In the past, the U.S. has levied sanctions against individual ICC judges and prosecutors, but this time around the warning is for the entire organization itself. And Rubio hinted that Washington may just be getting started.
“We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling their ability to operate against us,” Rubio said in announcing the move. “The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC.”
Of course. No surprise there. The Orwellian reversal is not a new phenomenon:
The South African-born jurist and former UN human rights chief Navi Pillay, who presided over a commission that declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for what the committee described as her efforts to promote peace and international law.
Her win is sure to be seen as a stinging, high-profile rebuke to US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have both rejected the findings of a UN commission she led that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Both leaders also have been highly critical of the institutions where Pillay has worked, with Israel previously accusing her of being a “Hamas proxy” with a long history of vehemently anti-Israeli and antisemitic positions.
“Stinging, high-profile rebuke”? Hardly. Neither Trump nor Netanyahu – nor I, nor probably you – give the Nobel Prize Committee or the UN any credence or respect. The Prize about as meaningful these days as anything else the UN does (or as meaningful as another Trump impeachment, which will happen if Democrats win control of the House in the coming election). Only the left cares about this sort of thing, and only to them it’s a “high-profile rebuke” to the nefarious Trump and Netanyahu and Israel.
However, on a certain level it still shocks me – although it should not – that so much of the world believes this sort of thing to be the height of virtue. How can they not recognize the absurdity of the assertion that Israel is committing genocide? And yet I’m sure that most of the people I know would probably nod right along – people with advanced degrees in this or that or the other thing.
It is a puzzlement to me how people can buy into the most transparently stupid – and actually evil – belief systems without questioning them. And yet, here we are.
The firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed, the Pentagon said Thursday, a stunning revelation about plans for the first military execution in more than 65 years after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had described it as being “public.”
That is quite a turn-around. It’s been 17 years since the shooting, a terrorist act that killed thirteen military members and injured 33. So the carrying out of the verdict has been much delayed by appeals. Now that the appeals seem to have run out (although I’m not 100% sure they have), the military seems to want to make up for lost time by using an especially violent means of death and by making it public.
There’s a long history of public executions in the US and elsewhere, but the last public execution in this country was in 1937. The idea was that the spectators would learn a lesson from the spectacle, but I find that unconvincing and I’m not in favor of making anyone’s death public in a sort of snuff film. If you look at the list of countries engaging in public executions these days, it includes Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia (although the latter is changing). Is that a group to emulate?
States started to change the policy as an increasing number of people witnessed botched hangings and as broader concerns grew over the events, Radelet said.
“Instead of promoting the sanctity of life and how solemn the circumstance was, with people applauding and having a carnival-like atmosphere, that really turned people off,” he said.
Democratic Senate candidate from Texas James Talarico has been missing from the campaign trail since September 26:
According to local press, Talarico’s campaign claims he is having a bad bout with the flu, which they say required a visit to urgent care. …
Paxton’s campaign was right on it, taking full advantage by putting out a milk carton photo of Talarico and asking if he’s been seen.
I, for one, believe the flu story, for the simple reason that I got the flu 12 days ago and I’m still not all better. Plus my son, who is far younger than I, also is still somewhat sick. This is a nasty, nasty bug that started with a cough, segued into many days of fever and exhaustion, and then turned into several GI symptoms; I’ll spare you by not describing the latter except to say they haven’t totally gone away.
So yes, Talarico’s campaign could actually be telling the truth about this. However, there isn’t much else it’s telling the truth about, especially the extreme leftism of the candidate, although certain aides seem to be letting it slip:
#TXSEN NEWS:
In the closing days of James Talarico’s race against @KenPaxtonTX, Talarico’s own staffers could cause major problems for the Texas Democrat — in this exclusive footage, one of Talarico’s Marxist field organizers explains how she views him as the "vehicle" to push Texas drastically leftward, and that Talarico is actually far more anti-Israel than he publicly claims to be
Jonathan Turley takes Macron to task for pretending to champion free speech while attacking it:
French President Emmanuel Macron went full Orwell this week. While long the darling of Western media, Macron has been one of the most anti-free-speech leaders in the world. This week, he declared that “The so-called American ‘free speech’ today, which some people have promoted, is the opposite of free speech.” …
In my book The Indispensable Right, I discuss how France has careened down the slippery slope of censorship for decades, and the desire to silence others has now become an insatiable appetite.
Macron has supported figures like his anti-free-speech ally Thierry Breton in globalizing the reach of the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA) to curtail speech, including Americans and American companies.
In his latest pitch for censorship, Macron pulls out an old saw that if everyone can speak freely, no one can speak freely.
Macron declared that “There is no freedom if there is no limit to my freedom, which begins with the freedom of others and respect for a common framework. I know this when I walk down the street: my freedom cannot mean hitting you, insulting you or trashing the public space we all share.”
That line is remarkably telling. It captures how even “insulting” language is treated as a crime in France.
Of course there is an inherent problem with free speech – which is that liars have free reign and can spread their lies with impunity. But who decides who the liars are? That is the question, and that is what makes free speech necessary. We saw during the COVID era that the government was busily engaged in censoring what turned out to be the truth. We need no further demonstration of the dangers of censorship.
But France, unlike the US but like most of Europe, has no robust tradition of freedom of speech. I discovered that – much to my surprise – quite early in my blogging career, when I traveled to France twenty years ago to write about the al-Durah trials. You can read what I wrote back then in several posts, especially this one. Here’s an excerpt:
What I hadn’t realized was how US-centric my questions had been. Yes, of course, I knew that France has a different legal system than ours: theirs was based mainly on the Napoleonic Code, whereas ours was a predominantly common law system of evolving and changing interpretations of previous case law and statutes, under the overarching protection of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
But surely, as two Western countries purporting to share a love of liberty, the law of France and that of the US shouldn’t be all that different.
It was only when I looked into the law of defamation under the French legal system that I realized the differences were not subtle, as I’d previously thought. They were major, reflecting profound differences in the attitudes of each country towards justice, its citizenry, society–and, in particular, the value and desirability of freedom of speech.
Here is a summary of French law concerning defamation; see pages thirteen and fourteen for the relevant material.
Essentially, France has made it incredibly easy to win a libel suit. Nearly all you need to do is to show that you were defamed (“any allegation or imputation of an act affecting the honor or reputation of the person or body against whom it is made”). I said “nearly all” because yes, there is a defense, and that is truth.
Well, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? But it is bad, and this is why: the burden of proof in France falls on the defendant.
That’s such a dry, legal phrase: “burden of proof.” But what it means in practice is that it’s up to the person who made the defamatory statement to prove to a three-judge panel (not a jury; this reflects the fact that the French have far less trust in the decisions of its ordinary citizen than the US does) that the defamatory statement was true. Or, if the statement concerned a matter of public importance, he/she is required to prove that he/she conducted a serious investigation before making the statement, and that the statement was measured and objective and without even a trace of personal hostility.
Check out that word, prove. It means just what it says, not “indicate he/she had reason to believe it was true” or “suggest it might be true,” or even “prove it was most likely true.” It places the burden of proof in defending against a libel suit unconscionably — almost ludicrously — high.
In this time in which social media has taken over so much of our communication, and algorithms manipulate people for nefarious reasons, the spread of lies is facilitated and helped along by the general historical ignorance of much of the Western world (especially young people). But censorship adds another layer of control and ultimately gives more opportunity to spread lies of the official variety.
What is the solution? I confess that I don’t know. But Macron’s solution, or Andy Burnham’s, is no solution at all.
Yesterday, on the October 7 anniversary, Mamdani managed to squeeze out a few words of sympathy for victims of Hamas before condemning Israel for fake genocide. That was too many Israel-sympathetic words for the left to stomach, apparently. Nothing will satisfy them, although the destruction of Israel and Jews would be considered a good start.
It is mind-boggling how the people heckling Mamdani wrap themselves in the cloak of virtue. But of course, that’s an old ploy as well – the Reign of Terror comes to mind, in which the killers talked incessantly of virtue and especially of the virtue of the common man. But there is no inherent virtue in a mob.
On this anniversary there are many articles reflecting on the intervening three years and what we have learned.
In some ways, the post-10/7 wars have gone better than expected for Israel. At the beginning, it seemed as though Hezbollah, for example, would be a more formidable foe than it has been. That doesn’t mean it’s been easy, or that Israel can ever rest. But it does mean that 10/7 acted more as a wakeup call to galvanize Israel into taking the threats seriously and understanding that its enemies really do mean to destroy it.
Unfortunately, another thing that’s been learned is how powerful Jew-hatred is, including when it’s cloaked in a fake “anti-Zionism” that is nothing more than a vicious double standard that will not allow Israel to defend itself. This did not begin on 10/7; I’ve written two posts so far about how far back it goes, and how instrumental the Soviets were in spreading the word (please see this as well as this).
The anti-Jewish forces got busy right away, as early as 10/8 when Israel had done nothing as yet except be viciously attacked. But Jew-hatred always finds fertile ground, and it has spread immensely since 10/7, both on left and right. A lie really does get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on. It is sobering and depressing, but it’s reality these days.
Has there ever been a people more frequently or more preposterously lied about than the Jews?
I don’t ask that in expectation of sympathy. It’s perversely flattering to excite the sort of malign curiosity that cannot be satisfied by what’s observably true. But there’s also been a heavy price to pay for being a figment of such superstitious fear and loathing that even the presence of Jews isn’t necessary for fear and loathing to take root and flourish. Distant hearsay can be enough. …
… [F]olklore hasn’t quite given up on the figure of the Wandering Jew, cursed to roam the earth homeless as punishment for taunting Jesus on the way to the crucifixion. Long before academic anti-Zionists began to call for the expulsion of Israelis from Israel, Luther had posited their eternal exile as an expression, sanctioned by God, of their vagabondage of soul. And as for the Jew as companion of the devil, not to say the devil himself, I can personally vouch for the tenacity of that superstition, as more than one of my schoolfellows have asked—in Prestwich, north Manchester, England, 1954—if I would show them what remained of my tail.
Regarding the Blood Libel, the malicious medieval defamation that told of Jews kidnapping and killing Gentile children for their blood, either to add zest to matzah or to replenish the blood of male Jews who menstruated profusely as a consequence of circumcision—another fantasy, too lurid and deranged to be simply called a falsehood—it too has resurfaced in recent years, determining the way the deaths of Palestinian children in the latest Gaza war have been presented as the result of Israel Defense Forces soldiers killing little ones “for sport” and laughing as they do so. No footage of such vile behavior exists, of course. I myself was widely misreported as arguing, in a piece in the [London] Observer a couple of years ago, that the press should cover up all word of such deaths. In fact, I argued for no such thing, nor would the left-leaning Observer have printed the piece had its staff thought that was my meaning. My target was the narrative strategy of the BBC and other news outlets, in which nine stories out of 10 led with the latest death count of Palestinian children—too cruel had they been even a quarter true, but which time and again proved unverifiable.
The charge of genocide leveled at Israel, a charge that invariably comes with the pseudo-authoritative definite article—the genocide, to muffle dissent and to rejig the hierarchy of genocides in favor of Israel’s victims—could be said to be the biggest lie of all.
And an extremely successful lie, at that. On the left in the 2026 election in the US, it is almost required that a Democrat candidate support the claim. The right – or the former right, such as Tucker Carlson – has its adherents, as well.
Powerline has this post of remembrance. The stories remain heartbreaking, just like the 9/11 stories. But there is no going back and undoing what happened. The only way is to go forward. But how to do that in the face of the remarkable moral inversion of much of the world? Here is a comment there which deals with that question:
The most stunning thing to me is the response of Western Civilization to the horrendous Satanic acts of Hamas on October 7th. In a functional, optimistic and honorable civilization, our collective response should have been total commitment to the eradication of Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamism in general. Sadly, the opposite has happened. Many (mostly European) countries have doubled down on Jew hatred, admiration for the sub-human “palestinian cause” and total fecklessness in the face of their suicidal choices of importing millions of proto-terrorists into their own countries.
Israel and the United States of America* have stood virtually alone against the creeping scourge of “submission”.
‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of [and] I’ll tell you what you are guilty of’, said the great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman. Today, that grim, eternal truth was starkly illustrated by the Green Party’s passing of a motion saying ‘Zionism is Racism’. To throw around the word ‘racism’ even as you single out Jewish sovereignty as uniquely demonic, to pose as an enemy of bigotry even as you dream of the erasure of the world’s only Jewish state, takes moral duplicity to sickening new heights. In their snivelling whisperings about ‘racism’, these scumbags reveal their own.
It was at their conference in Brighton that the Green Party of England and Wales voted in favour of the ‘Zionism is Racism’ screed. The motion expressly defines the Greens as an ‘anti-Zionist party’. It says Zionism is a species of racial hatred, and will henceforth be ‘treated as any other form of racism’. Most obnoxiously of all, it commits the Greens to campaigning for the scrubbing of the Jewish nation from the face of the Earth. It calls for ‘the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital’. So no more Jewish homeland. No more tiny patch of land, a poxy 263 by 71 miles, for the Jews to call their own. All of it would disappear. Imagine accusing others of being ‘genocidal’ even as you agitate for the total dismantling of the ancestral kingdom of the Jews.
I have been meaning to post this interview with Dara Horn, who has written penetratingly on Jew-hatred and what is actually behind it. Now seems like a good time to recommend watching it. A great many people have tackled that topic, to be sure. But I’m especially impressed with her insight:
Perhaps not, although he has a history of claiming Egyptian citizenship:
Michigan progressive Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said in a previously unreported 2016 video that he held dual U.S.-Egyptian citizenship, contradicting his campaign’s claim that he has never been an Egyptian citizen.
The video, first reported Monday by The Washington Free Beacon, shows El-Sayed speaking at a GlobeMed conference in Detroit while serving as the city’s health director.
“I carry dual citizenship, and I grew up spending most of my summers in another country where I understood what it meant not to have the right to self-govern,” El-Sayed told the audience.
Now he says he was mistaken:
Richner said El-Sayed had been told as a child that his grandfather pursued Egyptian citizenship on his behalf because his parents were born in Egypt.
But when El-Sayed and his family later attempted to verify his status, she said they could find no documentation establishing Egyptian citizenship.
I can’t say I care either way. El-Sayed is cut from the same cloth as Mamdani, a leftist and Muslim with a smooth exterior and disarming smile, who unfortunately has a chance of winning his election.
Actress Eva Marie Saint has died at 102. By all accounts, she had a good life: married to one man, two children, and a productive career:
Her publicist, Jeff Sanderson, said she died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and loved ones.
A regal-looking blonde who ricocheted from playing sultry spies to Southern belles and Superman’s stepmother, Saint made her motion picture debut opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” (1954). …
Saint married director-producer Jeffrey Hayden in 1951, and the couple stayed together for 65 years until his death in 2016. They had two children. Saint had made it clear that family was more important to her than her career.
“I had an agent once who wanted me to make many more movies,” she told CBS’ “Sunday Morning” in 2014. “I said, ‘I can’t. I can only do one a year, if that. I have children, young children.’ And he said, ‘Well, I guess you won’t be a superstar.’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess not.'”
