The West has given up on being in the right. It thus can treat Israel and Hamas equally before the International Criminal Court (ICC).
I had a professor at Harvard who was truly a unique fellow. He was not only a full professor but also a full-time farmer. He was the most intellectually curious person I knew on the faculty. Today, professors are mostly dullards or drones. They dare not propose anything that does not fit into the official orthodoxy of their chosen field—even if tenured. How many professors have been threatened or removed in show trials for saying the wrong things about trans or Palestinians? In those days long ago, one was still allowed to use his brain.
In my professor's course on the built environment of North America, he showed a slide having a massive pole with an even more massive doughnut on the top of it. After he removed the slide, he asked the class what was next to the doughnut store. We were all stumped except for one young woman who correctly pointed out that it was a Ford dealership. The professor congratulated her for looking beyond the sign but admonished her because her roommate had taken the class a year before and had given her the answer beforehand.
If you ask most people who was the führer after Adolf Hitler, few would know. Hitler was that big doughnut that took up the entire view, but there was a leader after him, one that Hitler himself appointed in his rambling will. Admiral Karl Doenitz was the genius behind the successful U-boat campaign that nearly knocked England out of the war. Even Churchill said that the enormous losses of ships and cargo at the hand of Doenitz’s wolf packs was the one thing that could prevent him from falling asleep. Doenitz was elevated to the head of the Kriegsmarine and eventually the leadership of Germany—for all of 8 days.
When Doenitz was brought to the Nuremberg trials, he was charged with war crimes with a suggested punishment of death by hanging. Doenitz did something brilliant and sent a letter to American five-star admiral Chester Nimitz. He asked the hero of the pacific if he had ordered unrestricted warfare against all Japanese shipping. Nimitz said that he had, and in practice they would sink anything from a rowboat to an aircraft carrier or an oil tanker if it was in the service of Japan. Doenitz showed the court that he had acted no differently than Nimitz, and the true-believing Nazi was given a 10-year jail term in place of death. He died 35 years after the end of the war.
If the war crime trials in Germany and Japan had the demented mentality of today’s international courts, the judges there would not have asked why Doenitz got off lightly but rather why wasn’t Admiral Nimitz dragged into court? And what about Bomber Harris whose RAF burned down Dresden and Hamburg? And let’s not forget General Curtis LeMay, whose B-29s burned down 60 cities in Japan. And of course, we need General Leslie Groves and his Los Alamos scientists for their role in causing the death of nearly 200,000 people in the two atomic strikes. Why weren’t these “mass murderers” brought to justice? The simple answer is because the good guys won.
When Hitler had his troops kill Polish soldiers and drag their bodies into Germany in order to make it look like Poland attacked first, one of his officers said that the ruse would eventually be discovered. Hitler replied, “The winners write the history.” And the winners, using the same brutal and murderous tactics as their enemy, also keep the right to decide who the war criminals are. No one—not even the Germans or Japanese—would for a moment have thought to bring Eisenhower or Admiral Halsey into the dock. They won and they had the right to administer justice. But no longer. When the ICC can create a false equivalence between the democratically-elected prime minister of Israel, Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu and the arch terrorist Yahya Sinwar, then we know that the international institutions have lost their legitimacy. Netanyahu and his forces responded to the worst murder of Jews since the Holocaust and have done everything to defang Hamas with the minimal loss of civilian life. Sinwar has done his utmost to maximize loss of life for soldiers and civilians equally. Sinwar and Hamas are evil. Netanyahu and Israel are the good guys, protecting their society that includes democratic institutions and elections.
Those who set up the Nuremberg court were warned that there is no such thing as international law. In the old days, top Nazis like Goering and Speer would have been sent to England, France, Russia etc. to face crimes against the laws of those countries. Even when the international tribunals were set up, they were specifically set up by the victors and thus granted immunity to their side. While the US army might deal with a colonel who ordered his troops to kill civilians, there was no way that anyone on the winning side would be brought before an international court. But today, the international institutions cannot tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. Both sides seem to be shooting, firing rockets, killing. So they must both be evil, and their people need to be dragged off to the Hague to face "justice." Their moral ignorance is repugnant.
Only one side of a conflict should be brought before international courts. The side that is considered in the right (like an attacked Israel or Ukraine) should be completely indemnified from having to face such tribunals. As we lose our moral compasses, we can no longer define good or evil. And as such, we judge the defending soldier and the attacking terrorist as being one and the same.
There are good guys and bad guys, good and evil, right and wrong. As long as the ICC and other international courts cannot discriminate between them, they should be ignored or put out of business.