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.

Noah Rothman provides a worthwhile reminder of why a nuclear Iran is a threat not just to Israel, but to the United States:

For one, Iran is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism on earth. It exports terrorists and arms throughout the region and beyond, and there are no guarantees that it won’t play a similarly reckless game with nuclear material. At minimum, the terrorist elements in Iran’s orbit would be emboldened by Iran’s new nuclear might. Their numbers would surely grow, as would their willingness to court risk.

Iran maintains the largest arsenal of ballistic missiles in the region. It can certainly deliver a warhead to targets inside the Middle East, and it’s fast-tracking the development of space-launch vehicles that can threaten the U.S. mainland. Even if Tehran were a rational actor that could be reliably deterred, an acknowledged Iranian bomb would kick-start a race toward nuclear proliferation in the region. The Saudis, the Turks, the Egyptians, and others would probably be compelled to seek their own nuclear deterrents, leading to an infinitely more complex security environment.

In the meantime, Iran would be able to blackmail the West, allowing it occasionally to choke off the trade and energy exports that transit the Persian Gulf and to engage in far more reckless acts of international terrorism.

As for the possible consequences, Rothman observes:

Iranian retaliation might be measured with the understanding that if it’s not properly calibrated, the U.S. and Israel could begin taking out Iranian command-and-control targets next. If the symbols of the regime begin crumbling, the oppressed Iranian people might find the courage to finish the job. If there’s anything the mullahs fear more than the U.S. military, it’s their own citizens.