THE BIG SIGNALER

Why does Donald Trump's US administration want to intimidate international justice?

 

By Sidney Hey 

There is no doubt a friend told me: Things are changing faster than we can assimilate them. It is true that the speed at which some issues are spreading and others are coming to light is something you would not have imagined 25 years ago and one of them is to see the great rottenness of an empire that is sinking in its own shit.

I make it clear that I am not a communist, let alone a socialist, as I speak in criticism of the USA which for the past century has been a beacon of democratic values, freedom and blablablabla and has shown only by its own actions that it is not one iota of that.

President Donald Trump has escalated even further in putting his country on the cusp of opprobrium, to the point of abhorrent cynicism. From his greyish Ukraine policy to his shameful and explicit support for Israel's genocide of the Palestinian population, his administration has only proved us right.

Precisely in reference to the mass crimes being committed in Gaza and those that Israel is extending with its encroachments in the West Bank, in the face of irrefutable evidence of gross and systematic violations of the human rights of the Palestinian population, at the behest of governments such as the South African government and with the support of a large part of the international community, international justice has been sought to do and apply what the Rome Statute provides for aberrant cases such as those that the world is witnessing today.

Since the filing of the complaint before the International Criminal Court and the arrest warrant for Netanyahu and his closest officials, the threats and attempts by Tel Aviv, redirected from Washington, to intimidate the actors and the judges of the court themselves have not ceased. These notoriously unjust and illegal coercive interferences pursue a pernicious goal: impunity. These mafia-like attitudes did not begin with Trump and MAGA, nor are they unique to Republicans. The Democratic clique of the Clintons, Obama and, of course, Biden, also operated underhandedly to try to sabotage the prosecution of investigations into their actions in Afghanistan as well as those committed by Israel.

Secretary of State Marc Rubio's latest announcements already take things beyond the abstract of cynicism. The imposition of sanctions against ICC officials for their investigations into war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Americans in Afghanistan and those committed and still being committed by the state of Israel put into perspective a political reality that for decades has been masked by the creation of enemies.

According to the US Secretary of State, the officials investigating these acts have abused their power, politicised their actions and are not transparent in dispensing justice, considering the body they work for as ‘a threat to national security’. What kind of threat would a court represent to a nuclear power? Oh yes, the truth! For the American Establishment truth is not part of their policy and it is indeed very curious that, despite their boasts about Christian morality, Puritanism and their faith in God, wasn't it Jesus who said The truth shall set you free? Perhaps that is the clearest proof that they have long since ceased to be Christians. According to Rubio (who is Trump) the investigations by ICC officials are being used as a legal war against his country and its ally Israel.

With regard to Israel and its political elite led today by PM Benjamin Netanyahu, the horrendous crimes committed by its military forces, both regular and irregular, and which they boast of continuing to reproduce, are so overwhelming and varied that they make the chests of millions of people, wherever they are and whatever their creed, burn with indignation at such criminal impudence. Just as a sample of the variety of crimes that the state of Israel harbours, there are the rapists, paedophiles and child abusers. Rumours of Jeffrey Epstein's faked suicide to secretly smuggle him out of the US to find refuge in Israel today have yet to be silenced. 

But he is not alone in enjoying the benefits of impunity. Some of them linked to his revulsive intelligence services such as Tom Artiom Alexandrovich who, as an Israeli cyberwarfare agent, will be able to escape criminal prosecution for sexual abuse after being arrested in Las Vegas following an FBI raid. Because Trump ordered by request of his dear friend Netanyahu his immediate release and extradition to Israel where there are a large number of Palestinian women and children captured in the Gaza Strip and who are held in real torture camps where they are subjected to all kinds of humiliations, rapes and some are subjected to experiments.

But what Marc Rubio and the administration he represents through these threats is to try to sneak public opinion or rather to try to hide (as the saying goes) an elephant in the middle of a bazaar. Showing themselves as unfairly attacked or slandered by the criminal investigations is a public relations strategy that only they believe. In the light of any jurist or even a moderately educated citizen who is not a lawyer, one realises that these childish attitudes cover up simple acts of extortion so crude, illegal and so unjustified that they should shame the very honest representatives of the USA, and believe it or not, there are some.

It is regrettable how so brazenly the administration of Donald Trump, who to the height of cynicism governs a country that still has the gall to point the finger at others with a yardstick of democracy that they broke long ago, seeks to turn the illegal into legal, the aberrant into normal and those who seek to elucidate the truth to persecute them into silence.

Needless to say, this does very little to seek and achieve justice in international bodies. The citizens of the world are becoming more aware than ever of the need for truly universal justice, universal justice with all that that means, to exist and to be implemented.