ICC’s arrest warrants expose the West’s inability to defend the values on which freedom and democracy are built

In one respect the International Criminal Court is a perfectly constituted body, and its actions flawless. Assuming that you take its name literally – that it is a court, in reality, for international criminals – then it has fulfilled its remit to the very letter. It has, after all, left international criminals such as Bashar al Assad of Syria, Xi Jinping of China and Ali Khamenei of Iran entirely free to go about their business, without a stain of ICC criticism of their character or actions.

When, however, a nation decides to defend itself from those actions – when, in other words, Israel began a military option to destroy the military capability of Iran’s proxy, Hamas, after the rape and murder of 1200 Israelis on October 7 – the ICC leaps into action to sanction the leaders of the nation defending itself from state-sponsored terror.

In this respect, the ICC is the archetypal international body of our times. A nation defends itself against terrorists who rape and murder its citizens and it is the leaders of that nation that the ICC prosecutes. Anyone expecting anything else must have been asleep for the past thirty years. The ICC’s behaviour is par for the course of the morally inverted world in which we now live in which the glue that binds international bodies together is what used to be called the delegitimisation of Israel, but is now easier to refer to simply as Jew hate. International bodies focus relentlessly and near-exclusively on the Jewish state and fabricate war crimes to turn the victims of genocide into its supposed perpetrators.

The UN General Assembly, for example, repeatedly passes more resolutions against Israel than against all other countries in the world combined. The UN Human Rights Council is one of the main vehicles for the promotion of Jew hate, with standing orders committing it to attacking Israel in every session.

How do you make yourself relevant in a world in which Jew hate is the common denominator among disparate nations? It’s not exactly difficult to work that one out: use Jew hate as your guiding principle. Quelle surprise, the ICC has issued arrest warrants against the leader and former defence minister of the Jewish state – responding to a request from that moral light unto the nations, South Africa, reportedly acting under instruction and financing from Iran.

As Prof Eugene Kontorovich, the leading international law expert, puts it: “The ICC was already a failing institution when it seized onto the oldest hatred to revive its relevance. Now it is issued arrest warrants for against leaders of democratic non-member state for crimes that did not happen, in state that does not exist, against leaders have have overseen the most humane urban war in modern history. These arrest warrants are themselves crimes: they seek to deny Jews from defending themselves from genocide.”

Our world may be morally inverted but that offers us a number of tests of decency. Do you, for example, grasp the centrality of Ukraine's need to defend itself against Russia - and for the West to support it properly?

Israel is another such test: Do you understand the fight for freedom versus barbarity? Do you stand with Israel, fighting a proxy war for the West - or do you stand with the rapists and murderers who seek to destroy the West and its values? International law – as interpreted by the bodies charged with its implementation – was long ago captured by those who see everything through a plane of moral relativism and which thus, perversely, leads them to see those who stand up for Western values as the ones who need to be punished. And in issuing arrest warrants against the Israeli PM, the ICC is asserting that it has the right to try – and, if convicted, imprison – democratically elected leaders with whose security policies the court’s judges disagree.

The ICC’s arrest warrants matter to everyone, not only those concerned with Israel’s security. Because they expose how the West's real problem today is not those who openly seek to destroy us, whom we could defeat if we decided to act, but rather our inability to stand up for and defend the values on which freedom and democracy are built, having effectively ceded such decisions to those who regard their own societies as being the enemy.