The Dictatorship
Democrats and Republicans offer hypocritical response to ICC’s Netanyahu arrest warrant
This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 23 episode of “Ayman.”
For the first time in history, the International Criminal Court issued landmark arrest warrants against a major ally of the United States. On Thursday, the ICC issued warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas military leader, Mohammed Deif. (Israel has said it killed Deif earlier this year.)
The world’s highest criminal court, which is made up of 124 countries — including all 27 members of the European Union — is now saying that if Netanyahu or Gallant set foot on the territory of a state party, that state party has an obligation to arrest them and transfer them to the Hague.
The jurisdiction of the ICC extends beyond member states and its word carries tremendous weight.
It’s worth noting that the U.S., despite playing a critical role in establishing and operating the United Nations War Crimes Commission, the World War II tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo, and more recent international tribunals, is not a signatory to the ICC. Neither is Israel.But the jurisdiction of the ICC extends beyond member states and its word carries tremendous weight. The language in Thursday’s ruling is devastating. The warrants state that Netanyahu and Gallant bear responsibility for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts,” as well as “the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.”
No one who has closely followed this war over the past 14 months would be surprised by these charges, especially that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. Multiple human rights organizations and aid groups have been sounding this alarm from the beginning.
But there’s more obvious proof that, as the ICC states, Israel “knowingly deprived the civilian population” of food, water, medicine and other medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity — they said they would.
Two days after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel that killed more than 1,200 people, then-Israel Defense Minister Gallant announced to the world a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip that would allow no food, water, electricity or fuel to 2.3 million Gaza residents. That means Israel’s leaders essentially announced last October that they would do what the ICC just filed arrest warrants for them doing.
In a press release outlining its arrest warrantsthe ICC said there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Netanyahu and Gallant “intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity.”
As expected, Netanyahu denounced the court’s announcement and claimed that it was antisemitic. Former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth responded to that accusation on X, writing: “Netanyahu cheapens the concept of antisemitism to try to save himself. At a point when Jews around the world need to rally support against antisemitism, Netanyahu throws them under the bus by equating antisemitism with criticism of his own war crimes.”
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote that “Netanyahu Brought the ICC Ruling on Himself and Now He’s Whining About Antisemitism.”
But how the international community has reacted is also critical in all this. The European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said that all E.U. member states should respect the court’s decision and implement it. Nations including France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Canada and South Africa all said they would meet their commitments under international law.But how did the United States — the country at the center of the rules-based international order that it helped build in its image, the country whose current president, after four years of Donald Trump turning away from that international order, pledged to put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy — react?
By slamming the court and calling its ruling “outrageous.” In a statement, President Joe Biden said the U.S. would “always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”
Threats to its security? Netanyahu and Gallant are being charged with using starvation as a weapon of war, not with defending itself. They’re being charged with doing what Gallant publicly announced they would do. Biden knows all about Israel restricting aid to Gaza; he built a $230 million pier off of Gaza’s coast because of it — a pier that collapsed faster than American credibility on the international stage.
The charges also include “crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” One recent study from Oxfam found that more women and children were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military in one year than in any other conflict in decades, including Russia’s devastation of Ukraine.
Make no mistake, the hypocrisy and depravity here is bipartisan.
It’s worth remembering how Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken reacted when the ICC charged Vladimir Putin with war crimes in 2023. The president and the secretary of state welcomed those charges and urged the international community to comply with them.But make no mistake, the hypocrisy and depravity here is bipartisan. Last March, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, called the ICC arrest warrant for Putin “a giant step in the right direction for the international community.” But on Thursday, Graham called the ICC a “rogue and politically motivated organization.” And on Friday, he threatened to impose sanctions on any U.S. ally that enforces the warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.
The hypocrisy even turned to hostility for fellow Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, of Arkansas. “The ICC is a kangaroo court and Karim Khan is a deranged fanatic,” Cotton wrote on X, referring to the ICC prosecutor. “Woe to him and anyone who tries to enforce these outlaw warrants. Let me give them all a friendly reminder: the American law on the ICC is known as The Hague Invasion Act for a reason. Think about it.”
Yes, think about that: A prominent Republican senator and ally of Trump threatening military action against the International Criminal Court in order to defend American-funded alleged war criminals.
In 2020, Biden campaigned on restoring America’s standing in the world and respecting international norms and his administration promised to champion human rights. The actions of this past week alone have put an exclamation point on his failure to do so. It’s also exposed American hypocrisy and its weakened influence in the world. And soon Biden will hand the keys to the White House to Trump, a man who has said he wants to end the Israel-Gaza war but makes no promises about human rights or international norms, and brings along a threat of more fire and fury.
Allison Detzel contributed.
The Dictatorship
A forced-labor crackdown or an end-run around Congress? Dissecting Trump’s new tariffs
NEW YORK (AP) — The Trump administration has imposed double-digit tariffs on more than 60 countriesusing a legal justification that permits the president to levy import taxes and other sanctions against countries found to engage in “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable” or “discriminatory” trade practices.
The new tariffs announced in recent days take effect just as temporary 10% worldwide tariffs expiredand critics say they are less about cracking down on forced labor than they are a way to replace those tariffs. The expired tariffs were themselves a temporary replacement for worldwide tariffs the Supreme Court struck down in February.
The tariffs were levied on countries that the U.S. says either don’t have or don’t effectively enforce a forced-labor import ban. The affected countrieswhich account for 99% of U.S. imports, were quick to protest, calling the Trump administration’s claims unfounded and arbitrary, as nations with vastly different records on forced labor received the same tariff level. The U.S. spent four months investigating but gave few details on how it arrived at the tariff rates, which are either 10% or 12.5%.
Sidestepping Congress
The tariffs were levied under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 on countries that the U.S. determined had failed “to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”
During President Donald Trump ‘s first term, he cited Section 301 to impose sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports amid a dispute over the sharp-elbowed tactics Beijing was using to challenge America’s technological dominance. The U.S. is also using 301 powers to counter what it calls unfair Chinese practices in the shipbuilding industry.
“The 301s allow a permanent tariff without going to Congress to settle the dispute,” said Barry Appleton, a law professor and co-director of New York Law School’s Center for International Law. “That’s what all of this is about. The president doesn’t want to knock on the front door of Congress, so he’s trying every side door and every unlatched window to get in.”
Little evidence that countries failed to enforce import bans
The office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) said it consulted with all 60 economies under investigation and held two rounds of public hearings, elicited more than 2,100 public comments, and had “engagement” with its trading partners about what they were doing to combat forced labor bans.
It didn’t detail its talks with the countries, saying those were confidential. Experts say it is fairly straightforward to investigate whether a country has a ban or not, but it is difficult to determine the government’s exact rationale for each country’s failure to enforce import bans.
“There’s not a lot of hard evidence there,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president for general economics and trade policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “It’s pretty laughable on its face to think that a country like the ones in Europe or in Norway or Switzerland aren’t doing enough to police forced labor.”
And even if countries do enact and enforce the forced-labor import bans the U.S. wants, they would still need to prove that they’re enforcing them to Washington’s satisfaction before the tariffs would be removed, said lawyer Patrick Childress, a partner at Holland & Knight and a former U.S. trade official.
“This suggests that no short-term path for countrywide relief from the new Section 301 tariffs will be available,” he said.
Sign up for Morning Wire: Our flagship newsletter breaks down the biggest headlines of the day.
Countries and industries reject the forced labor argument
Many countries have pushed back against the Trump administration’s findings.
Brazil, which faces a 12.5% forced-labor tariff, called the U.S. move “arbitrary and unjustified.” The U.S. “chose to manipulate an issue of great importance to human rights and the struggles of workers worldwide in order to accuse 59 countries and the European Union of unfair practices,” it said in a statement.
Australia also questioned the justification for its 12.5% tariff.
“We believe that amongst all of the countries in the world, Australia does take the issue of slavery, modern slavery, seriously, and will continue to do that,” Trade Minister Don Farrell told reporters in Adelaide.
Carve-outs have riled some industries. The National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO), which describes itself as the voice of the American textile industry, protested a mechanism that exempts the Section 301 tariffs for textile and apparel imports from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia based on those countries’ imports of U.S. cotton and textiles.
“No other industry has been more disadvantaged by forced labor than the U.S. textile industry, which employs 453,000 workers and has lost 41 plants over the past two plus years,” NCTO chief executive Kim Glas said in a statement. “We remain strongly concerned that USTR’s textile mechanism will harm the very domestic manufacturers the administration seeks to help.”
US forced-labor bans don’t always work
The U.S. has two major pieces of legislation related to forced-labor import bans. The Tariff Act of 1930 gave Customs and Border Protection the authority to seize shipments where forced labor was suspected and to block further imports. But it had a big carve-out: If there was “consumptive demand,” meaning there wasn’t sufficient supply to meet domestic demand, imports were allowed regardless of how they were produced. The Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act that took effect in 2016 eliminated that loophole.
In 2021, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was passed. It blocks imports from China’s Xinjiang region unless businesses can prove the items were made without forced labor.
But goods made with forced labor can still make it into the U.S. In 2015, an Associated Press investigation found that slave labor was used in the fishing industry in Southeast Asia. The seafood they caught made its way to supermarkets and pet food providers across the U.S.
An investigation by The Associated Press in 2020 into the $65 billion palm oil industry found labor abuses among an invisible workforce consisting of millions of men, women and children in Asia. The fruit they harvested made its way into the supply chains of major companies, including Unilever, L’Oreal, Nestle and Procter & Gamble.
Calls for a more comprehensive approach to combat forced labor
During hearings on the tariffs this month, National Retail Federation vice president Jonathan Gold, who was representing the business coalition the Joint Association Forced Labor Working Group at the hearing, said that in order for the import bans to work, they would have to be much more extensive.
He said there need to be “clear, measurable benchmarks” tied to tariffs for countries to hit, and that the U.S. should help countries build enforcement programs.
Kenya Davis, a partner at the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm, said an effective ban needs a “comprehensive approach” that provides transparency about what the investigations consisted of, along with programs that provide countries aid in enforcing bans.
ByI dig Shroff
During the make-up White House Correspondents’ Dinner last Friday, the President of the United States tried to take a swipe at an old foe. “Even Rosie O’Donnell reached out from Ireland,” he told the room. “She was desperate to come back to the United States and pay her respects to Donald J. Trump. But that didn’t work out, unfortunately, because nobody wanted her to come back.”
The joke wasn’t merely unfunny, it was also inaccurate. O’Donnell already came back to the country. Two nights before Trump’s speech, she opened her new comedy showwhich centers on her life and feud with Trump, at Manhattan’s Daryl Roth Theatre. On Thursday, she appeared on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”And next month, she will guest host“Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Two decades and two presidential inaugurations later, Trump still hasn’t let it go – and O’Donnell hasn’t backed down.
After the 2024 presidential election, O’Donnell actually did what many Americans threatened to do – leave the country. But now she is back, and that matters – because the story was never just about O’Donnell herself. It was also about the rest of us, the people watching Trump attack her.
While co-hosting a 2006 episode of “The View,” then one of the biggest daytime platforms in America, O’Donnell said that Trump was not self-madeand was in no position to lecture anyone about morality. At the time, the landlord-turned-game show host was furiousbut the feud was tabloid fodder rather than national news.
Two decades and two presidential inaugurations later, Trump still hasn’t let it go – and O’Donnell hasn’t backed down. There were years of insults, including the 2015 primary debate where moderator Megyn Kelly asked Trump about women he’d called pigs and slobs and he cut her off with three words: “only Rosie O’Donnell.” He brought her up again in his first debate with Hillary Clinton. And on Friday, in a ballroom filled with media elite who have yet to call him out as bluntly and forcefully as O’Donnell has, Trump called her a “a sick young woman. Sick older woman, I guess now I have to say.”
The two-time president of the United States, in other words, has spent twenty years returning to the same woman. She was among the first with a national platform to publicly refuse the premise his whole life is built on, and he has never been able to get over it.
Which is what makes his threat last summer worth remembering: “Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.” It wasn’t a serious legal proposal – the president cannot revoke a native-born American’s citizenship – as much as it was a MAGA theory of belonging. In threatening O’Donnell, Trump threatened to make citizenship a privilege he extends and can revoke (based on mere speech, no less). It was a warning to any critic whose passport is the only thing standing between them and a very different life and who doesn’t have O’Donnell’s resources or profile.
In the context of a twenty-year battle with the now-most-powerful man in the world, a regrouping abroad is not surrender.
Of course, there is an obvious objection to holding Rosie up as any kind of resistance example: she left. Staying carries real moral weight. Many people who have absorbed this past decade of Trump’s politics did not have an Irish grandmotheror the means to build a life somewhere else. There is something a little uncomfortable about resistance broadcast from another country, particularly when only some can afford it. But in the context of a twenty-year battle with the now-most-powerful man in the world, a regrouping abroad is not surrender.
And the impetus for her decision is crucial: “I knew, after reading Project 2025, that if Trump got in, it was time for me and my non-binary child to leave the country,” she told CNN last year. After years of being Trump’s favorite target, O’Donnell had better reason than almost anyone alive to know his obsession with settling scores and having things his way. Indeed, she knew better than much of institutional Washington, which was still reassuring itself about guardrails, norms, and adults in the room. Many institutions folded alarmingly quickly this time around: the museums, the law firms, the universities. O’Donnell did not wait for them to capitulate.
Yet she did not disappear. Now she is telling her story on her own terms, projecting Trump’s own words onto a theater wall for audiences that laugh at them instead of with them. While on Friday, the president described a broken woman pleading across the Atlantic, the actual Rosie was onstage a short train ride away, turning his words into part of her act. Twenty years after he decided she would be the punchline, she is still standing.
That is why Trump keeps coming back to O’Donnell. His campaign against her only worked if it ended with her gone or begging him for forgiveness. Personal intimidation is never only about the person being targeted. It is a warning to others: cross me and you will regret it. Too many institutions accepted that bargain. Rosie O’Donnell never did. In trying to make an example of her, Trump only made a point – and not the one he intended.
I dig Shroff
Kaivan Shroff is a senior advisor to the Institute for Education and a political commentator. He previously served on the advisory board for Dream for America, a progressive Gen Z-led non-profit. He is an alumnus of the Hillary for America digital team, holds a joint degree from Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a BA in Political Science from Brown University.
Last week, former Justice Department lawyer Liz Oyer testified in the Senate against the confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general. Then came the death threats.
Oyer oversaw the DOJ’s pardon office before President Donald Trump ousted her last year and promptly turned the office into a tool to help out his donors and political allies. She has said she was fired for refusing to restore actor Mel Gibson’s gun rights after his 2011 misdemeanor conviction for domestic violence, a claim the Trump administration has denied.
And she was a key witness urging senators to vote against confirming Blanche, who has already sought as acting attorney general to quash further inquiry into the Epstein files and drew criticism over his softball interview with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
And it seems Republicans are now fueling attacks against Oyer as they try to make Blanche the nation’s top law enforcement official.
“Hey everybody, I started getting death threats after I testified against Todd Blanche last week,” she said, showing images of expletive-riddled messages she received.
Oyer attributed the threats to dubious accusations — peddled by Missouri’s Republican senators, Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, and in conservative media — that she was basically an ally to rapists and murderers.
At the Senate hearing, the two senators homed in on President Joe Biden’s decision to commute most federal death sentences. In an effort to undermine Oyer’s credibility, Schmitt and Hawley cherry-picked examples of macabre crimes committed by some of the death row prisoners to suggest she didn’t take the crimes seriously. The attacks were reminiscent of Hawley’s attacks on current Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearing.
In her videoOyer explained that her recommendation to reassess the cases of all 40 inmates on federal death row, 37 of whom Biden spared from execution, was in keeping with the administration’s broad opposition to capital punishment. She also dispelled misinformation that commuted inmates will be ever be released from prison, adding:
Biden campaigned on a promise to end the federal death penalty. In light of that promise, some people believe it would have been more principled for Biden to commute all 40 death sentences, not 37. That would have sent a clear message that the president was categorically rejecting the death penalty — not weighing the relative value of people’s lives.
Intent on scoring political points, Hawley and a spokesperson for Schmitt doubled down on their attacks despite Oyer’s post about receiving death threats. In comments to the Columbia MissourianHawley said the “real victims” are the people hurt by those who were spared from execution. And the Schmitt spokesperson said Oyer’s “disgraceful clemency recommendations ignored the victims’ families’ concerns.”
The unavoidable irony here is that Hawley and Schmitt are hardly advocates for victims. They’re basically launching this line of attack to help Blanche — someone who has been rebuked by Epstein victims and their families.
And, of course, Hawley and Schmitt are both staunch allies of Trump’s — someone whose own clemency actions have included scores of Jan. 6 rioters who have gone on to commit assaults and sex crimes after being freed. Hawley, as you likely remember, raised a fist to the Jan. 6 horde right before the insurrection broke out, only to be later seen running for safety.
So when it comes to the topic of placating criminals, Hawley and the GOP have little credibility.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
- Blanche vote could be postponed, Cornyn says
- It’s Newt (and Russ and James)
- A forced-labor crackdown or an end-run around Congress? Dissecting Trump’s new tariffs
- Data center boom sparks lobbying surge
- Kids’ safety advocates draw red lines for Senate online safety package
- Beshear urges McConnell to provide more info on his health or resign
- Trump tried to make an example of Rosie O’Donnell. It backfired.
- Former DOJ lawyer spotlights death threats after Blanche testimony
- Capitol agenda: Graham’s legacy faces uncertain future
- Trump and Democratic states clash in court over who’s too sick to work
-
The Josh Fourrier Show2 years agoDOOMSDAY: Trump won, now what?
-
Politics1 year agoFormer ‘Squad’ members launching ‘Bowman and Bush’ YouTube show
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoLuigi Mangione acknowledges public support in first official statement since arrest
-
Uncategorized2 years ago
Bob Good to step down as Freedom Caucus chair this week
-
Politics1 year agoFormer Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron launches Senate bid
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoPete Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon goes from bad to worse
-
Politics1 year agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit
-
The Dictatorship11 months agoMike Johnson sums up the GOP’s arrogant position on military occupation with two words