Israel and the International Criminal Court

CNSNews ^ | 4/12/02 | Brad Keena

[Tumbleweed_Connection]

Europe is having a little trouble keeping its Jew haters from making headlines these days. Particularly beset, French officials - like proud but embarrassed parents at a PTA meeting - are still grasping for a handle on the moment after a recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks.

A synagogue in Marseille was burned to the ground two weeks ago. Two youths were arrested April 8 for placing a homemade bomb in a Jewish cemetery in Strasbourg. A school bus carrying Jewish school kids was pelted with rocks April 11. That same day, police in Paris said a dozen or so hooded assailants wielding clubs attacked a group of Jewish teenagers playing soccer. Screaming anti-Semitic remarks, the KKK-like assailants sent several of their Jewish victims to the hospital.

France, it turns out, is now host to the world's largest co-existence of Arab Muslims and Jews. With national elections on the horizon, the Mid-East crisis has propelled foreign policy and immigration to the center of French political debate. Attending a pro-Palestinian march on April 6th (which drew 30,000 demonstrators) Green presidential candidate Noel Mam\'e8re said, "It is legitimate to criticize the State of Israel while denouncing the acts committed in France in recent days." Missing, of course, is the answer to the question of how France's five million Arab Muslims have come to outnumber the 700,000 Jews living there in the first place.

After Thursday's attack on the teenage soccer players, French Sports Minister Marie-George Buffet issued a Politically Correct statement, poorly-disguised as a condemnation: "I am convinced that the young people of France, of whatever opinion and of all origins, will take action to defend the spirit of tolerance and dialogue."

His phrase, "defend the spirit of tolerance and dialogue," must have sounded just as lame in French - d\'e9fend l'esprit de tol\'e9rance et dialogue - as it does in English.

So, what exactly is dialogue? Is it sheet-covered criminals with clubs arguing their right to bash the heads of Jewish people? And what should we make of tolerance - that stupid PC word that keeps raising its ugly, high-handed, so-full-of-self-satisfaction head? Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary defines tolerance as "the endurance of the presence or actions of objectionable persons." Pertaining to medicine, tolerance is the "physiological resistance to a poison," according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. I wonder, is that the policy in France these days?

[Lesson to young people from French officials: when considering a person of Jewish persuasion, try to endure his or her actions, however objectionable. In time, you - hooded or otherwise - will come to "resist" this "poison."]

[Or, as SS Colonel Julian Scherner tells Oskar Schindler, "That's not just good old-fashioned Jew-hating talk; it's policy now."]

In the Scriptures, God never tells us to tolerate others. You see, tolerance is not enough. Instead, God tells us to do a hard thing: He commands us to love one another. Love isn't tolerance; it is more than that. Love requires, at the very least, that we treat others as we would have others treat us. Love, under God's definition, is seldom found in modern thought, is not binding in legal circles, and carries little currency in the economy of popular obligation.

The nations of the world appear to be gathering against Israel - finding it difficult to tolerate Jews. As a truck filled with cooking gas blew up outside a historic synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba killing six people and injuring dozens of others April 11, that same day a new International Criminal Court (ICC) had just become a reality. At a ceremony marking the ratification of a Rome accord by enough nations to put the treaty into effect, gatherers at the United Nations headquarters hailed the new world Court as a "landmark human rights achievement." This from a body celebrated in some circles for its hard-line stance against Israel. The United States still defends Israel against frequent UN resolutions of condemnation. The U.S. (with Israel) also resisted ratifying the odious accord that set the ICC into motion this month. The Court's first tribunal is scheduled to convene in The Hague, Netherlands, next year, claiming jurisdiction even over citizens of countries like the U.S. and Israel that are not a part of the agreement.

Oddly, the tribunal is championed as a belated effort to fulfill the promise of the post-Nazi Germany Nuremberg trials, when Hitler's followers were prosecuted for pioneering new crimes against humanity. Seen by defenders as a deterrent to a future Holocaust, the International Criminal Court debuts at a time in which the very opposite result has become a chillingly real possibility. Who knows what may soon happen to Jews around the world accused for their ancestral connections to the state the entire world now seems to despise? Who will become the first U.S. citizen(s) to be apprehended and thrown before the judgment of a court that recognizes no constitutional protections? When the court issues its first guilty verdict, don't expect any "tolerance."

[Diogenesis]

Where is the condemnation from the UN about burning of synagoges in Europe and Canada?

Where is the condemnation for the suicide bombers?

The UN/EU ignore antiSemitism
because they love terrorists, especially Chief Terrorist Arafat.