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Medea Benjamin
May 29, 2024Common Dreams
Senator Lindsay Graham was bursting with contempt for the International Criminal Court when he grilled Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a May 21 congressional hearing. Wagging his finger, he warned that, if the ICC gets away with issuing arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, “We are next.”
The audience at the hearing, stacked with CODEPINK pro-Palestine supporters, burst out in applause at the notion of the U.S. being hauled before the world’s highest court. “You can clap all you want,” an angry Graham retorted, “but they tried to come after our soldiers in Afghanistan.” Graham was thankful that in the Afghan case “reason prevailed” when the case was dropped, adding that the U.S. must level sanctions against the ICC “not only to protect our friends in Israel but to protect ourselves.”
Graham was referring to the 2019 efforts of former ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to hold both the Taliban and the U.S. accountable for war crimes in Afghanistan. When Graham said that “reason prevailed,” he really meant that U.S. thuggery prevailed because the Trump administration brazenly imposed sanctions against ICC officials, denying them visas to the U.S. and freezing their assets in U.S. banks. U.S. President Joe Biden lifted the sanctions but did so with the tacit understanding that the court would not resume the probe of U.S. crimes in Afghanistan. The message from both Democratic and Republican presidents was clear: Do not dare hold the U.S. to the same standards you use for others.
While most Republicans and pro-Israel hawks in the Democratic Party will likely join hands to hammer the international court, President Biden may ultimately feel pressured to adopt the position best articulated by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). “It is fine to express opposition to a possible judicial action, but it is absolutely wrong to interfere.”
The International Criminal Court was founded in 1998 as the result of a lifetime’s work by an American (and Jewish) international lawyer, Benjamin Ferencz, rooted in his experience as an investigator and chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg tribunals after the Second World War. Ben passed away in 2023 at the age of 103, but the universal jurisdiction that the court is exercising in this case is the fruition of his life’s work to hold war criminals accountable under international law, no matter what country they are from or who their victims are.
Enter Israel. The ICC has been building a case against Israel for nearly a decade. A recent blockbuster investigation by TheGuardian and two Israeli-based news outlets revealed a shocking almost decade-long secret campaign against the court by Israeli intelligence agencies, who surveilled, hacked, pressured, smeared, and threatened ICC officials in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries..............
Follow the Money: How Israel-Linked Billionaires Silenced US Campus Protests
America’s universities are on fire. A protest movement against the violence in Gaza and U.S. colleges’ complicity in them has swept the nation, with encampments on college campuses in 45 of America’s 50 states. The crackdown has been swift; thousands of students have been arrested, charged, fined, lost their degrees, or even deported. Amid corporate media demanding a “Kent State 2.0”, riot police, armored vehicles and snipers have been deployed across the country to terrify those campaigning for justice into silence.
Why have overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against a foreign power’s actions been met with such a heavy-handed response? A MintPress News investigation finds that those same elite institutions have deep financial and ideological ties to the state of Israel, are funded by pro-Israel billionaires who have demanded they take action to crush the student movement, are partially funded by the Israeli government, and exist in a climate where Washington has made it clear that the protests should not be tolerated.
Israel’s Billionaire Backers
The movement began on April 17 at Columbia University, where a modest Gaza solidarity encampment was established. Protestors hardly expected to be welcomed by university authorities but were shocked as university president Minouche Shafik immediately called in the NYPD – the first time the university had allowed police to suppress dissent on campus since the famous 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
Shafik’s decision was no doubt influenced by the enormous pressure put on her by the university’s top donors – many of whom have deep connections to the Israeli state and its military.
Robert Kraft
Billionaire businessman and sports executive Robert Kraft, for example, publicly announced he was cutting the university off from his lavish funding over its failure to suppress the protests effectively enough. “I am deeply saddened at the virulent hate that continues to grow on campus and throughout our country,” he said in a statement, claiming that Columbia was not protecting its Jewish students........
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