By Seth Mandel
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
The Rule of Scapegoats: Someone’s reason for needing a
scapegoat is just as newsworthy as his desperate actions to bring someone else
down.
And that appears to be the case yet again, this time with
Karim Khan.
Khan is the lead prosecutor for the International
Criminal Court, a supra-national NGO on steroids that identifies as a judicial
body. (An affliction we might call “bureaucratic dysmorphia.”) Under Khan’s
leadership, the ICC dove headlong into uncharted waters by seeking to arrest a
leader of a nation for alleged war crimes when the ICC had jurisdiction over
neither the alleged perpetrator nor the alleged victim.
The ICC, in other words, went full vigilante. As is often
the case with such vigilantism, the target was Israel.
Non-democracies wanted action against Israel and didn’t
care if the action was legitimate, because (as ever) they needed to distract
from their mistreatment of their own citizens by focusing on a common enemy.
Some democracies backed the ICC, if tentatively, as a way of catering to the
angry anti-Israel mobs in the streets but without jeopardizing their own
security by materially intervening in a war against Israel.
But the question remained: Why did Khan bend to the
pressure from these countries and announce an arrest warrant against Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant when
it would hurt Khan’s relationship with the U.S. and destroy the court’s
remaining legitimacy as a neutral arbiter? Khan didn’t appear to be getting
anything out of this reputation-destroying stunt. So why’d he do it? Why did
Khan personally need a scapegoat?
Thanks to an explosive piece of reporting
in the Wall Street Journal, we might finally have our answer: A
female employee of Khan’s testified that she had been repeatedly sexually
assaulted by Khan, bullied into temporarily covering it up, and nearly driven
to suicide by Khan’s treatment of her.
The accuser had been working for the ICC for six years
before joining Khan’s team in 2023. According to her testimony, Khan first
sexually assaulted her in June of that year on a trip abroad. He would repeat
the assault in New York, Colombia, Chad, Paris, and his wife’s home in The
Hague.
Khan was scheduled to visit Israel and Gaza in an
important step in the process of collecting evidence and interviewing officials
before deciding whether to issue warrants. Then last spring, he was made aware
of the rape allegations and canceled the fact-finding trips. Two weeks later he
issued the arrest warrants.
The timing was no coincidence, the Journal reports:
“The warrant shored up support for Khan among anti-Israel ICC nations that
would likely back Khan if the allegations ever became public, according to
court officials. The warrant also discouraged his accuser for a time from
pushing her allegations, officials said, because she strongly supported the
investigation of Israeli leaders.”
From this we learn three things. First, the investigation
was always a sham, because as soon as Khan fact-gathering trip became
inconvenient he canceled it and issued the warrants anyway. Second, the
warrants against Israeli leaders would insulate him from criticism from many of
the ICC member states, who didn’t care if there was evidence that he was raping
a subordinate to the point of driving her to considering suicide. Third,
according to testimony, Khan explicitly tied the rape allegations to the Israeli
warrants.
“As the abuse allegations were swirling among ICC staff
and others, Khan allegedly tried to get his accuser to disavow them by telling
her the charges would hurt the Palestinian investigation, according to her
testimony,” the Journal reports. “The casualties of the allegations
would include ‘the justice of the victims that are on the cusp of progress,’ he
said to her, according to a record of a call that is now part of an independent
U.N. investigation into her allegations. ‘Think about the Palestinian arrest
warrants,’ she said he told her on another occasion, according to the
testimony.”
This testimony, if accurate, describes a monster. Not a
jerk with poor impulse control; an actual monster. He also accused her
indirectly of being part of a conspiracy to bring down the ICC, which is
basically his way of saying she’s some kind of agent of the Jews.
The accuser also wrestled with whether to come forward.
Her mother was sick and needed care, which her salary helped provide. She told
a friend she wanted a job transfer rather than to hold Khan accountable: “I
held on for as long as I could because I didn’t want to f— up the Palestinian
arrest warrants,” she testified.
There is obviously no defense of the arrest warrants’
legitimacy now—if they are not canceled, the ICC should be subject to every
applicable sanction. If Khan doesn’t resign, this is the end of the ICC
experiment: A permanent such court was always going to be less effective than
the situational courts that were set up to investigate war crimes in the past,
and its permanence meant the court was full of revolting employment incentives.
That part is now beyond dispute as well.
In addition to that, there is the matter of what
anti-Semitism does to people. Khan’s alleged victim hesitated to come forward
because she, too, backed the arrest warrants that were issued in order to
protect her alleged rapist.
Civilization is going to have to decide if there is
anything in the universe more important to it than its war on the Jews. I’m not
looking forward to hearing the answer.
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