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Nicaragua’s Charade at the ICJ
General view of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Netherlands December 11, 2019. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo
JNS.org – The solemnly named International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague has become an arena for the world’s despots and authoritarians to strut and grandstand, projecting their own abuses—torture, censorship, genocide—onto the world’s democracies.
The anti-democratic crusade waged in the name of human rights has impacted Israel more than any other state. The Jewish state is subjected to insulting and, frankly, frivolous lawsuits every time it tries to discharge its basic duty of protecting its citizens—whether that was the security fence constructed along the West Bank border more than a decade ago or the war against Hamas in Gaza right now.
Since the onset of the latest war in the Gaza Strip, triggered by the monstrous Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, Israel has been the focus of a baseless charge of genocide brought about by South Africa, which largely failed in its bid to make the accusation stick. Many observers pointed out that South Africa’s worsening domestic record—marked by corruption, horrific xenophobia towards migrants from other countries in southern Africa and an inability to deliver basic services like electricity and clean water to those who need them most—hardly qualifies its African National Congress (ANC)-led government to sit in judgment over Israel. Yet Pretoria has continued undeterred, at the same time that it welcomes Hamas leaders for state visits and treats its Jewish community—and anyone else who dares utter understanding for Israel—with unvarnished antisemitism.
Now the baton has passed to Nicaragua, which last week sent its lawyers to the ICJ to charge Germany with aiding and abetting Israel’s supposed “genocide.” The bitter irony is that it is Nicaragua’s far-left leadership, aligned with the dictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba, that should be in the dock.
Daniel Ortega has been in power in Nicaragua since 2007, and he’s not going anywhere—at least, not voluntarily. Some readers will remember Ortega’s name from the Sandinista revolution that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and the Iran-Contra scandal that followed during the subsequent decade. But you don’t have to dig deep into that history to get a sense of the kind of regime that he runs. As Freedom House—an NGO that monitors the state of liberty around the world—explains it, the latest period of Ortega’s rule has been “a period of democratic deterioration marked by the consolidation of all branches of government under his party’s control, the limitation of fundamental freedoms and unchecked corruption in government.”
In the last year alone, the Nicaraguan regime has expelled more than 200 opposition leaders into exile in the United States. It has passed new legislation to strip those deemed “traitors to the homeland” of their citizenship. It has turned the police into an arm of the executive, trampling over the separation of powers that democracies hold so dear. In many ways, this new wave of repression is an outgrowth of the regime’s brutal clampdown on anti-government protests in 2018. Abroad, meanwhile, its authoritarian domestic policy is matched by unflinching support for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine and a close bond with the Iranian regime, North Korea and other rogue states.
This, in short, is the character of the regime that has brought charges of “genocide” against Israel by targeting Germany’s supply of arms to the Jewish state—as if a serial sex offender was to opportunistically cry out, “rape!”
Why is Nicaragua embarking on this path at the ICJ? Some insight was provided by a German journalist who specializes in Latin American affairs, Toni Keppeler, during an interview last week with Swiss radio. Noting that Nicaragua is quite isolated among the world’s states, Keppeler suggested that the ICJ lawsuit was seen by Ortega as a means of boosting his international image. And Germany, he added, was a much safer bet than the United States, which supplies far more weapons to Israel, because America can punish Nicaragua in ways that Germany couldn’t or wouldn’t. He also noted that Ortega wants to be embraced by left-wing groups around the world. And so the Nicaraguan caudillo figures, not unreasonably, that bandwagoning on the Palestinian cause they are obsessed with is the way he will achieve that.
But there is another, more sinister reason behind Nicaragua’s action. Ultimately, these cases against Israel at the ICJ are aimed at shifting public perceptions of Israel and its history, and in particular, the influence of the Holocaust upon support for Israel in the democratic world. One of the reasons why Germany supports Israel is simply because it was the country that initiated the mass slaughter of Jews during World War II. Since 1945, democratic Germany has been guided by entirely different principles, elevating its backing for Israel into a staatsrason—“reason of state.” Indeed, as I noted recently, one of the several questions about Jews and Israel on the newly reformulated naturalization test for prospective immigrants to Germany asks, “What is the basis of Germany’s special responsibility to Israel?” with the correct answer being “The crimes of national socialism.”
That is how it should be, but for the international left, such a stance is intolerable. In their jaundiced eyes, Germany has atoned for the Holocaust by backing the nakba—the Arabic word for “catastrophe” used by many Palestinians to describe the creation of modern-day Israel in 1948. Germany’s position irritatingly reminds the world that Jews were once victims of nightmarish genocide themselves—hardly the sort of fact you’d want to highlight if your purpose is to turn them into victims once again. And so, Nicaragua’s lawyers (including, disgracefully, a German citizen named Daniel Muller) have trooped into the ICJ to argue that supporting the Jewish state is the wrong way to express solidarity with Jews.
The goal here, make no mistake, is to separate the Holocaust from Israel and to argue that the one entity in the world capable of preventing another Holocaust is actually sowing its seeds! It’s topsy-turvy logic, but if it works effectively as propaganda, generating meme after meme on social media, why worry about that?
Hence we arrive at a situation where the 15 ICJ judges debate a phantom genocide while turning a blind eye to genuine examples of this phenomenon, along with other related crimes. “The government of Nicaragua is perpetrating widespread violations and abuses that may amount to crimes against humanity,” the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect Project noted in a briefing back in February, but you won’t hear a peep about that in the ICJ’s corridors. Ditto for Turkey’s racist treatment of its Kurdish minority, and indeed, for the myriad other examples of government-sponsored cruelty on every continent.
This is yet another demonstration of antisemitism, insofar as antisemitism applies to standards for Jews that no other nation has to contend with. That is the ugly reality behind these fanciful appeals to “international law” that plague Israel. Germany is now receiving a glimpse of what that feels like but only because of its relationship with Israel—otherwise, this case would never have been brought to court.
The post Nicaragua’s Charade at the ICJ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump: ‘Really Great Countries’ Want to Join Abraham Accords After Iran war

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then-US President Donald Trump, and United Arab Emirates (UAE) Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed display their copies of signed agreements as they participate in the signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between Israel and some of its Middle East neighbors, in a strategic realignment of Middle Eastern countries against Iran, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, US, September 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Tom Brenner/
i24 News – US President Donald Trump said “some really great countries” wish to join the Abraham Accords, speaking on Sunday to Fox News.
Trump said Iran was “weeks” away from its nuclear threshhold before Israel launched a surprise operation that lasted 12 days.
The US joined the operation last month, bombing the Fordow underground uranium enrichment facility with never-before-used GBU-57 series MOPs (Massive Ordnance Penetrators), as well as other nuclear sites in Isfahan and Natanz with Tomahawk missiles.
Shortly after, Trump pushed for a ceasefire. Dozens of Israeli civilians were killed in the flare-up, while hundreds of Revolutionary Guards members and senior officials in Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs were killed.
The US and Iran have restarted negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program, with Trump reiterating that uranium enrichment is a red line. “Enrichment doesn’t mean like air conditioning and it doesn’t mean to jack up your car. Enrichment is a bad word,” he said.
“I won’t let that happen,” he concluded.
Regarding the success of the strikes against Iranian facilities, he stressed that the enriched uranium stores were buried underground and that the nuclear sites were “destroyed.” Trump also lambasted early reports that suggested only superficial damage had been inflicted, saying that the source that leaked the preliminary assessment should be “prosecuted.”
The B-2 bombers who conducted the mission, Trump said, would be invited to meet him at the White House.
The post Trump: ‘Really Great Countries’ Want to Join Abraham Accords After Iran war first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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IAEA Chief Says Iran Could Be Enriching Uranium Within Months

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi arrives on the opening day of the agency’s quarterly Board of Governors meeting at the IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria, Nov. 20, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Lisa Leutner
Iran could be producing enriched uranium in a few months, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog Rafael Grossi was quoted as saying on Sunday, raising doubts about how effective US strikes to destroy Tehran’s nuclear program have been.
US officials have stated that their strikes obliterated key nuclear sites in Iran, although US President Donald Trump said on Friday he would consider bombing Iran again if Tehran is enriching uranium to worrisome levels.
“The capacities they have are there. They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that,” Grossi told CBS News in an interview.
“Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there,” he added, according to the transcript of an interview on “Face the Nation” with Margaret Brennan due to air on Sunday.
Saying it wanted to remove any chance of Tehran developing nuclear weapons, Israel launched attacks on Iran earlier this month, igniting a 12-day air war that the US eventually joined.
Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.
Grossi, who heads the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, said the strikes on sites in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan had significantly set back Iran’s ability to convert and enrich uranium.
However, Western powers stress that Iran’s nuclear advances provide it with an irreversible knowledge gain, suggesting that while losing experts or facilities may slow progress, the advances are permanent.
“Iran is a very sophisticated country in terms of nuclear technology,” Grossi said. “So you cannot disinvent this. You cannot undo the knowledge that you have or the capacities that you have.”
Grossi was also asked about reports of Iran moving its stock of highly enriched uranium in the run-up to the US strikes and said it was not clear where that material was.
“So some could have been destroyed as part of the attack, but some could have been moved,” he said.
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Court Cancels Israel PM Netanyahu’s Trial Hearings this Week

FILE PHOTO: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives a statement during a visit to the site of the Weizmann Institute of Science, which was hit by an Iranian missile barrage, in the central city of Rehovot, Israel June 20, 2025. JACK GUEZ/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
The Jerusalem District Court canceled this week’s hearings in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-running corruption trial, accepting a request the Israeli leader made citing classified diplomatic and security grounds.
It was unclear whether a social media post by US President Donald Trump influenced the court’s decision. Trump suggested the trial could interfere with Netanyahu’s ability to join negotiations with the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Iran.
The ruling, seen by Reuters, said that new reasons provided by Netanyahu, the head of Israel’s spy agency Mossad and the military intelligence chief justified canceling the hearings.
Netanyahu was indicted in 2019 on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust – all of which he denies. He has cast the trial against him as an orchestrated left-wing witch-hunt meant to topple a democratically elected right-wing leader.
On Friday, the court rejected a request by Netanyahu to delay his testimony for the next two weeks because of diplomatic and security matters following the 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran, which ended last Tuesday.
He was due to take the stand on Monday for cross-examination.
“It is INSANITY doing what the out-of-control prosecutors are doing to Bibi Netanyahu,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. He said Washington, having given billions of dollars worth of aid to Israel, was not going to “stand for this.”
A spokesperson for the Israeli prosecution declined to comment on Trump’s post. Netanyahu on X retweeted Trump’s post and added: “Thank you again, @realDonaldTrump. Together, we will make the Middle East Great Again!”
Trump said Netanyahu was “right now” negotiating a deal with Hamas, though neither leader provided details, and officials from both sides have voiced skepticism over prospects for a ceasefire soon.
On Friday, the Republican president told reporters he believed a ceasefire was close.
Interest in resolving the Gaza conflict has heightened in the wake of the US and Israeli bombings of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
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