The Linguistically Challenged International Court of Justice

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The International Court of Justice’s January 19 decision that found, by a vote of 15-2, accusations of genocide against Israel sufficiently “plausible” to warrant a thorough investigation is one more hardly needed bit of evidence of how foolish and detached from reality supposedly intelligent legal minds can be. The fact that, in rendering their 27-page verdict, the judges did not once refer to the lengthy arguments presented to them in Israel’s defense says all that needs to be said about the level of their deliberations.

Nowhere was this level demonstrably lower than in paragraphs 51-53 of the Court’s decision, which dealt with the allegedly “genocidal and dehumanizing rhetoric coming from senior Israeli officials” in regard to the war in Gaza. Three examples of such rhetoric were actually cited by the court, all in Paragraph 52. Let’s take a look at them.