On Monday, Karim Khan, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced that he is seeking arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as for three senior Hamas leaders. Kyle Orton examines some procedural flaws in Khan’s case, and argues that the ICC’s investigation, with which Israeli officials cooperated, was in fact a “sham.” He then turns to the bigger picture:

The prosecutor, the judges, and the rest of the ICC bureaucracy are drawn from an international layer of highly ideological academics and lawyers committed to the “progressive development of international law.” . . . By definition, this cadre sees national sovereignty as the biggest impediment to its objectives, and is by disposition virulently hostile to claims based on traditional rather than rational-legal authority, to claims of national interest generally, to the use of force in pursuit of same, to nationalism or patriotism in any form, and really to democracy, seeing it as a destabilizing factor that produces undesirable elements in the international system—look at Donald Trump—which compete with their own magisterial impartiality.

This obviously makes the Jews a special problem, holding to their ancient creed of peoplehood centered on the Land of Israel. . . . During the Enlightenment, Jews were attacked for stubbornly holding on to their insular, backward particularism. . . . The language has changed, but the theme of Jews as not only holdouts against the tide of universalist progress, but as a cosmic danger to the entire enterprise, has remained within Western elites, whose members now come from the four corners of the earth and staff the ICC.

The next step, of course, is to use the ICC against the United States and other democracies. Orton concludes:

As with so many things that start as problems for Jews, “international law” of the modern kind, embodied in the ICC and United Nations institutions like the International Court of Justice (ICJ), is a problem for us all.

One of the greatest, and most baffling, of America’s errors since October 7 has been its indulgence of Qatar, a nominal ally that tends to act as anything but. Over the next week, I’m going to use this space to point to some of this regime’s bad behavior, and its deadly consequences. Today, I’ll focus on Al Jazeera, a state-sponsored media conglomerate that churns out anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda in a variety of languages. Douglas Murray calls attention to some of its employees in Gaza:

Take Muhammad Washah, whom Al Jazeera presented as a stellar part of the press corps merely reporting the truth. Unfortunately for them, their man is also a senior commander in Hamas. He used to be in Hamas’s anti-tank missile unit, but since 2022 he has been in charge of research and development for aerial weapons. Known to you and me as “rockets.”

It’s quite something to pull off. On the one hand, Washah can spend his days making rockets to fire at Israel. But in the evenings he can report on the terrible destruction in Gaza caused by the “Zionist entity.” . . . He might have kept getting away with it if IDF soldiers in Gaza had not managed to get a hold of his laptop.

And that’s why, Elliott Abrams explains, supporters of freedom of the press should have no qualms about Washington pressing Doha about the network—or about Israel’s decision to prevent it from operating within its borders:

While organized as a private company, Al Jazeera is the voice of Qatar’s regime. It was founded and financed by the then-emir of Qatar. Whenever I am told that this is not true, and that Al Jazeera is really an independent news source, I ask a simple question: show me one time since its founding nearly 30 years ago that it has voiced one criticism of the Qatari government. I’m still waiting.

And it’s not just Al Jazeera: Qatar owns other news media that are equally awful. . . .

These news sources are not free; they need to stay close to the Qatari official line and never contradict it in significant ways. . . . And that is what makes their pernicious role so consequential: Qatar could turn them off, or turn them into actual independent news sources, if it wished. Instead it wishes to promote and laud violence.