DANIEL VAUGHAN: Donald Trump Should Call The International Criminal Court's Bluff

By 
 January 10, 2025

Later this month, the world will come together for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. At this time of great reflection, there will be one missing person. The leader of Israel, the free Jewish state refounded in the aftermath of the Nazi atrocities, is not allowed to attend.

Poland is the host nation for the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp. It has a museum conducting ceremonies with countries across the world invited. They are holding this to commemorate the day this concentration camp was finally freed after an estimated 1.1 million people were brutally slaughtered.

Auschwitz represented the very worst of Hitler's final solution. We hold the memorial services there to remind ourselves of the great tragedy that occurred there and how each generation faces some threat attempting to eradicate Jews.

To any rational mind, this is a prime place and event for the leader of Israel to attend. Benjamin Netanyahu represents the Israeli state and has been its fiercest defender for decades. But we do not live in a rational time, but an extraordinarily stupid one, and are witnessing the return of the very antisemitism Auschwitz is supposed to warn against.

Netanyahu isn't attending at the moment because the International Criminal Court issued bogus arrest warrants last year against Netanyahu and others in the government for what it claims are "war crimes" in Gaza. The indictments are thin on evidence but heavy on Hamas propaganda.

It's what you expect from international organizations like the United Nations, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), and all other long-winded names for similar organizations. These groups exist to attack and harass Jews as a means to ignore real problems.

UNRWA has dropped some of those pretenses by directly hiring members of Hamas. The UN hides behind various resolutions, blaming Jews for multiple things in Israel while ignoring genocide, slavery, and other things in places like China, Saudi Arabia, etc. If you're a country with a bad human rights record, you have to attack Israel in the UN to set up a deflective shield of criticism.

The ICC has joined the very worst of these ranks by claiming some level of legal authority to arrest Netanyahu any anycountry that has ICC jurisdiction. The United States does not recognize the legal authority of the ICC, and hopefully, we never will.

To his credit, Polish President Andrzej Duda has requested that his government allow Netanyahu to attend ceremonies. He has to take this step because otherwise, Netanyahu risks arrest if he attends the Auschwitz memorial and remembrance services.

The Polish government has made no decisions on this question. Nor has it sided one way or another on the ICC's indictments.

We're only 80 years from the liberation of this camp, and already, we're slipping into the very worst tendencies that created Auschwitz.

This situation screams for Donald Trump's boldness. He should call the ICC's bluff and invite Netanyahu to these ceremonies. Trump has experienced bogus lawfare directly, and there's no better person to walk right into the hornet's nest than Trump. He should attend the ceremonies and have Netanyahu as his special guest.

It plays to Trump's best traits: dare the ICC, Polish government, or anyone to lay a finger on Netanyahu as a guest of Trump's at the ceremony. In doing this, Trump will prove the ICC is a toothless organization and should be ignored by everyone.

A court that claims to represent justice on an international level but sides with antisemitism as its seminal moment deserves scorn. Trump, for his part, is responsible for peace in the Middle East by getting the Abraham Accords together. He will likely expand that in his second term.

Trump understands the importance of freeing the Jewish and American hostages still held by Hamas. In short, he gets it. Calling the ICC's bluff would severely blunt its name and impact on the world stage.

Just as the United States should cut off all funding and resources to UNRWA for aiding Hamas, so we should do the same to the ICC. Trump can also pull the NATO funding card and put pressure on Poland and everyone else. NATO is more important than the UN or ICC, anyway.

We should not allow a bogus court with moronic flights of fancy undercut the 80th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation. If the ICC wants to side with Hamas, then we can put it into the same bucket as Hamas and Nazis. They're both seeking the same thing: the delegitimization of the Jews and the eradication of the Jewish state.

It's time to call the ICC's bluff. Donald Trump can lead the way.

" A free people [claim] their rights, as derived from the laws of nature."
Thomas Jefferson