ICC a sign of a deep sickness that could kill us in Australia, too
That UN agencies mourn the Butcher of Tehran as they seek to arrest democratic Israel’s leaders presents the morally inverted, politically corrupted nature of what passes for liberal internationalism today.
The contrasting treatment, especially at the UN, of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash on May 19, starkly presents the morally inverted, politically corrupted and more than half insane nature of what passes for liberal internationalism today.
The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague has formally requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes in Gaza.
Netanyahu is the duly elected Prime Minister of the Middle East’s only democracy. On October 7 his country was attacked, while a ceasefire was in place, by the terrorist group Hamas, which is sponsored by Iran. In the attack the most savage, sadistic and sexually depraved terror was unleashed as 1200 people were exuberantly tortured and butchered, and some 250 taken hostage. Hamas then retreated into its tunnels below the civilians of Gaza.
Netanyahu’s government retaliated, with a few clear objectives – to end Hamas rule in Gaza, to destroy Hamas and to ensure October 7 wouldn’t happen again. Hamas vowed it would repeat October 7 over and over. Meanwhile it killed some of the hostages, tortured others, even small children (there’s video) and subjected women and girls to sexual assault, sexual terror.
Raisi, unlike Netanyahu, didn’t have a background in politics, certainly not democratic politics, more the legal system, specifically as a prosecutor. In a totalitarian theocracy such as Iran, prosecutors are always busy. Before becoming president Raisi was most famous for his role on the Tehran Death Committee in 1988. Across the Islamic Republic of Iran at that time many thousands of political prisoners were tortured and killed. No jurist was a more enthusiastic deliverer of death than Raisi. Later, when president, he looked back on those days with fondness and claimed the executions as a particular achievement for Iran.
Raisi ran unsuccessfully for president a couple of times. He was neither popular nor in the first rank of Iranian leaders, or of Islamic theologians, though he gave himself the title of Ayatollah. In 2021 Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, decided, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they would make Raisi president. He was a reliable hardliner and someone the IRGC in particular thought they could control.
Iranian elections used to have some limited meaning. Elected officials never really had power and Iranian voters several times elected notionally moderate presidents to no avail. The real powers, the IRGC and the office of the Supreme Leader, decided who could run. But much more than the president, they wielded state power.
Consequently, Iranians stopped bothering to vote. When Raisi won, the turnout was claimed to be 49 per cent, though even this is regarded as an exaggeration.
Since Raisi became president in 2021, Iran has been energetic. It redoubled the vice police. Iranian women and girls are routinely arrested, sexually assaulted and beaten to death for offences such as not wearing their hijabs properly. One such case, of a young woman named Mahsa Amini, who died in 2022, set off a round of riots and protests that were savagely repressed, with hundreds dead and more than 20,000 imprisoned.
Internationally, Raisi’s government became famous for murdering Iranian dissidents in Europe and the US. Western governments regard Iran as the chief state sponsor of terrorism. Apart from Hamas, Iran has built Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon, into a powerful non-state military force, with perhaps 150,000 missiles and tens of thousands of soldiers.
Tehran funds and provides weapons to Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Syria. All these groups deal out death fairly indiscriminately to their opponents and internal critics. Iran also backs the Houthi rebels, whom Australia has just declared a terrorist organisation under our law. They fire missiles at Israel but the Houthis’ great significance has been to massively disrupt shipping in the Red Sea. They exempt Chinese and Russian shipping, which is as sure a sign of Iranian control of their activities.
Many of the deaths Iran caused under Raisi occurred on the soil of nations over which the International Criminal Court claims jurisdiction. Yet the ICC never produced a warrant for Raisi’s arrest. Indeed, the UN lowered its flag to half-mast to honour Raisi after his death. The EU, not quite as otiose as the UN but surely its first cousin in the fatuousness of much that it says and does, used its most senior officials to send heartfelt and sincere condolences over Raisi’s death.
A former immigration minister of Belgium, Theo Francken, chided the EU for praising a “butcher and a mass murderer”. A Swedish member of the European parliament, David Lega, asked the EU leaders: “Can you ever look the brave women and freedom fighters of Iran in the eye again?”
You’ve never heard of Francken or Lega and you never will. Voices like theirs are marginal now.
The ethos of institutional liberal internationalism, especially when associated with the UN, has become an inverted parody of what it was once meant to be. The UN culture is a result of a combination of activism from dictatorships, especially China and Russia; plus the in-built voting power of the Arab, North African and Muslim blocs, none of which is sympathetic to democracy, and the ideological leftism of the activist and NGO class in Western societies themselves.
Thus the UN frequently produces abominations with a kind of PG Wodehouse comic quality – committees on women’s rights headed by Saudi Arabia, human rights bodies chaired by China, non-proliferation committees headed by Pakistan and the like.
Feeding into that are two other dynamics. One is that most nations are concerned, understandably but dismally, only to avoid getting themselves criticised in any UN committee. So they go along to get along. And they like to get their little share of UN goodies. So they don’t object to some moral grotesquerie to secure the position of deputy rotating chairperson of the Pots and Pans Committee of the Under Secretary’s eminent Consultative Group.
Far more toxic is the sick obsession in this fetid culture with Israel and Jews. This is a kind of reverse intersectionality. Modern demented left-wing activism absurdly defines Israel as a colonist state. Demented right-wing activism draws on centuries of Western anti-Semitism. Most Arab nations, though many have recently made good accommodations with Israel, would nonetheless rather not have any non-Muslim state in the Middle East, while the tradition of Arab anti-Semitism roars. China, Russia and all their friends will routinely seek to hurt Israel in order to hurt America.
All of this comes together in a witch’s brew of anti-Semitism cloaked in the faux high-minded verbiage of liberal internationalism. Very frequently, specialist UN human rights bodies pass more resolutions criticising Israel than they do concerning the rest of the world combined. Don’t worry about Uighurs or Tibetans or Christians in China; never mind about labour camps in North Korea; leave the Arab world’s treatment of women or indeed of gays to one side – all the human rights evil in the world is insanely attributed to Israel.
By the way, the only nation in the Middle East that has big gay pride days is Israel. I’ve seen the gay pride days in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But somehow you never see a protest march with a sign: Queers for Israel.
That the UN and its institutions have become so morally corrupted is partly the fault of the West, as it has lost power, cohesion, self-confidence and the ability to believe in and argue for the values it once regarded as universal.
The UN has been a politically corrupt body for a long time. Our response was not always this feeble. In 1975, only 30 years after the Holocaust, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism. At the time, under Gerald Ford’s presidency, the US seemed all astray, after Watergate and the failures in Vietnam. Its ambassador to the UN was the professorial, slightly dishevelled-looking Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a cloud of stray hairs and half-dropped papers but a whirlwind of moral force. He went on, this most untelegenic of figures, to be a long-term Democrat senator for New York.
He strode, this ungainly figure, to the lectern and thundered forth a modern Gettysburg Address, in its way the finest speech ever delivered at the UN. Moynihan began: “The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations and the world that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by and it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.” This was not bluster. The US stirred itself to get what was in fact a racist motion reversed, and it succeeded.
Back then Australia voted with the US, unlike now. Joe Biden denounced the ICC action as an outrage. His Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said he’d work with Republican senators, notably Lindsey Graham, to consider imposing US sanctions on officials of the ICC who enacted such infamy. Biden, in my view a generally weak president, on this has been strong. Perhaps the issue called to an earlier version of Biden, when America itself was stronger.
In Australia, Anthony Albanese couldn’t express any view at all. Albanese has become the Incredible Shrinking Man of strategic issues. He has rolled into an ever smaller ball and seems now ready to disappear altogether on national security, as though he were always a conjurer’s trick.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong stayed gravely silent. Richard Marles, as ever, posed heroically and said nothing. The independent foreign minister, Ed Husic, was the government’s most voluble and forthcoming figure. He thinks the ICC a wonderful thing and is shocked, truly shocked, that Peter Dutton could criticise it. Husic, like Dutton, at least has a position, though any relationship between Husic’s positions and the government’s seems accidental.
On national security now the Albanese government resembles a large orange-green jelly that has been quivering so intensely it has slowly lost its structural integrity and collapsed into a thousand tiny pieces, each one of them quivering alone. Dutton may be a long way from becoming prime minister, but on this issue he’s had a clear, straightforward position, with the benefit in this case of being right in principle.
Of course, Netanyahu deserves great criticism. He has become an increasingly counter-productive Prime Minister for Israel. This is despite past mighty achievements – liberalising and growing the Israeli economy, pioneering new relationships in Asia, welcoming millions of immigrants into the country, creating a good life for Jewish and Arab Israelis alike, and then, during Donald Trump’s presidency, achieving the Abraham Accords in which Israel exchanged diplomatic recognition with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
But he became too arrogant, too self-obsessed, too complacent. The October 7 attacks are wholly the moral responsibility of Hamas, but they also reflect a shocking intelligence failure, and simple preparedness failure, on Israel’s part. Similarly, Netanyahu has not been able, or perhaps not willing to try, in recent years to control the lawlessness of some of the Israelis who live in the West Bank.
Netanyahu must bear responsibility for these matters. Now, he faces intense criticism from his cabinet colleagues for refusing to address governance in the Gaza Strip once Israel is finished its military operation. None of this remotely makes Netanyahu a war criminal. Israel has not starved Gaza. Hamas itself has made it difficult to get aid convoys safely into Gaza. Egypt has shut its border with Gaza because it doesn’t like Israel controlling the other side. But this means no aid from that quarter. Hamas and its allies have attacked aid shipments coming through the pier the US built to provide a sea route for aid to Gaza.
Similarly, Hamas’s casualty figures are greatly exaggerated. There has been terrible death and destruction in Gaza and this is entirely Hamas’s responsibility. Even today, Hamas could end all the suffering by releasing some Israeli hostages and accepting the ceasefire Israel has been offering for months. Hamas attacked Israel in the most sickening manner possible, then hid among and underneath Palestinian civilians. The ICC seems to be of the view that this means Israel is forbidden from waging a military campaign against Hamas. The UN itself recently halved its estimate of the number of women and children killed in Gaza, which suggests Israel’s efforts to keep civilian casualties as low as it can have been meaningful.
The ICC has no jurisdiction as Palestine is not a state and Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC. And finally, the ICC is meant to act only where national governments can’t or won’t act. Israel has a strong judicial system and will certainly have a plenitude of inquiries once the military action in Gaza is complete. The odious ICC action therefore has to be seen as a political expression of the cultural collapse and degradation of the old liberal international ideals.
It’s up to the nations that believe in those ideals, most importantly the US but, you would expect, also its allies and like-minded nations, to vigorously reform or, if this is impossible, simply walk away from those institutions.
Instead, Ireland, Spain and Norway extended formal diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine. This is a common but bizarre conceit of our day. There is no state of Palestine. Hopefully one day there will be, but this can come about, as the US argues, only through negotiation between Israel and Palestinian representatives.
But, as everyone knows, any Palestinian leader who makes any kind of peace with Israel will surely be assassinated by extremists in his own camp. Some Palestinian groups, such as Hamas, are utterly transparent in their anti-Semitism and vow never to recognise any Jewish state. Others theoretically recognise Israel’s right to exist but have erected a whole lot of preconditions and red lines they know Israel can never possibly meet. Therefore they won’t ever have to face the hard compromises and choices a Palestinian state would necessitate.
Instead, all the Western gestures of solidarity with the Palestinians have amply and warmly justified Hamas’s terror. The Albanese government rewarded Hamas when it declared, through a very confused and poor speech by Wong, it would recognise Palestine before an agreement was reached with Israel.
Israeli legal scholar and commentator Eugene Kontorovich surely calls out a gruesome truth when he writes: “Hamas’ grisly terror raid on October 7 has proved to be the single most stunningly successful act in gaining support for the Palestinian cause … The bloodier the terror attacks, the more stark the eliminationist rhetoric, the more support for a Palestinian state.”
Kontorovich identifies a crippling syndrome. The more savage the terror, the more entranced Western elite opinion becomes. If Israel responds that same elite instantly reverts to the rhetoric and operating principle of de-escalation.
When Biden was backing Israel most strongly early in the campaign, Hamas released hostages and agreed to a ceasefire. Washington’s efforts more recently have caused Israel delay, and this delay itself prolonged Palestinian suffering and helped Hamas. As Hamas has seen Biden come under political pressure, and therefore put Israel under pressure, it has been effectively rewarded for its barbarism and encouraged to make no compromise.
The ICC is not a court but a sign of the deep sickness at the heart of the international system. Don’t think that sickness cannot kill us here in Australia in time.
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