07-15-2004, 02:30 PM
By P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 15, 2004
The World Court’s ruling against Israel’s fence reveals that for the UN-EU establishment that it represents, there’s not much Israel can do that would escape condemnation other than lie down and die.
Targeted killings of terror masters are out. Military operations in places like Rafah or Jenin are out; they spark media frenzies of alleged massacres and wanton killing of civilians. Demolitions of the homes of suicide bombers—the only thing that can deter people who seek their own death—are out. Even curfews, roadblocks—out; they’re seen as oppressing the Palestinian people.
And now the moralists of the World Court have informed us that passive defense, too, is out. Adopting the official Arab League take on the legal status of the West Bank and airbrushing Palestinian terror out of the picture, the Court has ordered us to tear the fence down and start back where we were a couple of years ago when a few days without a suicide bombing seemed blessedly peaceful.
Less than two weeks earlier Israel’s Supreme Court, whose justices mainly represent the Left-liberal part of Israeli society, had ruled that the fence was a legitimate security measure, but parts of it would have to be rerouted because they inconvenienced the local Palestinian population. The same sort of Israelis who think Israel could redeem itself in the world’s eyes by removing this or that settlement, or withdrawing from this or that piece of land, or signing this or that treaty, hoped that the Israeli Court’s ruling—which clearly rated Palestinian convenience over Israeli lives in some cases—would favorably influence the Court in The Hague. Now they know it made no difference at all.
The World Court’s ruling was read out in solemn tones by its President, Shi Jiuyong of the People’s Republic of China. It’s a good thing Mr. Shi is so concerned with Israeli morality, since it spares him having to glance backward at his own country—which Freedom House, in its “Freedom in the World” report for 2003, ranks 7 for political rights and 6 for civil liberties on a descending 1-7 scale (by the way, Israel ranks 1 and 3, respectively). Freedom House gives some more detailed information on the state of rights and liberties in the PRC, and this is just a sample:
"China is one of the most authoritarian states in the world. Opposition parties are illegal, the CCP controls the judiciary, and ordinary Chinese enjoy few basic rights. . . . [A]ccording to [a] State Department report[,] officials often subject prisoners to “severe psychological pressure” to confess using legal loopholes to prevent suspects from obtaining counsel . . . . Officials bypass the courts entirely in jailing, without trial, hundreds of thousands of Chinese each year. . . . By most accounts, Chinese prisons, re-education camps, and detention centers hold thousands of political prisoners. . . . Even after they are released, many former political prisoners face unrelenting police harassment that prevents them from holding jobs or otherwise leading normal lives. China executes thousands of people each year, more than all other countries combined. . . . Many are executed immediately after summary trials, and often for nonviolent crimes. . . . many Chinese have been executed for nonviolent offenses such as corruption, pimping, hooliganism, or the theft of farm animals or rice. . . . Law enforcement officials routinely torture suspects to extract confessions. . . . The regime sharply restricts press freedom. . . . Chinese jails held 36 journalists as of December 2002, 14 of whom were serving time for publishing or distributing information online. . . . Beijing sharply restricts religious freedom . . . . [Z]ealous local officials . . . harass and at times fine, detain, beat, and torture church leaders or ordinary worshippers. . . . In Xinjiang, officials sharply restrict the building of new mosques, limit Islamic publications and education, ban religious practice by those under 18, and control the leadership of mosques and religious schools. . . ."
Yes, Mr. Shi, I hope you represent your country proudly on the Court of Justice, and are bearing down hard on all those Israeli infractions.
Shi’s second-in-command is the Court's vice-president, Raymond Ranjeva of Madagascar. With a 3, 4 ranking on political rights and civil liberties, Madagascar in fact does much better than China, but it’s no paradise either:
"Most of the 20,000 people held in the country's prisons are pretrial detainees, who suffer extremely harsh conditions. In many rural areas, customary law courts that follow neither due process nor standardized judicial procedure often issue summary and severe punishments."
Then there’s Nabil Elaraby, the Egyptian justice. Nobody fell off his chair in shock when Elaraby—who has no problem serving under President Shi, whose country officially discriminates against and oppresses Muslims and Islam—voted along with the 14-1 majority to condemn Israel’s fence. Back in 2001, two months before he was elected to the World Court, Al-Ahram stated Elaraby’s views on Israel as follows: “New facts and new problems are created on the ground.… Grave violations of humanitarian law ensue . . . the atrocities perpetrated on Palestinian civilian populations, for instance. . . . Israel is occupying Palestinian territory, and the occupation itself is against international law.” But last January, when Israel requested that Elaraby be removed from the fence case, it got nowhere. As for human rights in Egypt (rankings: 6, 6), a few details from Freedom House:
"The Emergency Law . . . allows for the arrest without charge and prolonged pretrial detention of suspects, as well as their families and acquaintances. Torture and inadequate food and medical care are pervasive in custody. In November 2002, Amnesty International published a report stating that “everyone taken into detention in Egypt is at risk of torture.” The authorities rarely investigate the abuse of detainees (unless they die in custody). . . . Although non-Muslims are generally able to worship freely, the government has seized church-owned property and frequently denies permission to build or repair churches. In recent years, Muslim extremists have murdered, kidnapped, raped, and forcibly converted scores of Copts, and burned or vandalized Coptic homes, businesses, and churches; the few perpetrators who have been brought to trial have been acquitted or received light sentences."
And so it goes. Israel also found itself chastised in this ruling by Jordan, the Russian Federation, Sierra Leone, and Venezuela (respective Freedom House rankings: 6, 5; 5, 5; 4, 4; 3, 4). All these countries have considerable human rights problems at home that, ideally, they would tend to first; instead, their representatives on the Court voted to remove Israelis’ right to life and affirm Palestinian terrorists’ right to slaughter them unimpeded.
And then there were the democracies that voted in favor. They included France and Belgium, the biggest Arafat-groupies on the planet; the Netherlands, which hosted the evil farce; as well as Brazil, Germany (the less said the better), Japan, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom, a country not totally in the EUnuch camp that showed, with this ruling, that where Israel is concerned it stands—or grovels—with the most abject of the appeasers.
The lone dissenting vote by the American judge, Thomas Buergenthal, together with the bipartisan dismissals of the Court’s ruling by American leaders, were the only rays of light in a very dark picture.