The Uselessness of International Institutions

I attended an online talk today by Justice Professor Elyakim Rubinstein, formerly a senior diplomat and Deputy Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, and Abraham D. Sofaer, formerly a federal judge and Legal Adviser to the US State Department and an emeritus senior fellow at Hoover. They were discussing, from the Israeli perspective, the recent preliminary ruling on Israel and genocide by the World Court.

As you may know, the court heard a challenge brought by South Africa's government against Israel, and issued a preliminary finding that genocide was possibly occurring. It then issued a series of orders that Israel is, of course, perfectly free to ignore because all these international institutions are a joke.* 

I was curious to hear the Zionist** perspective on this, so I tuned in to hear what they had to say. They pointed out that this court doesn't operate like a real court, and thus did not actually do a real finding-of-fact. What it did was pile all the allegations together, call it 'evidence,' and the ruling says that given 'all the evidence,' there's a high probability of finding some proof in there somewhere once it's evaluated. 

To put it in layman's terms, then, the ruling isn't actually a ruling that Israel is doing anything wrong; it's a ruling that a lot of accusations have been made, and 'where there's smoke there's fire.' 

A real court wouldn't issue even a preliminary injunction without a sufficient review to determine whether or not a case was likely to succeed on the merits. No such effort was made here. 

That's what the Zionists say. Unlike the clowns at the UN, they do at least mean what they say.

* The head of the UN declared that these sorts of rulings are "legally binding," and he "trusts" that Israel will abide by them. He knows perfectly well that they will not abide by any one of them, let alone all of them, and no one can do anything about it. In other words, the rulings are not in any sense "binding." Thus, there's not really a law; and a court that issues bootless rulings while draping itself in the costume of jurists is not really a court. 

The head of the UN's pantomime to the contrary just shows you how much of a joke these institutions really are. I also have a good laugh when they do things like appointing Saudi Arabia or Iran to the "Organization for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women."

** This term is usually employed as a perjorative and often unfairly, but here I am using it accurately and non-prejudicially: the institution that hosted this talk is explicitly and formally a Zionist organization.