Last week, in an article in the Australian, I joined many from around the world denouncing the moral equivalence from the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) between Israel as a democratic country with an elected Prime Minister, a professional and disciplined military and a powerful and independent judiciary, on the one hand, and Hamas as a terrorist organisation with no internal judicial checks on its military conduct whatsoever, on the other.
Perhaps stung by the chorus of criticisms, Karim Khan, the prosecutor, has now dug the hole he is in even deeper in an interview with the Times. A British citizen of Pakistani ancestry, he recalled the many attacks on prominent British leaders by the Irish Republican Army and commented that the U.K. did not bomb Belfast to get the IRA on the justification that “there undoubtedly may be some IRA members and Republican sympathisers” in Belfast. Khan is now guilty of serial false equivalencies.
Where to even begin when a man in such a critically important office for international criminal justice betrays such jaw-dropping ignorance and lack of understanding?
First off, Belfast is part of the U.K., and people of Northern Ireland are British citizens. Gaza is not part of Israel, and Palestinians living there are not Israeli citizens. The Government and defence force of Israel, unlike Hamas, believe it their solemn duty to serve, defend and protect Israelis, not bomb them.
During the time of the Troubles, the IRA were not the ruling party of Northern Ireland.
The IRA was not committed by its charter to the complete destruction of the U.K. and the liberation of the entire country, from the English Channel to the North Sea and the Irish Sea. Senior IRA spokesmen did not call repeatedly for the death and ethnic cleansing of all Englishmen, with excitable mobs of expatriate Irish chanting “Gas the Poms!” and “Where are the Poms?” in the West’s major cities.
Perhaps I missed the news item when the IRA crossed the narrow sea to attack a major cultural festival where the English youth had gathered to celebrate life with dancing, singing and general good cheer and bonhomie, killing 8,000 (scaled from the October 7th attacks to reflect the much bigger U.K. population), abducting another 1,700, including children, babies and elderly and sadistically raping and torturing at will.
The IRA did not regularly launch rocket attacks from the cover of Belfast hospitals across the Irish Sea on civilians, installations and infrastructure in Britain. Nor do I recall news of the IRA building hundreds of miles of underground tunnels in which to hide their fighters and arms either.
If this is the level of Khan’s intellectual and logical reasoning capacity, the ICC will be living in interesting times for the next few years. He should be embarrassed by the political theatre he has staged.
Ramesh Thakur, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General, is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Senior Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute, and Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. His new book, Our Enemy, the Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power (Brownstone Institute, 2023), is out now. This article was first published by the Spectator Australia.
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