The dismissal of International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, a British-Pakistani lawyer, by the court’s member states marks a watershed moment, not just for international law, but for our understanding of how modern “lawfare” is weaponized as a personal shield.
For months, the global public was led to believe that Khan’s aggressive pursuit of arrest warrants against Israeli leadership was a principled stance on human rights. However, the timeline tells a far more cynical story.
The allegations of coercive sexual misconduct against Khan were formally reported internally to senior ICC officials and the court’s independent watchdog before he launched his lawfare campaign and sought arrest warrants against Israeli officials.
Confronted with an impending career-ending scandal, Khan played the ultimate survival card: he targeted the Jewish state.
By aggressively seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, Khan orchestrated a calculated diversion. This move was designed to align him with the Western political Left and their Islamist coalition allies, who command significant influence over mainstream media narratives.
The strategy was clear: leverage anti-Israel bias to frame any subsequent scrutiny of his personal behavior as a retaliatory, politically motivated attack. In the early stages, the tactic worked seamlessly. The mainstream media accommodated this narrative, focusing on institutional friction rather than the severe allegations of misconduct that have now led to his formal dismissal.
This playbook, using hostility towards Israel as an emergency exit from domestic or personal ruin, is becoming a disturbing trend among contemporary leaders. On May 27, 2026, the offices of Spain’s Socialist Party, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the EU’s anti-Israel-in-chief, were raided by the police.
This escalation follows the formal indictment of his wife on corruption and influence-peddling charges. There are other ongoing corruption charges against those close to Sánchez, including the recent indictment of Spain’s former Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero over corruption linked to Venezuela and oil schemes.
Sánchez’s relentless diplomatic assaults on Israel may be initially seen as aligned with his coalition’s Leftist ideology, or as a professed concern for the human rights of the oppressed.
However, more vicious attacks on Israel also serve a highly functional domestic purpose: convincing a progressive base that internal judicial scrutiny is merely a shadow campaign directed by Jerusalem.
In Persian culture, there is a precise term for this behavior: riya (ریا). Riya is the practice of flagrant hypocrisy, where one projects a false public image to conceal a darker reality. In Iran, modern history has taught citizens a painful truth: the louder a public figure performs ideological purity, the larger the crime they are attempting to hide.
Under the Islamic Republic, a mafia cartel operating under a religious guise, hyper-demonstrative piety is the standard armor for systemic financial and political corruption. The legendary Persian poet Hafez famously identified riya and deceit as the absolute pinnacle of societal moral decay.
Steps toward accountability
Today, Western elites are recycling this ancient vice. Antisemitism is a chronic human disease akin to latent tuberculosis. It exists asymptomatically across millions.
However, when activated by political opportunity, it breaks out into lethal destruction, from the horrors of the Holocaust to the atrocities of October 7. The contemporary Western Left and its Islamist allies have seamlessly repackaged this bias under the acceptable veneer of “anti-Zionism.”
The message being sent by corrupt global actors is deeply hazardous: if you face a sexual misconduct investigation, a corruption probe, or severe political failure, simply launch an assault on Israel. By doing so, you can instantly purchase an ironclad policy of political immunity from the global progressive establishment.
The ICC’s decision to finally dismiss Khan is a step towards accountability, albeit far too late. The political targeting of the Jewish state to cover misconduct should have been opposed by the court’s member states sooner. The ICC appears to have been dragged, kicking and screaming, towards the right decision by Marco Rubio’s campaign to dismantle the Court.
The prosecution of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose only crime was serving as Israel’s wartime prime minister during an existential war launched by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its terrorist proxies in the aftermath of the October 7 atrocities, was the final nail in the coffin of this self-appointed court’s credibility.
The case of Khan and his attack on Israel demonstrated how dangerous a so-called court could become in the hands of rogue actors, posing a risk to the national security interests of the United States.
Islamists and Leftists do not hate the US just because it supports Israel; they hate Israel because the Jewish state is the beacon of light of American values in the Middle East, just as they hated the Shah of Iran for his Western values, resulting in the disaster of 1979. Rubio’s diplomatic campaign to dismantle this morally bankrupt institution is a welcome development.
The international community must remain vigilant against those who weaponize the targeting of Israel to conceal their own misconduct and evade accountability.
The writer is an Iranian journalist and former editor-in-chief of ManotoTV.