Poilievre makes specious argument against Netanyahu arrest warrant

Last week, the international court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, persecution, and starvation as a weapon of war. (The ICC panel of eight legal experts unanimously recommending these charges included Theodor Meron, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor and former Israeli diplomat.)

Needless to say, these are incredibly serious charges coming from the world’s highest criminal court, which has 124 member countries (including Canada, but not the United States or Israel).

A member country doesn’t get to pick and choose which ICC rulings to abide by — any more than citizens choose which domestic court rulings they’ll accept. The law is the law, and everyone is bound by it (except in the United States, where the Supreme Court now allows the president to commit criminal acts as part of his job).

So Trudeau did the right thing. He may not have agreed with the ICC warrant, but he respected the rule of law. By dissing this as “woke,” Poilievre isn’t just trashing Trudeau, he’s also undermining the ICC and the legal obligations it imposes on all member states.

Poilievre specifically rejects the legitimacy of the ICC charges against Netanyahu, on the specious grounds that Netanyahu was democratically elected.

How is that relevant? Netanyahu isn’t charged with failure to secure an electoral mandate. He’s charged with committing crimes against Palestinians in Gaza, killing tens of thousands of them, demolishing their homes, schools, universities and hospitals, as well as starving them.

So, does Poilievre take the position that abiding by the rule of law in order to hold accountable a political leader alleged to have committed heinous crimes is …. woke, just something to ridicule?

Woke has become a right-wing buzzword used to demean people who oppose injustice — from slavery to gender discrimination.

Yet a number of social scientists have advanced theories suggesting that opposing injustice is something innate in humans, that humans have a natural aversion to injustice.

It’s this aversion to injustice that seems to drive people around the world to protest what’s happening to Palestinians. For the most part, the motivation of these protesters has nothing to do with ethnicity or religion. They protest because they consider it deeply unjust that Palestinians (including women and children) are defenceless — under constant bombardment without an army to protect them against two of the world’s most heavily-armed nations, the U.S. and Israel.

And yes, Hamas’ murderous invasion and hostage-taking in Israel on October 7 was also deeply unjust. Accordingly, the ICC also issued a warrant for Hamas leader Mohammed Deif (and would have issued warrants for two other Hamas leaders, but Israel had already killed them).

An aversion to injustice may be innate in humans, but it can also be nurtured by a supportive culture, which has traditionally existed in Canada.

Indeed, Canada was pivotal in the establishment of the ICC. Canadian senior diplomat Philippe Kirsch served as chair of the founding 1998 conference in Rome, where the final proposal for the Court was drafted under Canada’s leadership and approved by 120 nations. Canada has remained a strong supporter of the Court, providing resources and diplomatic advocacy.

This is a tradition Canadians can be proud of. But Poilievre would undoubtedly dismiss it all as just more evidence of Canada as a woken, broken country.

Sadly, the view of our would-be prime minister seems closer to that of U.S. Senator and Trump ally Lindsey Graham, who last week denounced the ICC warrant against Netanyahu and threatened to “crush” the economy of any nation enforcing it.

This article was originally published by the Toronto Star.