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Alameen Templeton
He may be suffering from dementia, but Genocide Joe Biden may still find himself behind bars for openly facilitating Israeli war crimes in Gaza, thanks to a US-based NGO that has called on the International Criminal Court to (ICC) charge him.
Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) has called for a formal investigation into links between Biden, his foreign secretary Antony Blinken, defence secretary Lloyd Austin and other officials from his administration.
“There are solid grounds to investigate Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin for complicity in Israel’s crimes.
ICC ‘not a members-only’ court
“The bombs dropped on [Palestinian] hospitals, schools and homes are American bombs, the campaign of murder and persecution has been carried out with American support. US officials have been aware of exactly what Israel is doing, and yet their support never stopped,” said Reed Brody, Dawn board member and veteran war crimes lawyer.
The US and Israel are not signatories to the Rome Statute, the ICC founding charter.
Raed Jarrar, DAWN’s advocacy director believes the path to the ICC has opened up because the NGO had used up all avenues to justice in the US.
“We have tried every possible venue in the US to stop the flow of US weapons to Israel and contacting and lobbying officials and working with Congress and filing a lawsuit,” Raed Jarrar, Dawn’s advocacy director, told Middle East Eye.
“None of these actions by any of our partners have led to any measures of accountability or suspended arms being sent to Israel. We were only left with the option of resorting to the ICC.”
DAWN had hired a team of ICC-registered attorneys from the EU to submit their 172-page submission that Biden and other US officials must be prosecuted for their roles in aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes by providing political, military, financial and public support to the Zionazi state.
Rafah atrocity
This was done with full awareness that US weapons and intelligence were being used to commit war crimes, including mass murdering civilians, ethnic displacement and genocide.
One such instance, reported by Markaz Sahaba, was an assessment report issued in May last year as Israel was preparing to destroy Rafah. Blinken personally intervened to ensure damning evidence and unavoidable conclusions of genocide were either removed or watered down from the report that was also deliberately delayed.
DAWN says the US provided at least $17.9bn of weapons transfers, intelligence sharing, targeting assistance, diplomatic protection, and official endorsement of Israeli crimes despite knowledge of how such support had and would substantially enable grave abuses.
It argues the ICC can take on the case despite the US and Israel remaining outside its charter ambit because it is the only proper international institution where such a necessary prosecution can take place.
It points out the ICC is the only permanent international criminal court for prosecuting such crimes (the International Court of Justice, for instance, only settles disputes between states and doesn’t prosecute individuals) especially as the US thugs are immune from effective prosecution in their own country.
Repeat offenders
Biden, Blinken, and Austin were aware of how their assistance would be used to commit crimes,” Dawn said this week.
They repeatedly intervened to block efforts to cut back military assistance to the genocide, knowing full-well they were facilitating war crimes.
“Indeed, they ensured that US support continued despite the knowledge that such support violated US laws prohibiting military assistance to abusive security forces, ignored pleas from United Nations officials and agencies, and defied the International Court of Justice’s orders to cease the sale, transfer and diversion of weapons to Israel that could be used to commit genocide in Gaza,” Dawn said.
Other officials DAWN has asked the ICC to charge include Jake Sullivan, then-national security advisor; Gina Raimondo, then-secretary of commerce; Bonnie Jenkins, then-under secretary of arms control and international security; Stanley L Brown, acting assistant secretary of political-military affairs; Amanda Dory, acting under secretary of defence for policy, and Mike Miller, acting director of the Defence Security Cooperation Agency.
A warning to Trump
ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, who is already facing US sanctions for daring to prosecute Israeli officials, received the DAWN submission on January 19, a day before King Donald Trump took over the White House.
DAWN kept mum about the submission until this week, in a bid to avoid immediate US ire as Trump had made known his hostile intentions towards the court and its personnel that he also targeted during his first term.
They’re hoping this latest revelation of charges against a US president will give Trump pause for thought as he calls for ethnic cleansing of Gaza. He has already backpedalled from that.
“We’re not operating in a vacuum. Although this focuses on the Biden administration, we hope the Trump administration will read it and take it as a wake-up call; otherwise, they will have criminal liability too,” Jarrar said.
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