Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview Wednesday that International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Karim Khan chose to “hit the Jews” when he faced sexual misconduct allegations.
As Breitbart News has reported, U.S. President Donald Trump sanctioned the ICC for pursuing prosecutions of U.S. soldiers even though the U.S. is not subject to the court’s jurisdiction.
President Joe Biden removed those sanctions (without accepting the ICC’s jurisdiction), but did not stop Khan — and may have quietly encouraged him — when Khan targeted Netanyahu and his defense minister.
Trump restored his sanctions on the ICC upon returning to the Oval Office, and has since expanded on them.
Netanyahu told part of the back story: Khan had acted against Israel, suddenly and without warning, in an apparent attempt to distract and deflect from credible sexual misconduct allegations by several women.
The prime minister told Breitbart News:
So this ICC prosecutor said that he’ll come to Israel. “Israel is an upstanding country. It has an independent judiciary.” [He’s] saying all these good things, he’s about to come to Israel, and on the day that he’s supposed to come, he cancels the visit, and I think two days later, he issues these arrest warrants for me, the Prime Minister of Israel, and our former defense minister, as war criminals.
And we couldn’t understand it. What happened?
Little did we know that a few days before that, he was confronted by a senior staff member who said to him, there is a female staff member in your office who says that you have been raping her and sexually assaulting her for over a year, and this guy, the prosecutor Karim Khan, whose brother, was sitting in a British jail for sexual assault against a minor, he said, I’m ruined. I have to get out of this somehow.
So he decided the best way to get out of that was to hit the Jews, or hit the Prime Minister of the Jewish state, because you’ll have all that, you know, all the all these extreme progressives lining up automatically behind him. They won’t support Israel. They’d support him.
So obviously they did. That’s exactly what he did. He he wanted to extricate himself from these sexual assault charges, and he slapped these false, completely false charges … against Israel.
And since then, there have been four other women who came to the fore and accused him. So he’s been sort of suspended, but that’s what you have: the International Criminal Court, an unelected, corrupt bureaucracy, charges or issues arrest warrants against the prime minister of a democratic state fighting against these savage terrorists. And how can you have a greater a greater inversion of justice and a greater perversion of justice?
And that’s basically what President Trump is doing now. He’s saying, enough of this. I won’t stand when that is being done to America’s soldiers, and I won’t stand when it’s being done to Israel’s to America’s ally, Israel. And I think he should be commended. He’s issued sanctions against this corrupt prosecutor, and the corrupt judges who issued enabled the issuing of these warrants.
And by the way, the one who wasn’t corrupt, the Romanian judge? They removed her just before the issuing the warrants. They knew what they were doing, you know?
Yeah, so, so this is, this is what we’re dealing with. Yes, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of vilification, a lot of lies, but that won’t stop us. We’ll do what we need to do to defend ourselves.
Pollak noted that one of Khan’s accusers was allegedly pressured, unsuccessfully, into withdrawing her accusations by being told that her story would hurt the case against Israel and the Palestinian cause.
Netanyahu agreed, noting that even though she was anti-Israel, she ultimately came forward against Khan.
Khan has been suspended from his ICC office pending an investigation of the accusations against him.
“Obviously it’s not only the charges that are leveled against me. They’re not really leveled against me,” Netanyahu concluded. “They’re leveled against the State of Israel, the Israeli Defense Forces, our military, that is going to exceptional lengths that no other army has gone to to get civilians out of harm’s way.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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