The rise and fall of Karim Khan, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), is a story for the ages. Not just because the most powerful international criminal lawyer in the world turned out to be a criminal himself. Not just because the charges of his repeated sexual assault of a vulnerable employee were grotesque. But because of what it tells us about the cancer of modern antisemitism.

Once his debauchery came to light, Khan thought he could save himself by blaming the Jewish state. And a global cadre of lawyers, UN “experts,” “human rights” types, and the Palestinian terrorist entourage supported that strategy to the end of the line.

Khan was elected Prosecutor and assumed his post in June 2021. Use of the ICC against Israelis did not begin with Khan. The constituent treaty, called the Rome Statute, was permanently marred during the 1998 drafting process. The treaty included provisions intended to criminalize Jews living and breathing in parts of the land of Israel assigned by the drafters to a Judenrein Palestine. The supposed legal north star of universality was tossed out to target a party of one. The instant the treaty came into force in 2002, anti-Israel forces sought to use the ICC to criminalize Israel, Israelis and their supporters.

Those efforts gained steam when the UN General Assembly voted to admit the “non-member observer State of Palestine” in 2012, the non-existent State of Palestine purported to ratify the Rome Statute in 2015, and that “state” referred alleged Israeli crimes to the ICC in 2018.

By the time Khan mounted the stage, the Court had legitimized “Palestine’s” ratification and Khan’s predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, had officially opened an investigation on “The Situation in Palestine.”

Nevertheless, jurisdictional hurdles abounded. The Oslo Accords prohibit Palestinian use of the ICC; Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute; Israel’s accusers are acting in bad faith; and the law prohibits international control in the context of robust national democratic institutions. The ICC apparatus reacted to those barriers by ignoring them, by claiming it was fine to launch a legal and political global pogrom against Israelis without even purporting to make a final determination of ICC jurisdiction over them.

But Khan didn’t just climb aboard the bandwagon that had been moseying along for years; he........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)