Europe inadvertently admits the truth : Israel the Jewish State is Held to the Highest Standards of Any Country in the World

Why Israel the Jewish State is Held to the Highest Standards of Any Country in the World:  Because This is the Oldest Hatred in World History

Harry Liberman

The contemporary international legal order displays a persistent double standard that applies hyper-critical scrutiny to Israel’s defensive operations while mitigating or ignoring the actions of autocratic regimes and Western powers. This dynamic was highlighted during a 2014 exchange where journalist Caroline Glick debated European diplomats who defended disparate standards for Israel compared to neighboring states.  Jerusalem Post.

The global architecture of international law operates on a deeply flawed, self-reinforcing loop—a circular trap that systematically exempts brutal autocracies while placing a unique, existential chokehold on the world’s only Jewish state. When the International Criminal Court (ICC) or United Nations bodies target Israel, they are met with Western applause and institutional urgency. Yet, when the exact same legal doctrines are applied to the atrocities committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, Great Britain’s historical crimes, or Arab-Islamic regimes across the Middle East, the machinery of international law grinds to a halt. Suddenly, the rules are mitigated, defused, and deemed “unenforceable.”

This asymmetry is not a bureaucratic oversight; it is the modern manifestation of the world’s oldest hate, repackaged in the sanitized vocabulary of international human rights. By applying an entirely separate and unachievable standard to Israel while remaining aggressively silent on the escalating horrors of the world outside it, the global elite, the media, and the United Nations have exposed a profound systemic rot.

The recent explosion of global antisemitism is no sudden anomaly; it is the predictable awakening of a historical virus that has merely completed its mutation from religious and racial persecution into institutional anti-Zionism.

The Admission: The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

The mechanics of this structural double standard were laid bare in a chillingly candid exchange involving the prominent journalist Caroline Glick. When debating European officials regarding why Western bodies obsessively penalize Israeli defensive actions while minimizing or ignoring systematic, state-sponsored slaughter by neighboring regimes, the underlying logic was exposed.

During the 2014 Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference, Danish Ambassador Jesper Vahr argued that Europe should apply a double standard, explicitly stating that Israel should insist on being discriminated against because it claims to be a Western democracy. Glick directly countered this logic, noting that it creates a singular standard for Israel driven by an “obsessive-compulsive need to constantly pick at the Jewish state” while fundamentally treating Israel’s neighbors as “objects” rather than human beings capable of accountability.

This admission exposes a toxic, dual-layered prejudice:

The Weaponization of Israeli Success: Because Israel built a thriving, technologically advanced, and Western-style democracy, the international community demands it fight existential asymmetric wars with a level of surgical perfection that no Western nation—including the United States or Britain—has ever achieved in its own history.

The Infantalization of Dictatorships: By treating Islamic autocracies and proxy networks as exempt from the standards of civilization, the international community engages in a profound racism of lower expectations. The brutal execution of dissidents in Tehran, the total erasure of human rights in Afghanistan, and the war crimes of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are treated as weather patterns—unchangeable, expected, and therefore legally unpunishable.

The result is a perverse legal reality where the victim of aggression is placed under an international microscope, while the aggressor is granted a permanent pass due to geopolitical realpolitik.

The Circular Shield: Canada versus Iran

This dynamic creates a closed, circular defense system for a state like Iran. When the Iranian regime sponsors global terror networks, executes thousands of its own citizens, or shoots down civilian airliners like Flight PS752, the international community laments the “lack of jurisdiction.” The ICC claims it cannot act because Iran never signed the Rome Statute, and the UN Security Council remains paralyzed by the inevitability of a Russian or Chinese veto.

Even when nations attempt to use domestic courts to hold the regime accountable, the international legal order rushes to protect the perpetrator. This friction is at the heart of the ongoing legal battle at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Alleged Violations of State Immunities (Islamic Republic of Iran v. Canada). When Canada amended its State Immunity Act to allow terror victims to sue the Iranian state and seize its assets, Iran sued Canada at the ICJ, arguing that customary international law guarantees absolute sovereign immunity for its actions.

The system is structurally rigged: the rules are rigidly maintained to ensure that terror-exporting regimes like Iran remain untouchable under the guise of state immunity, while those same rules are actively bent or broken to ensnare Israel.

The Manufacturing of Jurisdiction: How the ICC Targeted Israel

The structural bias of the international legal order is most visible in how the ICC handled Israel. Israel—much like the United States—is a sovereign nation that explicitly chose not to sign or ratify the Rome Statute. Under basic treaty law, a court has no authority over a non-signatory state.

Yet, to target Israeli leaders, the ICC engaged in unprecedented legal gymnastics. The court retroactively recognized a Palestinian state—which lacks defined borders, a unified government, or sovereign control—for the sole purpose of establishing an artificial territorial jurisdiction. By doing so, the ICC asserted the right to investigate and issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders defending their nation against  the Islamic Occupiers  of  Iran’s genocidal proxy network.

No one elected the Islamic  leaders of Iran in 1979  . It was a  violent revolution  in the name of  Islam  .

The 1979 Iranian Revolution was not a democratic election, but a violent uprising that overthrew the monarchy and resulted in the establishment of a theocratic Islamic Republic led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The ongoing resistance of the Iranian people highlights a history of suppressed democratic movements and severe human rights violations:

The 2009 Green Revolution: Following Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential election, millions of citizens launched the Iranian Green Movement to demand democratic reforms. President Barack Obama pursued a cautious, “hands-off” approach to protect secret nuclear negotiations and avoid being labeled an American imperialist meddler by Tehran. Obama later publicly admitted that failing to aggressively stand in solidarity with the 2009 protesters was a major foreign policy mistake. [1, 2, 3, 4] 

Mass Atrocities and Executions: Under Iran’s unitary, authoritarian Islamic theocracy, exercising basic freedoms like free speech, peaceful assembly, or political dissent remains strictly illegal and punishable by death. The regime has systematically crushed consecutive waves of public resistance—including the 2019 protests, the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, and the massive 2025–2026 Iran Massacres. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] The Casualty Toll: Human rights monitoring groups and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights confirm that the regime has violently suppressed dissent using live ammunition, digital blackouts, and record-shattering execution spikes. While historical massacres in 1988 claimed up to 30,000 lives, the combined toll of killed demonstrators, disappeared dissidents, and state-sanctioned hangings throughout these decades of unrest runs into the tens of thousands. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

The contrast is stark: the ICC claims it is legally powerless to investigate Iranian leaders who fund global terror, or British and American leaders who have launched overseas military campaigns, because they are non-members or lack geographic triggers. But when it comes to the lone Jewish state, the ICC manufactured a brand-new legal doctrine on the fly to bypass its own treaty restrictions.

Imperial Immunity and the Ghosts of Empire

To understand the depth of this hypocrisy, one must look at how the global legal order protects the historical and contemporary atrocities committed by Western empires. The foundational failure of the modern human rights apparatus occurred during the Biafran Genocide (1967–1970) in Nigeria.

Driven by neo-colonial interests to preserve control over lucrative oil reserves, Great Britain supplied massive quantities of heavy weaponry, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the Nigerian military government. This culminated in a total land, sea, and air blockade that deliberately starved to death over two million civilians, primarily Igbo children. Proportionally, this campaign claimed more children than the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust.

Where was the international legal order? The United Nations stood by in calculated silence, hiding behind the shield of state sovereignty to brand the slaughter an “internal affair”. The 1948 Genocide Convention was rendered entirely toothless because its powerful architects had intentionally designed a legal threshold for “intent” that is easily obscured by state propaganda. Britain used its imperial leverage and global influence to bury the atrocity, ensuring that no international tribunal would ever investigate its complicity in the destruction of Biafra.

The historical record shows a consistent pattern of Western powers directly blocking investigations into their own actions:

The U.S. and the “Hague Invasion Act”: In 2002, the United States passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act (ASPA), explicitly authorizing the use of “all means necessary and appropriate” (including military force) to free any American or allied personnel detained by the ICC, effectively threatening the court to prevent investigations into U.S. actions in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Principle of Complementarity as a Shield: Powerful nations routinely use their domestic legal systems to block international oversight, claiming they are “willing and able” to investigate themselves, while denying that same deference to Israel’s robust, independent judiciary.

The Media Monopoly and the Narrative Filter

A vital instrument of this asymmetric system is Western media dominance, which serves as a global narrative filter. During the Biafran conflict, British authorities managed news flows to minimize public awareness of the deliberate nature of the blockade. Today, this media monopoly operates with a profound double standard when contrasting Iranian state actions with Israeli defensive operations:

The Framing of Iran: When the Iranian regime launches hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israeli cities, or uses its proxies to slaughter civilians, the media framing routinely de-escalates the language, describing the attacks as “regional tensions,” “retaliation,” or “cycles of violence.” The regime’s systematic execution of internal protesters is buried beneath business headlines about sanctions and diplomacy.

The Framing of Israel: When Israel engages in defensive military operations to neutralize targeted terror infrastructure, the media instantly deploys the absolute vocabulary of international law—”war crimes,” “indiscriminate bombing,” and “genocide.” Every defensive action is stripped of context, framed not as a war for survival against an explicit genocidal threat, but as unilateral state aggression.

The Conclusive Knot: The Mutation of the anti Semitic Virus

When we tie these threads together—the soft bigotry of low expectations admitted by European diplomats, the absolute immunity granted to terror states like Iran, the historical erasure of British-led atrocities in Biafra, and the manufacturing of illegal jurisdiction by the ICC—the illusion of international law evaporates.

The international legal order does not exist to deliver universal justice. It functions as a sophisticated theater of realpolitik, where international bodies use Israel as a permanent moral scapegoat to project a false illusion of global accountability, all while shielding the world’s true tyrants and empires.

The current global surge in antisemitism—manifesting in elite universities, international courts, and Western media—is the predictable outcome of this systemic hypocrisy. Antisemitism is a historical virus.

In the Middle Ages, it was incubated through religion, accusing the Jew of killing God. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it mutated into science and race, branding the Jew as a genetic contaminant to the nation-state.

Today, in the 21st century, it has found its latest, highly institutionalized mutation: international law. By branding the collective Jew—the State of Israel—as the ultimate human rights violator, the global elite has successfully revived the world’s oldest hatred, dressing it up in the robes of international justice.