud party in general will breathe easier going into the elections.
Of course the ICC Japanese President glorifies her court as a bastion of the international rule of law. Bastion! Consider the ruling her court made that its jurisdiction extends to “Palestine” by reason of it being a state party to the Rome Statute.
Observe the offending falsehood that there exists a state named “Palestine.” Relegating international law to a fun amateur league puts the ICC in sync with its enabling partner, the International Court of Justice.
All of this defies common sense. Why would the ICC gamble with its already shaky standing and credibility? Any self-respecting law professor would poke gaping holes in the “state of Palestine.”
There must be — as indeed there are — embedded drivers permitting such legal junk to pass muster. No one has better explained the whys and methods than Shany Mor. In his perceptive article, “A Special Dictionary for Israel,” Mor cuts through what seems plain insanity to explain three drivers behind “thunderous intonations about international law.”
The first of them “deflects any suspicion of bias against Israel.” Emotional outbursts at Israel’s crass conduct in Gaza aren’t due to animus, so we are led to believe. They simply reflect “neutral applications of international law.”
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The second and third functions go real deep.
“For violators of international law our dominant image of ‘war criminals’ and ‘international tribunals’ is, of course, the Nazis. Attaching the terminology to Israel’s every military action over the decades, speaks to the fantasy of hauling the Jews before some tribunal where their guilt can finally be established.”
A third driver is more pathological.
In the world of global activists, there is a near-theological devotion to the postulate that Israel is uniquely evil, standing in the way of global brotherhood, and that good people everywhere would see that clearly if networks of powerful people weren’t using their money and influence to distort the truth and silence critique. The only way to make this pathology sound like a reasoned political program is to resort to international law. The argument is: there are laws and Israel is violating them, therefore my consuming hatred of Israel is just an application of these higher principles. It is necessary to stick to this conceit, otherwise their obsessive pathology starts looking like, well, an obsessive pathology.”
The Manufacturing of ‘Genocide’
Such perverted motives are disturbing, and the UN is an ideal proving house to apply and test them. Forgive the contradiction in terms but in September of 2025 a “UN-backed independent commission” produced the : Israel in its war on Gaza had committed genocide.
“Israeli authorities deliberately inflicted conditions of life on the Palestinians in Gaza calculated to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza, which is an underlying act of genocide.”
The Commision didn’t bother to reconcile their findings with Israel’s well-documented evacuation warnings, humanitarian corridors, historic aid deliveries, medical assistance to Palestinians, and precision targeting. What’s worse is that this dubious conclusion was reached after two long and fraught years of war: the case of genocide was brought by South Africa in late 2023. In a separate investigation on Israeli “criminal” conduct in Gaza, the ICC began investigating war crimes in March 2021 — well before the Palestinians committed the Oct. 7 atrocity.
Why the delay? Why, if genocide and starvation were genuine, did the UN, ICC, and ICJ take their leisurely time? After many years of killing and starving there wouldn’t be too many people left alive in the Gaza strip. And, come to think of it, what made Israel so tardy, if not outright slovenly, in committing genocide? The Israelis purportedly possess nuclear weapons, after all.
Without fake law fake charges inevitably flop. Just how bogus can the law that The Hague courts rely on be? After all they are venerated institutions of justice.
The answer is, very bogus indeed. Take the ICJ’s landmark 2004 “Advisory Opinion” on the so called “wall” that Israel constructed to stop the Arafat-inspired spate of horrific suicide bomber attacks.
The court begins its argument like so:
“The territorial boundaries of the Mandate for Palestine were laid down by various instruments.” Keep the eyes peeled — in graduated steps Occupied Palestine will be conjured up from the Mandate for Palestine which Britain governed from 1923 to 1948.
Step by false step from Par 17 on, the hackneyed fake, “Occupied Palestinian Territory” takes the identity of the Mandate, as “laid down by various instruments.” Evidently Marco Rubio is gunning for a court of law of great cunning.
And now he has picked the weaponry he’ll employ. To reinforce the levers for dismantling the ICC, Rubio has threatened not only stubborn member countries with prickly penalties, but non-state actors if they continue working with the court.
A rush of withdrawals by member countries will surely follow his threatened sanctions and travel bans. Venezuela lost no time taking evasive action by withdrawing its membership of the ICC.
What appears to be driving Washington is more ambitious than Rubio’s gut objection to the court posturing as a, “world tribunal with near-unlimited reach” and powers.
Could it be President Trump deftly realigning America’s allies and enemies? Taking out a meddling international court would give a project like that a decisive shot in the arm.
READ MORE from Steve Apfel:
The War Israel Was Never Allowed to Win
No Pieces of Paper Ever Bound the Islamic Republic
A Cancer Within Diaspora Communities
Steve Apfel was a business economist, founder and director of the School of Management Accounting, who now writes full time. As a veteran authority on anti-Zionism his 2012 book, Hadrian’s Echo: the why and wherefores of Israel’s Critics was acclaimed by top Middle East scholars.
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