Biden and Trump are Birds of a Feather when It Comes to Courts They Don’t Like
If you’re guilty and you know it blame the courts
Update: The UN’s Internation Court of Justice has ordered (in a 13-2 ruling (with justices from Uganda and Israel dissenting) that Israel must immediately halt its assault on Rafah, which has already driven over 800,000 refugees from other destroyed parts of Gaza holed up there to flee back to already totaally destroyed areas. Israel has said it will ignore the Court, which puts the issue squarely on Biden to either act in support of the ICJ by ending all military aid to Israel or to share completely Israel’s guilt for genocidal crimes against humanity by continuing to supply it with the weapons go commig\t them. Biden can no longer use weasel words like “red lines” Israel supposedly must cross before he will act. Those supposed lines have been erased completely by Israel’s ongoing slaughter of Palestinians. Biden and his state department Secretary Antony Blinken can no longer with strqight fqces lecture to other countries about the need to adhere to a ‘rules-based” international order.
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In one disturbing way, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are as alike as a pair of naked mole rats.
They both respond to judicial decisions that they don’t like by attacking the court, judges, prosecutors and in Biden’s case the entire International legal system, because they really can’t dispute the correctness of the courts’ actions and decisions, or the correctness of the charges levied against them.
Trump has attacked both the federal courts and the state courts in Georgia and New York claiming they are part of a political scheme by the Biden administration to weaponize the judicial system and sabotage his campaign for a second term in the White House. The claim is transparently baseless — so much so that many in his own party have condemned him for making it.
Now Biden is doing the same thing with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and more recently the International Criminal Court (ICC). Last November even as Israel’s military, the farcically named Israeli Defense Force ()DF), was slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, 70 percent of them women and children, Biden endorsed the nomination of US law professor Sarah Cleveland to join the UN-based International Court of Justice, At the time he praised the 15-judge panel she’ll be joining based in The Hague, Netherlands that adjudicates armed conflicts between nations, saying it “remains one of humanity’s most critical institutions to advance peace around the world.”
Of Prof. Cleveland, he said, “I strongly support Professor Sarah Cleveland’s candidacy to serve on the International Court of Justice—the main judicial organ of the United Nations. A talented scholar and practitioner of international law, Cleveland is committed to the principles that have long been at the heart of the Court: judicial independence, rigor, and humanity. “
But when three months later, in late January, that lop United Nations court issued a ruling in a case brought against Israel for its massively destructive assault on the captive territory of Gaza, calling on Israel to adhere to the UN’s genocide convention, and effectively saying that there was probable cause” to suggest the IDF was engaging in “genocidal “acts, Biden expressed outrage. He allowed his Secretary of State to declare the iCC’s decision and the entire case brought by South Africa against Israel’s war on Gaza “meritless” — exactly the kind of language used by Trump regarding his judicial tormenters.
Biden, for his part ignored the ICJ’s decision and continued supplying the IDF with the especially indiscriminate 2000-lb untargetable bombs that have reportedly accounted for about 50% of the Israeli military’s destruction of Gaza, and for the vast number of civilian deaths caused in each massive blast. He only called a”pause” to those deadly bomb shipments after his plaintive requests to Israeli Prime Minister to “be more careful” to protect Palestinian civilians in its epic destruction of Gaza, and not to invade Rafah, the last refuge where half of Gaza’s surviving population had fled on Israel’s advice were ignored and scoffed at by Netanyahu. (Readers should note that in WWII, the commonly dropped 500-lb and 1000-lb bombs used were nicknamed “blockbusters” because of their wide destructiveness. The 2000-lb bombs being offered to Israel for free, the largest in the US inventory, are two to four times as large and destructive as those.)
Then, in May the International Criminal Court, a second UN-linked judicial body also based in The Hague that charges and tries war criminals accused of crimes against humanity, voted to lodge war crimes charges against both Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as well as Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and several other Hamas leaders. The court prosecutor is now seeking the arrest of those leaders. (While it is difficult to make such arrests for the international courts, such indictments can make travel outside their home countries risky for those charged, former Chile as an dictator Augusto Pinochet learned on a trip the the UK.)
AgaIn President Biden, like Trump, is striking out at the court itself and the prosecutor, rather than addressing the charges and the propriety of making them. Rather than engage in a futile effort to argue that Netanyahu and Gallant are not guilty of mass murder in Gaza and have not been a engaged in ongoing war crimes with their mass terror bombing of the territory of Gaza, and sounding like a clone of his presidential rival Trump, Biden called the ICC prosecutors seeking of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Netanyahu “outrageous,” Biden said, "And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas,”
His “surrogate,” Secretary of State Blinken — playing the role Trump’s sycophantic politician backers have played in speaking for the indicted former president when he is making his most outrageous accusations against the courts and prosecutors on his various cases — said of the ICC arrest warrants, “It is shameful…Hamas is a brutal terrorist organization that carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and it still holding dozens of people hostage, including Americans.’
After asking ourselves just what makes Israel’s leaders any less “terrorists” than Hamas, let’s examine these White House calumnies against the ICC, which by the way Biden praised fulsomely when the same court over a year ago charged and its prosecutors obtained arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin for the war crime of removing Ukrainian children from Ukraine.
The president is right that there is “no equivalence” is both irrelevant and incorrect. He accusation is irrelevant because the ICC and prosecutor are not comparing the two charges, just saying that both are war crimes (would it have mattered whether Adolf Eichmann’s war crimes for killing Jews and Roma people were more or less severe than the crimes of Japanese Gen. Hideki Tojo? Of course not. The point is both were convicted of egregious war crimes and were executed for those crimes. No American leaders, being on the winning side of WWII, were even charged with war crimes, though many, including President Truman and War Secretary Henry Stimson, should have been for ordering and approving the dropping of the two atom bombs on Japanese cities.
As for inaccuracy,, Time magazine points out that the charges Israel and Netanyahu on one side and Hamas and Sinwar on the other are not even the same. As the article notes: “While Hamas and Israeli leaders both face allegations of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, the charges they are facing are entirely distinct. Whereas Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and other top Hamas officials Mohammed Diab and Ismail Haniyeh have been accused of extermination, murder, hostage-taking, rape and torture, the charges facing Netanyahu and Gallant include starving civilians, willfully causing great suffering and death, and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.”
The difference between Trump’s attacks on US federal and state judicial systems and Biden’s attacks on the two international courts is that all Trump is doing is trying to avoid getting convicted and punished for trying to overturn an election he lost, encouraging or orchestrating a pathetic putsch during a session of Congress, and preventing himself from being convicted of feloniously trying to influence an election by falsifying business records to hide his paying for the silence of a porn star he had a extramarital dalliance with. Biden is trying to protect from prosecution an Israeli leader guilty of ordering the most genocidal massacre of civilians since at least the 2003 US invasion of Iraq — and to protect himself from being accused of enabling that war crime by providing Israel with the huge bombs, howitzer shells, white phosphorus bombs, tanks and fighter bombers to conduct its war crimes.
Biden makes it all worse by sanctimoniously condemning the college students who have braved police brutality, risk of suspension or eviction from colleges they may have already spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, room and board money on trying to earn diplomas at, that they must not “disrupt” their campuses. By disrupting he means the setting up peaceful protest tent encampments in support of the people of Gaza.
No wonder the man is losing the youth vote and the usually reliable 90 percent vote of American Black voters (who recognize apartheid when they see it in Israel’s treatment of its captive Palestinian population).
The only good I can see at the moment coming out of this outrageous behavior by Biden and his surrogates is that three European countries, Norway, Ireland and Spain (all NATO members), have announced that they are now in support of recognition of Palestine as a independent state — something the US has never done. While some 12 nations have long recognized Palestine statehood, these three countries are the first developed Western nations to do so. This could be the start of a movement to end the diplomatic roadblock that has allowed Israel to hang on to lands conquered in 1948 and 1967, which it has clung to illegally ever since. The likelihood of such a surge of support is aided by word that several European nations, including Germany and France, are condemning the US dismissal of the two European Court rulings against Israel.
Trump’s flagrant insults against the US justice system may be strengthening his support among his cult following, but it appears that Biden’s adoption of Trump’s strategy of attacking the two international courts is having the opposite impact on key parts of the Democratic base needs if he hopes to defeat Donald Trump in November.