US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) holds a press conference in the US Capitol in Washington, DC, April 23, 2024. Photo: Annabelle Gordon / CNP/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

Democrats in the US Senate on Tuesday blocked Republican-led legislation that would have sanctioned the International Criminal Court (ICC), expressing concerns that the bill could potentially have negative effects on American companies and allies. 

Senate Republicans fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance the bill, with a final count of 54-45. Democrats had attempted to broker a bipartisan agreement on the bill to prevent American companies and allies working with the ICC from being penalized with sanctions which are intended to punish the international court’s prosecution against Israel. In addition, some Democrats have argued that issuing sanctions against the ICC would prevent US officials from working alongside the court to prosecute war crimes internationally.

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) stood out as the sole Democrat to vote in favor of the legislation. 

“Deeply disappointed by the outcome of the ICC sanctions bill.  My vote follows Israel — not the ICC that equivocated the democratically elected leader of our special ally to the terrorists and rapists of Hamas,” Fetterman wrote on X/Twitter. 

Fetterman’s comments echo statements he made last month in which the lawmaker vowed that his Senate vote will continue to “follow Israel” during the Trump administration. 

Though Fetterman campaigned as a progressive, he has emerged as a staunch ally of Israel in the 15 months following Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Fetterman has repeatedly condemned anti-Israel voices within his own party in the US Congress, as well as elite universities for tolerating what he has characterized as antisemitic and anti-Israel hate speech on their campuses.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) explained that although he supports sanctioning the ICC, he views the current iteration of the legislation as “problematic.”

“The ICC bill is one I largely support and would like to see become law,” Schumer said. “However, as much as I oppose the ICC bias against Israel, as much as I want to see that institution drastically reformed and reshaped, the bill before us is poorly drafted and deeply problematic.”

Schumer called on Republicans to agree to amending the legislation to prevent US companies and allies from being slapped with sanctions. 

“A bipartisan agreement is still very possible, and we hope and urge our Republican colleagues to sit down with us and come up with a bill that addresses the very real problems at the ICC without adversely affecting American companies and our allies,” Schumer added. 

In June 2024, the House successfully voted in favor of legislation to sanction the ICC, arguing that the court should be “punished” over its prosecution of Israel. The Senate, which was then majority Democratic, refused to vote on the bill.

Earlier this month, the US House of Representatives reintroduced and passed the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act (HR 23), which would sanction members of the ICC over its issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.

The legislation calls for the warrants against the Israeli officials to be “condemned in the strongest possible terms,” labeling them as “illegitimate and baseless” actions that “create a damaging precedent that threatens the United States, Israel, and all United States partners who have not submitted to the ICC’s jurisdiction.”

The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.

In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.

US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) said that she hopes to reach an agreement with Senate Republicans to alter the bill’s language. 

“I know we share most of the same concerns he does in drafting the bill, but I think it’s overly broad; it’s not drafted in a way that addresses the unique concerns that we have with respect to the International Criminal Court,” Shaheen said. 

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), who served as co-sponsor on the bill, slammed Democrats for blocking the Senate’s attempt to punish the “corrupt kangaroo court.”

“They had 10 months to negotiate this bill, but instead waited until the last minute to demand unworkable changes that would give carve outs to big tech. Make no mistake-Democrats weakened our national sovereignty and Israel’s ability to defend itself today,” Cotton wrote. 

The post US Senate Democrats Block ICC Sanctions Bill, Claim Legislation Could Punish American Companies, Allies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square on Jan. 19, 2025, as three Israeli hostages were set to be released from Hamas captivity as part of a Gaza ceasefire deal. Photo: Taken by author

Why are legacy news outlets assisting released Palestinian terrorists in getting away with actual murder?

Using the current Israel-Hamas ceasefire as their cue to place Palestinian terrorists on equal footing as innocent Israeli hostages, some underperforming journalists are sanitizing the bloody records of hardcore terrorists.

“This is not about politics or strategy. It’s about humanity and the shared belief that no one should be left behind in darkness,” Moran Stella Yanai, an Israeli hostage released in the November 2023 ceasefire deal, told the Associated Press in anticipation of the release of more hostages (“Hamas OKs draft agreement of a Gaza ceasefire and the release of some hostages, officials say,” Jan. 15).

The leading wire service boasts to have “done more than any organization in the world to expand the reach of factual reporting.” But recent ceasefire coverage indicates that the news service’s prowess in advancing the faux humanity of terrorists, while obscuring terror victims in darkness.

Thus, after quoting Stella Yanai’s appeal to humanity on behalf of innocent hostages, the AP draws a tidy and unfounded hostage-prisoner parallel:

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, families of Palestinian prisoners gathered as well. “I tell the mothers of the prisoners to put their trust in the almighty and that relief is near, God willing,” said the mother of one prisoner, Intisar Bayoud.

However, there are salient facts that the AP glaringly chose not to advance in its coverage of the Bayouds: Intisar’s son, Habbes Bayoud, is serving a double life sentence for his role in the brutal murders of Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Norzhich, two Israeli reservists who took a wrong turn into Ramallah in September 2000. Presumably, for the victims’ families, Bayoud’s release heralds torment, not relief. But AP neither humanizes their mothers nor notes the unspeakably brutal murders.

And Bayoud is not the only murderer to benefit from the AP’s exculpatory coverage in recent days.

The AP’s stated commitment to the advancement of the power of facts is again on retreat in the Jan. 15 article, “Hamas frees 4 female Israeli soldiers in exchange for 200 Palestinian prisoners as ceasefire holds”:

Rana Raef al-Farra, the daughter of one released prisoner, said she was 7 when her father was sentenced 21 years ago.”I am afraid that I will not know him when he gets out, or that he will not know me,” she said.

The AP neglects to mention that Rana’s father, Ra’if Ramez Helmi Al-Farra, was convicted for his role in killing six soldiers – Roy Nissim, Araf Azbarga, Sa’id Jahaja, Hussein Abu Leil, Adham Shehada, and Tarek al-Ziadne. In the AP’s warped calculation of which facts to advance, the media outlet prioritizes Rana’s concern that her father will not know her over the fundamental journalistic imperative that readers know her father for what he is – a killer.

CBS, too, deploys the dual strategy of expunging the terrorists’ violent crimes while extending sympathetic coverage to the murderers’ loved ones.

“These are not just people. These are our brothers and sisters,” an Israeli woman at a Tel Aviv gathering on behalf of the hostages says in a CBS Weekend News interview.

CBS correspondent Ramy Inocencio then says: “Many might say similar for the nearly 200 Palestinians that Israel released from prison in exchange.”

He proceeds to generously wipe away multiple convictions from a would-be murderer’s record: “Forty-seven-year-old Wael Abu Rida reunited with his family after a dozen years. He was half-way through a 25-year prison term for joining Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a US-listed terror group.”

But Abu Rida was not sentenced to 25 years only for belonging to Islamic Jihad. He was also convicted of attempted murder, arms possession, spying, liaising with an enemy agent, among other crimes.

The pardons parade continued at NBC. About “the dean of prisoners,” aka Muhammad Al-Tous, NBC cited the laundered rap sheet recounted in a statement from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club: “Tous, 67, was arrested in October 1985 and sentenced to lifetime imprisonment ‘on the grounds of his resistance to the occupation’ and his affiliation with the Palestinian faction Fatah.”

NBC fails to decode “resistance to the occupation,” which in this case means leading attacks on five civilian buses, in which 16 were wounded, ordering the murder of three people, and taking part in two additional murders.

“57-year-old prisoner Raed Al-Saadi was also among those to be released,” NBC’s elliptical coverage continues. “Al Saeedi [differing spellings in the original] was detained in 1989 at the beginning of the 1978 Intifada, it said, and ‘sentenced to two life sentences and 20 years,’ the statement said.”

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club doesn’t bother noting Al-Saadi’s crimes – the killing of civilians and soldiers – and neither does NBC.

While the lopsided ceasefire stipulates the freeing of killers in exchange for innocent hostages, there is no journalistic dispensation to manufacture pretend parity between terrorists and terror victims.

Tamar Sternthal is the director of CAMERA’s Israel Office. 

The post How the Ceasefire Coverage Exculpates Hardcore Terrorists and Murderers first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Ranvir Singh during a news segment on “Good Morning Britain” on Jan. 27, 2025. Photo: Screenshot

“Good Morning Britain” host Ranvir Singh issued an apology Tuesday on air after failing to mention Jewish victims of the Holocaust during her coverage of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“In yesterday’s news, when we reported on the memorial events in Auschwitz, we said six million people were killed in the Holocaust but crucially failed to say they were Jewish. That was our mistake, which we apologize for,” said Singh, 47.

During a news segment on the ITV show on Monday morning, Singh discussed the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, and reported on how King Charles was set to become the first British monarch to visit the site of the former Nazi death camp later that day for a special ceremony in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Singh talked briefly about the history of the Holocaust but when listing its victims, she failed to include Jews, who the Nazis sought to eliminate through genocide during World War II.

“Six million people were killed in concentration camps during the Second World War, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay, or belonged to another ethnic group,” Singh said on air.

The British organization Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) criticized Singh in a post on social media for her failure to mention Holocaust victims who were Jewish.

“Jews. The word you’re looking for is ‘Jews,’ not ‘people.’ This truly beggars belief,” CAA said. “This dire reporting is not only factually incorrect but erases Jews from a genocide in which six million Jewish men, women, and children were slaughtered specifically because they were Jews.” It additionally noted that there was no mention of the word “antisemitism” in the news segment.

“To make matters worse, there is no reference to Jewish people at all for over two minutes into this segment, and when there finally is one, it is only done once and in regard to former history students taking a tour of the Jewish quarter of Kraków,” CAA observed. “If this is intended to pay respect to the victims of Holocaust Memorial Day, it has failed abysmally and ignores the true nature of this horrific event.”

Michael Dickson — the executive director of StandWithUs in Israel, a nonprofit that combats antisemitism — said “deleting Jews” when discussing the history of the Holocaust and “the attempt to annihilate them” is “a slap in the face to Holocaust survivors and victims’ families.” He also said Singh’s acknowledgement of the “mistake” is “the opposite of a full-hearted apology.”

After Singh’s apology on air, ITV released a statement about the incident.

“In our studio introduction to the report on the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz we failed to acknowledge the Jewish community which we have since apologized for live on air in today’s program,” ITV noted, according to the British publication The Sun. “This failure was done in error, however clear reference to Jewish people in the correspondent news report from Auschwitz immediately followed, as well as a further extended program report referencing the six million Jewish victims.”

“Yesterday’s program also included a live studio interview with a survivor of Auschwitz, Rachel Levy, alongside Olivia Marks-Woldman, chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Trust, both of whom talked candidly about their own experiences as Jewish people,” the statement continued.

However, CAA said that even after ITV’s apology for the “scandalous blunder,” it would still like to know “how did such an obvious mistake happen in the first place?”

“The irony of this sort of ‘forgetfulness’ on a day of remembrance is not lost on us,” CAA added. “Holocaust Memorial Day is first and foremost a day to memorialize the six million Jewish men, women, and children murdered by gas and bullet by the Nazis and their collaborators. Its principal lesson is the need to bravely combat antisemitism whenever it arises, including in our own time. Given that Britain is currently experiencing the worst antisemitism in living memory, that lesson is more important than ever. Why, then, does our society keep failing to learn it?”

King Charles, 76, appeared to shed a tear as he listened to testimonies from survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp during Monday’s ceremony at the site. He was joined by other world leaders including King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of The Netherlands, Spain‘s King Felipe and Queen Letizia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Belgium‘s King Philippe and Queen Mathilde, Norway‘s Crown Prince Haakon, and Sweden‘s Crown Princess Victoria.

King Charles also visited the Jewish Community Center in Krakow on Monday. During a speech, he said the “evil” that took place during the Holocaust should ensure the world will never again “be a bystander in the face of violence and hate.”

“As the number of Holocaust survivors regrettably diminishes with the passage of time, the responsibility of remembrance rests far heavier on our shoulders, and on those of generations yet unborn,” he added. “The act of remembering the evils of the past remains a vital task and in so doing, we inform our present and shape our future.”

The United Kingdom holds the presidency of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) — an intergovernmental organization comprising dozens of countries — from March 1, 2024, until Feb. 28 2025.

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