This is Justin Trudeau's Post-National Canada

"Canada supports international law. We have to trust that the institutions we've built to protect international law are actually going to do their job."

"Everyone wants to support decisions on the international stage that they agree with, but that's not the way a justice system works."

"It's really important that everyone abide by international law. This is something we've been calling [for] from the beginning of the conflict."

"We stand up for international law, and we will abide by all the regulations and rulings of the international courts."

"This is just who we are as Canadians."

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at a news conference in Sharon, Ontario, on Thursday November 21, 2024. Photo by Chris Young /The Canadian Press

Justin Trudeau has  altered Canada beyond recognition. He has, as promised, taken Canada directly toward 'post-nationalism'. And in the course of achieving that status, his open immigration, refugee and migrant intake has been completely transformational. As has been his emphasis on society of new Canadian values; out with the old, in with DEI, Woke, and Critical Race Theory. Unions and Academic institutions have celebrated these changes; the infiltration of liberal-left 'progressives' and Islamist influences have been profound.

From the very beginning of what Trudeau speaks of as 'the conflict', he and his Cabinet cronies have issued statements and charges inimical to Israel's reputation in their contortions of the facts and their propensity to lay blame and responsibility on Israel for what Palestinian terrorism has wrought. This is not what Canada is. Most Canadians have had enough of Mr. Trudeau's wretched direction he has taken Canada into and for a wide variety of reasons. For Canadian Jews and their supporters the reasons are more personal; they abhor his sanctimonious antisemitism.

 

Demonstrators fill Ste-Catherine St. during Friday’s protest. Photo by John Mahoney /Montreal Gazette

 

Amply displayed in his tolerance for mobs of Muslim and Palestinian haters and malcontents swarming the streets of Canadian cities with their criminal cries of 'Final Solution', 'Globalize the Intifada', and 'Palestine will be free from the river to the sea', every declaration of this nature a clear call for the destruction of the State of Israel. The blockades and harassment of Jewish neighbourhoods, the attacks on synagogues and community centers, the shooting up of Jewish parochial schools and vandalization of Jewish businesses see no government action at any level, led by the federal government to bring order and security back to the streets of Canada.

So it is hardly surprising that Canada's utter failure of a prime minister hails the finding of the International Criminal Court that Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and its-then Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant are found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in their combined goal of punishing and destroying the intention of Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and others of their ilk to continue mounting deadly attacks on Israel and its citizens after the horrors of October 7, 2023. 

 

Canada's Prime Minister-in-waiting, opposition Conservatives, will reverse all the destructive moves made by the Trudeau government to return pride to Canada.

 

In Montreal on Friday, tens of thousands of pro-Hamas supporters and university students created mayhem and havoc by rioting, attacking police attempting to restore order, with the mob chanting anti-Israel and anti NATO slogans. Violence was rife, with masked and kaffiya-clad men and women making Nazi salutes and shouting invectives, smashing windows of businesses and at the conference centre where a NATO meeting was being held. And where was Justin Trudeau while this was going on? In Toronto attending a Taylor Swift extravaganza, dancing to the songs of the popular entertainer.

 

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing backlash after a video of him dancing at a Taylor Swift concert went viral over the weekend.  (Photos- X (Twitter))

 

"Israel was attacked by terrorists on October 7. The warrant issued by the ICC today against Netanyahu and Gallant claims their crimes started as early as October 8."

"A day Israel was in shock, grief and mourning."

"The ICC discredits itself by its actions today."

Liberal Montreal Member of Parliament Anthony Housefather

"It just shows once again how extreme Justin Trudeau has become."

"The prime minister of Israel is a democratically elected leader whose country is responding to an unprovoked invasion, by thousands of well-armed Iranian-funded terrorists who ... carried out mass rape and other atrocities deliberately targeted at civilians."

"But instead, he's calling for the arrest of the country that has been the victim of all of these attacks."

Opposition Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre

 

"The ICC arrest warrants for the former defence minister and the Prime Minister of Israel are outrageous."

"The ICC is drawing a false equivalency between a liberal democracy and a terrorist group that attacked that democracy last year."

"Conservatives stand for Israel's right to defend itself."

Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong

 

"Hamas needs to: Release the hostages. Drop their arms. Unconditionally surrender."

"We'll support a democratic ally's right to defend itself, not the false equivalency of the court."

Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman 

"A Modern 'Dreyfus' Trial" Israel vs the ICC

"[The International Criminal Court] issued warrants of arrest for two individuals, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr. Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024, the day the Prosecution filed the applications for warrants of arrest."

"Each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts."

"[There were also] reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant bear responsibility for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population."

ICC Pre-Trial Chamber 1

"It's a geopolitical bombshell."

"It's the first time the court has issued arrest warrants against a western country and also the first time that they are issuing arrest warrants when there's no jurisdiction in the case, but they've invented it for themselves."

"Outrageous."

NGO Monitor legal adviser Anne Herzberg

Nir Elias/Pool/AFP/Getty Images

 

The ICC tribunal in The Hague announced its decision to issue warrants for the arrest of Israel's prime minister and its then-minister of defence, citing its finding of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In so doing, it echoes the accusations of Muslim governments as well as the belief of many of Israel's so-called allies, Western democracies. The ruling has brought great joy and celebration to the very terrorist groups that conspired to launch a savage attack on Israeli civilians that resulted in the mass murder of over 1,200 Israelis, the wounding of far greater numbers, the rape of girls and women, sadistic torture and mutilation, and the hostage-taking of 250 children, elderly, women and men.

From its very modern foundation, the Jewish State, like no other on Earth, has been attacked ceaselessly, first by its neighbouring nations, and more latterly by terrorist groups funded, formed and patronized by those neighbours. The relentless attacks culminated in the October 7, 2023 incursion of thousands of Palestinian terrorists, led by Hamas with a deliberate plan to commit unthinkable atrocities. There is no country in this world that would not respond with force and determination to end, once and for all, the unendurable attacks targeting its people.

Yet because the terrorist groups in their psychotic hatred have no compunction in sacrificing their own citizens in what they view as the greater goal of destroying Israel and its people, the construct of a nation in its own defence committing a counter-attack that results in mass collateral damage, despite care taken to avoid victimizing innocent civilians during a theatre of war, elicits condemnation by the international community which has never suffered constant, unstoppable violent threats to their security, holding Israel to an impossible standard no other nation could or would endure.

ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan whose forceful prosecution of the Jewish State as having overstepped the boundaries permitted it by international consensus in reacting to terrorism directed toward it, with the very same terrorist groups vowing never to stop, to continue assaulting the state and its people with the same intensity and savagery until their goal of  utter destruction has been completed, reached a decision that was predictable, given the animus directed toward Israel. Telling enough that Khan is himself Muslim, and a committed proselytizer for Islam.

 

97 hostages kidnapped in Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack are still being held in Gaza  Reuters

 

Israel, like other countries such as the United States (China and Russia as well; the 3 of 5 members of the UN Security Council that have never signed on to the ICC), nor did India -- sign on to the ICC. The ICC has no jurisdiction in those countries, unless a country that did sign on files against them, as well as the fact that if a country has the means and determination with an independent judiciary to conduct its own investigation and come to a conclusion, that would negate the ICC's move to investigate' a condition that Israel fulfills. In this instance, it was 'Palestine' which is not a state and therefore ineligible, that the ICC cited, giving them the 'authority' to investigate. A complete and utter sham.

The Hague chose to reject Jerusalem's challenges with respect to jurisdiction with the claim that the court exercises its authority based on the Palestinian Authority's membership. A membership in and of itself absurd, absent sovereign country status. Allowing the PA membership in the body represents an absurdity, but one with an illegal, immoral and defined purpose. Israel chose not to be a signatory to the Rome Statute which established the court. Yet "Palestine" was inducted as a signatory though no such state exists under international law.

 

It is not Benjamin Netayahu and Yoav Gallant that have been singled out for international censure; their names merely symbolic to the greater target of satanizing Israel itself, and by extension Jews, wherever they live; in Israel or throughout the diaspora. The situation is a deliberate diminishment of Jews having the right to self-defence, either as a nation, or as a people. This is a malign, institutionalized assault demanding respect for a corrupted UN body that purports to dispense justice. 

Today, on 21 November 2024, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court (‘Court’), in its composition for the Situation in the State of Palestine, unanimously issued two decisions rejecting challenges by the State of Israel (‘Israel’) brought under articles 18 and 19 of the Rome Statute (the ‘Statute’). It also issued warrants of arrest for Mr Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr Yoav Gallant. ICC

"Israel utterly rejects the false and absurd charges of the International Criminal Court, a biased and discriminatory political body."

"The decision to issue an arrest warrant against the prime minister was made by a corrupt chief prosecutor who is trying to save himself from sexual harassment accusations and biased judges who are motivated by antisemitic hatred of Israel."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Office

Slandering Israel of "Catastrophic Palestinian Starvation"

"The available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring."

"The IPC [Integrated Food Security Phase Classification] acute food insecurity analysis conducted in February 2024 projected that famine would likely occur in the northern governorates [of Gaza] by the end of May, based on the assumption that conflict would persist with the same intensity and humanitarian access would remain very low."

"While the use of assumptions and inference is standard practice in IPC generally, the limitations of the available body of evidence and the extent of its convergence for northern Gaza in April leads to a very high level of uncertainty regarding the current food security and nutritional status of the population."

Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report

Bustling street markets filled with produce in the Deir al-Balah camp in central Gaza on June 21, 2024. Photo by Majdi Fathi/TPS-IL

The arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court naming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, accusing both of leveraging the "starvation of civilians as a method of war", levied in May, based its warrants on the warnings issued by the IPC's early reports and those of the UN's World Food Program, both warning that northern Gaza was under a "full-blown famine" in May. Just as the IPC's and UN's warnings were without credibility, so too the ICC's warrants.

Aided and abetted by international media which themselves relied on IPC projections in reporting the conflict, the allegations of war crimes committed by Israel at war with Hamas, gave credence to the public relations campaigns vilifying Israel on behalf of the Hamas propaganda machinery, while selectively bypassing Israel's assurances of efforts during an intense time of conflict, of making every effort to alleviate the food insecurity of ordinary Palestinians.

 

Lorries with aid loads for delivery into Gaza arrive at Larnaca Port, Cyprus, June 26, 2024. REUTERS/Marinos Meletiou

 

While Israel opened corridors with the full knowledge that in so doing, it ran the risk of assisting Hamas leadership and operatives escaping the consequences of the atrocities they committed in southern Israel. In the same token, while Israel was doing its utmost to still international criticism holding Israel to standards never imposed upon other countries forced to defend themselves from gratuitously savage violence, the world looked the other way when evidence arose of Hamas looting humanitarian food and goods convoys meant to sustain Palestinian civilians.

After months of dire warnings of "famine is imminent" in the Gaza Strip, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification released a snapshot report published on June 25. Funded by a number of Western countries such as Canada, the European Union and he United States the new report explains that its revision was occasioned partially from earlier reliance on "assumptions and inference" to "address major gaps in publicly accessible evidence". 

The report's conclusions inspired David Adesnik of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies to characterize the IPC's admission of errors as "one of the greatest slanders of the last eight months", obliquely referencing the beginning of conflict in October stemming from the Hamas invasion of Israel and revelations of the terrorist group's inhumane indulgence in sadistic savagery of horrific proportions that included group rape, mutilation and bloody mass slaughter.

A convoy carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza on its way to the Rafah crossing last month as looted. Photograph: Khaled Elfiqi/EPA

 

"After months of hearing that Israel was blocking the delivery of sufficient aid to Gaza we now see that Israeli authorities facilitated a massive increase in shipments of both aid and commercial goods, alleviating shortages in Gaza while Israeli forces continued to prosecute the war against Hamas."

"This is a decisive rebuke to malicious claims that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war against the people of Gaza."

David Adesnik, senior fellow, director of research, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

War Crimes by Hamas, Defense by Israel

"[Mohammad Al-Massi -- commander-in-chief Hamas military wing -- Ismail Haniyeh -- head of Hamas political wing -- Yahya Sinwar -- Hamas/Gaza chief -- charged by the International Criminal Court with extermination, murder, hostage-taking, rape, torture and outrages upon personal dignity; the three] planned and instigated the commission of crimes on October 7th, and have, through their own actions, including personal visits to hostages shortly after their kidnapping, acknowledged their responsibility for those crimes."

International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan

 

 

Three master-terrorists, utterly conscienceless sadistic monsters for whom human life is irrelevant to their greater goals of the total extermination of a re-born Jewish State, an ancestral Judaean land where historical antecedents leave no doubt Jews were domiciled for thousands of years until the Roman Empire sent its legions to pacify and control the Middle East for centuries until a time when Jews rebelled, fought and died and ultimately were exiled for a second time in ancient history. Palestinian terrorists are working on a third time.

 

And the State of Israel -- in the aftermath of a horror that slaughtered 1,200 of its citizens as well as a handful of foreign farm workers, where sadistic savagery was displayed in a volume of mass rape, jubilant mutilation, rape and murder of Jewish girls and women, where infants were killed along with their entire families and children, the elderly and ill, Israeli men and women were abducted and taken into captivity in Gaza -- reacted with fury and righteous offense. 

Israel's dispatching of its military into Gaza for the sole and singular purpose of disarming the Hamas war machinery, including dispatching the leaders of the terrorist groups Islamic Jihad and the PFLP on a martyrdom trip to Paradise; to militarily confront the groups, to dispossess them of their stockpiled weaponry, to destroy their tunnel system in Gaza, was meant to ensure that a promised repeat of the ghoulish October 7 attack would never re-occur.

Israel's reaction was the very same as any other self-respecting nation whose first duty it is to ensure the safety and security of its citizens, a well understood and expected response to the fracturing of a nation's trust that a neighbouring country or group of people aspiring to achieve recognition of a nation dedicated to their civil futures would never seek to commit that magnitude of violence on another. The unremitting hatred expressed by Palestinian terrorist groups toward Israel refutes that trust.

Yet in Israel's committing to protect its own from any further such terrorist acts after sustaining multiple decades of recurring lethal attacks massacring its citizens and in the process of response through battling its enemies takes the kind of humanitarian care to take highly unusual steps to mitigate civilian deaths in the geography hosting them alongside their terrorist government, condemnation at the plight of Gazan civilians emanates from all quarters. 

 

Apart from the reality that a majority of Palestinians approve of violence against Israel, approve of Hamas, approve of its charter to destroy Israel, approve of the unspeakable action of October 7, Israel does its utmost to protect the lives of non-combatant civilians. Which is far more than can be said of any other fighting force in history. Where during World War II, the Allied forces fire-bombed civilian infrastructure and cities as punishment for their leaders' instigation of war.

That the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for the Prime Minister of Israel and the Israeli defence minister -- as well as warrants for Hamas leaders, clearly indicates that in his opinion one group equates with the other. An outrage of discretionary choice to place leaders of a responsible, liberal democracy on a similar footing with leaders of a proud death-cult culture aspiring to destroy an entire people and its state.

Yet the ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan accuses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant along with Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh of war crimes and crimes against humanity in both the Gaza Strip and in Israel. The actual granting of the warrants is the responsibility of a panel comprised of three judges tasked to consider prosecutorial evidence to make their determination whether to issue arrest warrants so that a case can proceed.

 

ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan

"[Israel fights with] one of the strictest [moral codes, respects international law and has a robust judiciary capable of investigating itself -- and has in the past, impartially]."

"The State of Israel is waging one of the just wars fought in modern history following a reprehensible massacre perpetrated by terrorist Hamas on the 7th of October."

Benny Gantz, former military chief, member Israeli war cabinet

As for Hamas; it has accused the prosecutor of trying to "equate the victim with the executioner", a statement of such appalling absurdity, turning reality inside out, a trait and a twist of reality typical of Palestinian logic as a manipulative skill to convince others that night is daylight in appealing to the sympathy of the outside world for the 'victims' of Israeli aggression. Hamas, the statement went on, has the right to resist Israeli occupation, including "armed resistance". Israel is 'occupying' ancient Judaean land that Palestinians insist is their own rightful inheritance.

 

Russian Entitlement to Ukraine

"[If those behind such reports; forced deportation of children; supported objectivity] then we are ready to analyze specific cases, answer questions, provide data, statistics and facts."

"But if they are biased, if they represent only one point of view ... then there is no use responding to these reports."

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova

Stasik, 45, a Ukrainian soldier who recently had his right arm amputated, is examined by a medical volunteer during an evacuation operation from the eastern frontline near Bakhmut to hospitals in the Dnipropetrovsk region on March 15.

 

The reports this spokeswoman refers to based on over 500 interviews along with satellite images and in-person visits to detention sites and graves, discuss incidents of Russian forces committing war crimes in Ukraine; out of a UN-mandated investigation. Detailing wilful killing, torture, detaining non-combatants and in some instances forcing children to witness their mothers, sisters, aunts being raped. How can there be 'neutrality' over such episodes of military atrocities being carried out by Russian forces in Ukraine?

Coincidentally with the release of the report, the International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued arrest warrants for Russian officials for their role in having Ukrainian children forcibly deported from Ukraine, as well as the Russian military's deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure in the country Russia has invaded. Russia, needless to say, denies having committed any such atrocities, much less attacking Ukrainian civilians.

Meeting members of Russia's business elite this week, President Vladimir Putin urged them to invest in their country, to give it the financial assistance it needs to see out what he names the "sanctions war" imposed on Russia by the West. Of those attending the meeting called for the first time since the invasion, many are themselves under Western sanctions.

And it just happens that a day later, Russian President Vladimir Putin was placed under a warrant of arrest by the ICC, also obviously persecuting Russia for no good reason.

 

Ukrainian troops fire a howitzer at Russian positions near Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine, on Friday. A Nato official says Russia is sustaining up to 1,500 casualties a day, mostly in Bakhmut, while Ukraine is taking ‘an order of magnitude less’. Photograph: Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images

 

The man who has instructed the Russian military to destroy Ukraine, at the same time that he has declared eastern Ukraine Russian territory, oversees a military and a nation that brooks no interference or criticism in its brutality to bring a neighbouring country to its knees. A stubborn neighbour at that, refusing to pay obeisance to the bully next door intent on expanding its territory while terrorizing a community which refuses to submit to terror.

In destroyed Bakhmut the bloody infantry battle continues, with Russian forces led by the Wagner mercenary army capturing the city's east portion. Plans to encircle Bakhmut that had been boasted of have not yet materialized, since the Ukraine military has no intention of allowing it.  "Sometimes we see  groups of seven people (Russian soldiers). We strike, three fall and the rest continue to advance" -- Marian, age 21, a member of the 80th Ukrainian Air Assault Brigade, describes, at his mortar position.

 

A Ukrainian soldier, Bakhmut trench   Reuters

 

Seven mortars were fired by the brigade from that position, as small arms fire in the distance speak to the constant unfolding of a long-drawn-out checkmate. Taking Bakhmut has become a major aspiration for Moscow which sees it as opening a path to the entire surrounding Donetsk region finally falling to Russia. Kyiv, on the other hand, has decided that the ruined city is still worth fighting to contain for its value in inflicting huge damage on Russian troops.

"They (the Russians) need this victory like air and therefore do not count the losses" of untrained, poorly kitted-out Russian conscripts and mercenaries falling in huge numbers of dead and wounded in the fray of conflict where they are ordered to advance en masse, explained Serhiy Cherevatyl, a spokesman for Ukraine's eastern military command.

A declassified video was released Thursday of a Russian military jet intercepting an American drone in  international airspace over the Black Sea two days previously. Highlighting risks of a potential clash between the two nuclear powers. Moscow accused Washington of escalating tensions near Ukrainian Crimea annexed by Russia in 2014. The Pentagon's release of the video recorded the incident when the MQ-9 Reaper drone was intercepted by a Russian jet, sending it crashing into the sea.

A Russian Su-27 fighter jet can be seen in the video close to the drone dumping jet fuel over it in an obvious attempt to damage the aircraft. A second pass by another Russian jet resulted in a collision with the drone, the Russian plane striking the propeller, disabling the damaged drone. According to Russia, no such collision took place, the drone crashed when it made "sharp manoeuvres" while "provocatively" flying close to Russian airspace.

The episode proving that the United States is actively, directly taking part in the Ukraine war that is none of their business; strictly a Russian internal affair, proclaims Moscow. 

ICC Prosecution for War Crimes

 

What is a war crime?  Even war has rules.

• The definition of war crimes are set out in treaties called the Geneva Conventions along with other international laws and agreements.
• Military forces cannot deliberately attack civilians -- nor the infrastructure that is vital to their survival.
• Some weapons are banned because of the indiscriminate or appalling suffering they cause -- such as anti=personnel landmines and chemical or biological weapons.
• The sick and wounded must be cared for -- including injured soldiers,who have rights as prisoners of war.
• Serious offences such as murder, rape or mass persecution of a group are known as 'crimes against humanity' or in some circumstances, 'genocide
  

Reuters

Russia and its president have been referred to the International Criminal Court repeatedly, in reflection of the crimes against humanity committed by the Russian military as a whole and by Russian servicemen in episodes of vicious brutality, including torture, rape, looting, murder. It was inevitable, given Russia's violent invasion of Ukraine, and witnessed, photographed and first-person accounts of crimes committed by Russia that the International Criminal Court would be involved in prosecuting the perpetrator of barbarism in a conflict of territorial expansion.

"We see clearly a pattern, I think, in terms of the number, scale and breadth of attacks against the power grids of Ukraine. And we need to look at why that’s taking place; are they legitimate targets or not; and whether or not they are targeted for other reasons." 

"Children cannot be treated as the spoils of war."

"There seems to be a lot of damage in Ukraine, and it may well be it is part of a policy and part of a plan and we need to get to the bottom of it and see whether or not there is criminal responsibility and if there is we have an International Criminal Court that has jurisdiction to look into it."

"As a prosecutor we are officers of the court. We are not here to get a round of applause by a conjuring trick. Whenever we do move, [people] should have confidence that this is not a political process."

ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan

Mairupol theatre after the air strike    Reuters

The International Criminal Court has announced its preparation to initiate the arrest of Russian officials for their role in forcibly deporting children from Ukraine and for deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure. An unnamed source stated that arrest warrants could include the crime of genocide, expected to be served in the "short term" should the court prosecutor request be approved by a pretrial judge at the court based at The Hague.

Just as Russia, with its permanent seat on the United Nation Security Council vetoes any sanctions the other Security Council members, with China supporting Russia, bring forward, it is a foregone conclusion that it will use its weight at the UN to reject any such arrest warrants naming any Russian officials. An international war crimes prosecution would have the ultimate effect of pushing Moscow down a steeper diplomatic isolation incline. Russian officials named would theoretically find it difficult to travel abroad.

Dial back to the vicious assaults by the Sudanese military and its government on Sudanese Darfurians inspiring the International Criminal Court to prosecute the Sudanese president Omar Al Bashir and its head of military for 'genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in  Darfur, Sudan, since 1 July 2002' and the spectacle of Al Bashir travelling abroad to attend meetings of the Arab League where his presence was accepted and none there made a move to arrest him.

Moscow predictably denies deliberately targeting Ukraine's civilian infrastructure, insisting its attacks are merely intended to reduce Kyiv's fighting capacity. Russia feels it was completely legitimate to bring thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia as a humanitarian campaign meant to protect orphans and abandoned children from the conflict zone. Kyiv clarifies the situation, that thousands of Ukrainian children were deported to be adopted into Russian homes or placed in Russian camps and orphanages.

Exposed exclusively to a Russian education and ambience, given Russian passports, taught to be Russian and to reject their Ukrainian heritage, nationality and culture, the children are expected to consider themselves Russian. The genocvide convention of the United Nations defines 'forcibly transferring children of one group to another group' to be one of five acts prosecutable as genocide. 

The ICC can bring a prosecution against political leaders for "waging aggressive war". This covers an unjustified invasion or conflict not undertaken in self-defence.   Getty Images

Kyiv had taken its own prosecution action previously, conducting a few war crimes prosecutions of individual Russian soldiers accountable for incidents such as killings or rapes in occupied Ukraine territory. The prospective ICC prosecution would elevate the charges while targeting officials responsible for policies and not just the minions perpetrating such war crimes on the ground.

Russia is itself mindful of its diplomatic isolation, currying closer relations with those countries willing to overlook its barbaric war in Ukraine. The most senior and important to Moscow of which is Beijing. China's President Xi Jinping is on the cusp of visiting Russia, responding to a long-standing invitation. Just the kind of friendly support that President Vladimir Putin most appreciates at this vexing time from a powerful ally.

Rumour has it that President Xi may plan to speak by video link to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Beijing has made overtures in the past to bring Moscow and Kyiv to peace talks, but Beijing doesn't make the rules and Moscow insists that Kyiv accept all the territorial gains that Russia feels it is entitled to, and for Ukraine to disarm, and disavow joining NATO. Unlikely prospects.

Beijing has just pulled off a diplomatic coup in persuading Saudi Arabia and Iran to set aside their long-standing polarizing issues which has brought them into conflict by proxy, in Syria and in Yemen. Iran, resenting Saudi Arabia's role as custodian of Mecca and Medina, aspiring to hold that role itself, the two nations, the Sunni-Islam Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Shiite Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to restore diplomatic relations. Whether they will put a halt to battlefield hostilities is another matter.

"We do not recognize this court; we do not recognize its jurisdiction."

Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov

Getty Images

 

How Soon Forgotten! Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

The regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad has committed crimes against humanity and war crimes by subjecting cities to unlawful sieges that gave civilians no choice but to give up or die.

"[The] ICC has not opened an investigation in relation to Syria."

"Syria is not a state party to the Rome Statute and has not accepted the ICC [International Criminal Court] jurisdiction."

"Thus, crimes committed by its citizens on its own territories do not fall under the ICC jurisdiction, unless the [United Nations Security Council] would refer the situation to the ICC, which has not happened to date."

ICC spokesperson, Fadi el-Abdallah 

"The most heinous of violations of international humanitarian and human rights law perpetrated against the civilian population in Syria since March 2011."

"Such acts are likely to constitute crimes against humanity, war crimes and other international crimes, including genocide."

Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic report

"This matter has not been referred to the ICC, despite the several calls by the commission of inquiry, and numerous recommendations by the Human Rights council for the UN Security council to do so."

"[The Commission is exploring other] areas of criminal justice] to address the matter of Syrian war crimes]."

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

"There were rivers of blood and maggots [exuding from the bodies], once, I couldn’t eat anything for days."

"[Some corpses were totally rotten and their faces] unrecognizable [as if they had been deliberately disfigured with a chemical. It is the stench of the rotting corpses that most disturbed him and continues to date.] The smell stayed in my nose, even after I showered at home."

Syrian undertaker,witness Z 30/07/19

 

"Someone gives evidence that mass graves were still being dug until at least 2017. This is the kind of government, the kind of regime, that you don’t establish relations with."

"[The revelations made in such testimonies and the evidence laid out] will facilitate future trials against regime officials if they were caught traveling to Europe."

"The individual acts of torture only constitute a crime against humanity if they are being committed within a specific context, that being a widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population. Z’s testimony establishes the crimes were systematic."

Patrick Kroker, senior legal advisor on Syria, European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights

Millions of Syrians have been displaced in a decade of fighting    Getty Images

Syrian war planes strafing civilian Sunni Syrians in bread lines, hospitals and medical clinics bombed, barrel bombs targeting Sunni Syrian neighbourhoods, Syrian towns suffering the agonies of prohibited gas attacks. Children arrested, tortured, murdered. Women raped, imprisoned, murdered. Syrian citizens disappeared, never to be seen again alive or dead. Millions of Syrians internally displaced, fleeing bombardment. Millions more becoming  refugees, flooding neighbouring countries for haven, migrating desperately toward Europe.

Most leaders of countries conceive of legacy projects through which their administrations and their names will be respected and held in gratitude by their public. But not necessarily those in the Middle East, and certainly not the Assad family dynasty with their Alawite tribal affiliations and deadly sectarian hatred; a regime well known to have committed atrocities against its own people in the past and committed to carrying on that tradition. Syria and Iraq, both politically Baathist from opposite ends of the spectrum, both preying on their majority population, Sunni and Shia respectively.

The world watched, transfixed with revulsion at television screens, seeing children in agony from chlorine gas bombs hitting their night-time villages courtesy of their president, Bashar al-Assad, whose military was dispatched to clear Syria of the presence of Sunni Muslim 'terrorists', Syrian civilians who had agitated for equal status and treatment with their Alawite Syrian counterparts. They were rewarded by barrel bombs that wrenched their limbs from their torsos; a regime solution for terrorist activity.

Blood covers the hands of an injured boy following airstrikes believed to have been carried out by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, February 2015.   (Mohammed Badra/REUTERS)

An estimated 350,000 to 500,000 Syrian civilians were slaughtered by their own government, innocent civilians whom their president characterized as terrorists to justify his lethal responses to their pleas for equality as Syrian citizens. The bloody war against Sunni Muslim Syrians created 11 million refugees. A few years in to the civil war that proceeded, the regime battling Syrian Sunni militias attempting to overthrow the government that had systematically destroyed their human rights; the instability attracting actual terrorist groups seeing opportunities to advance their own agendas, among them the notorious Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

ISIL terrorists brought horror to the minds of those looking in at the Middle East, with their expanding capture of territory in Iraq and Syria, and their delight in torturing and murdering captured Europeans and Americans alongside their preoccupation with terrorizing and murdering and enslaving Yazidis, and their threats against Christians. Yet despite the terror they inspired in persuading those loyal to ISIL living abroad to launch attacks against Westerners in Europe and the United States, Islamic State could never match the kill rate of an established government that excelled in war crimes against civilians.

When "60 Minutes" documented the extent of the Assad regime's war crimes, activist Mouar Moustafa was the featured personality, a man who was determined to bring the full extent of the blighted criminality of al-Assad to public view through revealing his cache of documents signed by Assad authorizing depraved mass murder alongside thousands of photographs of civilians tortured to death in an accountability mission against his former president.

With the help of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the participation of Iran's proxy terror group Hezbollah and an assortment of Iran-controlled Shi'ite militias, augmented by the aerial bombardments of Russian warplanes, al-Assad finally had the upper hand, and with the dissolution of the Islamic State 'caliphate' the Syrian regime was enabled to restore its territory, mopping up the remainder of the Syrian resistance. The dreadful crimes committed by the Assad regime against its own people cries out for justice. Logically that should come with a trial against Assad himself and his advisers and military commanders.

But the International Criminal Court is disinterested in opening an investigation of Syria, just as the United Nations General Assembly has little interest in holding Syria to account for its paroxysms of mass murder, and the Security Council was never able to launch a condemnation of the regime with two of its permanent members, China and Russia, refusing to give assent. Finally, an accounting of sorts has arisen with a court in Germany having prosecuted and convicted a former Syrian regime officer for crimes against humanity.

 

A court in the German city of Koblenz sentenced former intelligence officer Eyad al-Gharib, 44, to four-and-a-half years in prison for aiding crimes against humanity. Convicted of accompanying 30 detained demonstrators being transported to prison, while fully aware of the systematic torture that awaited them in the prison. al-Gharib, a junior officer, had been arrested in 2019 along with senior regime officer Col.Anwar Raslan, under the principle of universal jurisdiction whereby a national court jurisdiction is given authority in issues of grave crimes against international law, irrespective of where the crimes take place.

Presiding judge Anne Kerber stands before pronouncing her verdict in the court in Koblenz, Germany, on February 24.

While it's a start on seeking justice, much, much more must be accomplished. Justice will only be served when Bashar al-Assad faces the full extent of international law and faces a penalty commensurate with his unspeakable crimes, and along with him, other members of his administration and the Syrian military which destroyed so many lives. President Vladimir Putin also has much to answer for in establishing support for the Syrian regime enabling it with that support to regain Syria while helping to slaughter Syrian civilians in the process.

There is no question the world is weary of these totalitarian governments persecuting innocent people, destroying countless lives, producing innumerable refugees and displaced populations facing miserable living conditions in lives of  traumatized horror. It is just so much easier to feel the horror, dread the outcomes, wish it would all go away, and turn away from it all, if only to maintain one's own sanity, sense of proportion and comfort in living normal lives in countries that sustain the rule of law and security and equality for all.

"This is a historic verdict. Not only because it is the first to convict a Syrian regime official for crimes against humanity, but also because it recognizes his crimes were part of a widespread and systematic attack orchestrated by the highest bodies of Assad's regime."

"This is only the first of many other trials and investigations we are supporting. It is almost ten years since the crimes Eyad A. [al-Gharib] was convicted for were committed in those early days of the uprising as the regime cracked down on bare-armed protesters." 

Nerma Jelacic, director, Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA)

Lessons From the Mandate of the International Criminal Court in the Hague

 Dominic Ongwen,  Photo ICC-CPI /via REUTERS

"Abductees were beaten for walking too slowly. One abductee was forced to kill another abductee with a club and forced to inspect corpses. Another abductee was forced to watch someone being killed. Some mothers were forced to abandon their children on the side of the road; one child was left on a rubbish pit."

"Civilians were shot, burned and beaten to death. Children were thrown into burning houses, some were put in a polythene bag and beaten to death."

Presiding Judge Schmittm International Criminal Court ruling against LRA ex-commander Dominic Ongwan

 

"[The Court] took the unprecedented step of reading out the names of a number of individual victims [of Ongwen's and the LRA's crimes]."

"While this case is important, redress must extend to the thousands of victims of the LRA's abductions, killings and mutilations, who still have not seen justice for the harms they have suffered."

Seif Magango, Amnesty's deputy director, East Africa, the Horn and Great Lakes

 

"I was abducted like Ongwen too, but he was a commander in the LRA, so he should be given the maximum sentence, considering what they did to me and lots of children from this region. The ruling today has touched me very much."

"When I was taken in 1996, I was two months' pregnant. We walked for hours between the border with Uganda and Sudan. Along the way, the rebels asked if any of us had an issue that meant we couldn't continue on the journey. I put my hand up."

"The commander asked the young soldiers to beat us with sticks. They said they would have to kill one of us that day, to discourage the young ones from trying to escape. They beat me all over the stomach and chest."

Former abductee

Thursday's ruling in The Hague was watched live by people in Gulu - not far from the Lukodi refugee camp   AFP

ICC Trial Chamber IX, composed of Judge Bertram Schmitt, Presiding Judge, Judge Péter Kovács and Judge Raul Cano Pangalangan, analysed the evidence submitted and discussed before it at trial and found, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Mr Ongwen is guilty of the following crimes:

1. attacks against the civilian population as such, murder, attempted murder, torture, enslavement, outrages upon personal dignity, pillaging, destruction of property and persecution; committed in the context of the four specified attacks on the Internally Displaced Persons camps ("IDP camps") Pajule (10 October 2003), Odek (29 April 2004), Lukodi (on or about 19 May 2004) and Abok (8 June 2004);

2. sexual and gender based crimes, namely, forced marriage, torture, rape, sexual slavery, enslavement, forced pregnancy and outrages upon personal dignity he committed against seven women (whose names and individual stories are specified in the judgment) who were abducted and placed into his household;

3. A number of further sexual and gender based crimes he committed against girls and women within the Sinia brigade, namely forced marriage, torture, rape, sexual slavery and enslavement; and

4. The crime of conscripting children under the age of 15 into the Sinia brigade and using them to participate actively in hostilities.

Kidnapped around the age of 14, convicted Lord's Resistance Army ex-commander Dominic Ongwen, grew to adulthood from his teen years entirely immersed in a child-and-human-rights-abusive environment whose purpose was to extract any possible measure of empathy and compassion from child abductees and to ensure they were entirely committed to the Lord's Resistance Army values and culture whose foundation was that of cruelty, anti-humanism and murder for profit in their reign of terror in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan.

 

When he is eventually sentenced, it will likely be for the maximum punishment for his crimes totalling thirty years' incarceration. The death penalty is not an option for sentencing with the International Criminal Court in the Hague. This man, now 40 years of age, was exposed as a child to the dehumanization of the terrorist group that saw fit to traumatize children they abducted, submitting them to a 're-education' in the realities of brutality and utter lack of empathy. He was ripped apart from his family and soon learned what was expected of him if he was to survive his initial captivity.

 

Subjected to death or mutilation by refusing the orders to harm others, he learned to commit acts of depraved brutality without compunction. The LRA promoted those children who proved themselves capable of the most violent behaviour and total compliance with orders to commit atrocities; the choice given them to either comply or face death themselves; survival meant becoming a working part of a LRA unit. Rising in the ranks of the LRA Dominic Ongwen perpetrated the same conscienceless brutality on children he abducted as was done to him.

It was not unusual for abducted children trained to survive by responding with alacrity to brutal orders, to have to prove their loyalty to the LRA by committing murder on demand, even murdering members of their own family. They were subjected to gang rape, used as human shields, placed front and centre in combat situations. LRA leader Joseph Kony led children to believe in his magical powers, his capacity to read minds, convincing them he knew their every thought and if those thoughts included escape, he would know.

Iranian child 'martyr'

The Lord's Resistance Army is in no way exceptional in its use of children in war situations. The Islamic Republic of Iran infamously sent tens of thousands of Iranian children to their deaths using their bodies to absorb the detonation of mines laid by the Iraq military during the Iran-Iraq war, so that the Iranian military could then flood the cleared minefields to attack their enemy. The children were assured they would go straight to Paradise, each of them wearing a 'key' to unlock the portals of Paradise.

 

Palestinian youths march during a military style exercise run by Hamas during a scouting summer camp next to the border between Egypt and Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Adel Hana/AP

 Palestinian boy in the Gaza Strip.

Abid Katib/Getty Images

Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, operate training camps in military exercises for Palestinian children in Gaza. The children are taught how to handle weapons, and how to produce elementary incendiary devices . They are taught from an early age that Israelis and Jews are their enemies and that the object of military training is to enable them to kill Jews and destroy Israel whose heritage land Palestinians claim as their own. This obvious child abuse is well known, yet Hamas, as a terrorist group whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and whose incitements to violence against Jews is well known, appears to be of no interest to the International Criminal Court as a potential for prosecution in a court of justice.

The Yemeni Houthis, clients of the Islamic Republic of Iran, considered by many countries to be a terrorist group, which has unseated the duly elected government in Yemen and seized a good part of its territory, also trains young boys for fighting, accustoming them to the use of firearms, and preparing them to take their place on the battlefield, using them as front-line shields just as their sponsors, the Iranian Republic did with their vulnerable young.

 

Kahlan, a 12-year-old former child soldier, demonstrates how to use a weapon, at a camp for displaced persons where he took shelter with his family, in Marib, Yemen in this July 27, 2018 photo.

Yet with all of this, on Friday the International Criminal Court in the Hague announced that it was prepared to launch a war crimes investigation against Israel. In a majority ruling following a six-year review by the chief prosecutor, the ICC judges made the announcement that "The Court’s territorial jurisdiction in the Situation in Palestine... extends to the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, namely Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem." 

 

Bearing in mind that the 'occupation' is in reality a military situation forced upon Israel for self-protection by the violently hostile actions of the Fatah and Hamas Palestinian groups intent on destroying Israel. These, however, are irritating facts the ICC has no use for.

 

Presiding Judge Robert Fremr in the courtroom at the ICC (International Criminal Court) in the Hague, the Netherlands, 2018    (photo credit: BAS CZERWINSKI/POOL VIA REUTERS)