How Doha Captured the International Criminal Court

 Qatar’s Deep Ties to the Muslim Brotherhood Are Highly Relevant in Alleged Meddling in Legal Actions Against the State of Israel

Craig Considine, Sydney Rodman at JNS June 18, 2026

The International Criminal Court in The Hague is seeking the arrest of more Israeli leaders for alleged crimes against Palestinians. The court’s specious claims against Israel never made sense. Now, however, those claims are beginning to unravel because of the ICC’s own problems. New evidence suggests that the ICC has ulterior motives that go far beyond mere anti-Israel bias—and that its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, is likely acting as a pawn of even more sinister actors.

It now seems that the ICC’s actions form part of a Muslim Brotherhood-led lawfare campaign, with Qatar pulling the strings. A shocking exposé published last month seemingly blew the lid off the ICC’s true motives. According to the report, which cites individuals who worked on behalf of Qatar, the Qatari government promised to “look after” Khan if he issued the arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. Khan, for his part, has not denied the allegation. The report also claims that Qatar hired investigators to discredit Khan’s critics, including a U.S. senator and a woman who accused Khan of sexual misconduct.

The ICC has pursued an intense anti-Israel campaign, possibly at Qatar’s behest. In November 2024, it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over the war in Gaza—a result of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023—even though Israel’s operations produced one of the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios of any modern urban conflict.

These ICC measures were not just symbolic, as some claim. Instead, they produced immediate real-world consequences.

Fearing arrest, Netanyahu canceled several diplomatic trips to Europe.

Sometimes, it is more convenient to accept a dysfunctional status quo than to challenge it. Yet new allegations against the ICC’s top judge should catalyze scrutiny of the entire court.

That Qatar was working behind the scenes with Khan to prosecute Israeli leaders is a major revelation, and it may explain the ICC’s rush to prosecute Israeli officials, at a speed that is unusual for the court. As one legal expert observed, the ICC, which was only established on July 1, 2002, is “the most inactive and procrastinating court in the world—it dealt with a dozen cases only, over a period of more than 20 years.”

If the allegations are true (and the evidence strongly suggests they are), then the ICC is effectively being directed by an international criminal country. This would help explain why Khan issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders while largely sparing top Hamas officials.

After all, Hamas’s top leaders lived openly in Qatar, a leading state sponsor of terrorism that has funneled billions to Hamas and enabled the group’s operations for years. Nonetheless, none of these puppet masters has been prosecuted. Instead, if the allegations are true, they appear to have been manipulating the very prosecutor overseeing the case.

Yet the implications are more significant than meets the eye. The truth is that Qatar’s lawfare against Israel goes well beyond the ICC situation.

The case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, also in The Hague, follows a similar pattern. When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, whose country is a close partner of Qatar, first revealed that his country would bring a war-crimes case against Israel before the ICJ, he did so while visiting Qatar. Around the same time, senior Qatari official Mutlaq al-Qahtani met directly with Khan and a senior ICC judge, potentially working on dual tracks to indict Israel at both the ICC and the ICJ.

Qatar’s deep ties to the Muslim Brotherhood are highly relevant. Robert Gates, a former CIA director and U.S. secretary of defense, once described the relationship bluntly: “Qatar has long had the welcome mat out for the Muslim Brotherhood.” It is an expensive welcome mat, with Qatar shelling out billions for Muslim Brotherhood actors over the years, including Hamas, whose leaders it also hosts.

Anti-Israel lawfare against Israel is straight out of the Muslim Brotherhood’s playbook. The group’s own internal documents expose how it deliberately uses legal tactics to advance its doctrine of tamkeen—the strategy of employing seemingly legitimate tools to empower Islamist goals in the West. Chief on that agenda for the Muslim Brotherhood, of course, is demonization of Israel.

Khan presents himself as a follower of the Ahmadiyya variant of Islam, a movement known for peace, interfaith dialogue and education. Yet he is actively targeting Israel, a democratic country that stands for peace and stability in the Middle East.

In addition, Khan has made several bizarre statements that amount to apologetics for the radical ideology that both Qatar and Hamas adhere to. In a 2018 interview, he asked: “Why do we have certain language that we do not see elsewhere? … Why ‘Islamic terror’? Why not ‘Buddhist terror’?” While most Muslims do not share the jihadist ideology, Khan feigned ignorance on this matter, suggesting either willful blindness or outright dishonesty.

Whatever Khan’s true motivations may be, this much is clear: The agenda that he, and the court he oversees, is pursuing is not entirely his own. The ICC is a farce—and a dangerous one at that.

 

Moral Decline in the West

 

Fawzia Amin Sido, Yazidi survivor of ISIS sexual slavery 

and captivity in Gaza, testifies at a UN Watch side event 

during the 62nd session of the UN Human Rights Council 

in Geneva, June 26, 2026. 

Fawzia Amin Sido’s story should have shaken the world. It did not.

That, too, is part of the story.

She was a Yazidi child from Iraq, abducted during ISIS’s assault on the Yazidis in 2014, one of the clearest genocidal campaigns of our century. She was trafficked to Gaza and held there for years by a Hamas terrorist affiliated with ISIS.

Eventually, she was extracted through the Kerem Shalom crossing in a complex operation led by COGAT, before being transferred through Jordan and returned to her family in Iraq.

Her testimony is almost unbearable to hear.

She was bought and sold. Abused. Raped. Forced into a jihadist “marriage.” Made to bear two children while still a captive.

In Gaza, she said, she was not free. She was controlled, beaten, and treated as a slave.

Hamas later claimed she had stayed there willingly. Of course it did.

This is not only a story about ISIS. It is not only a story about Hamas. It is a story about the failure of Western moral language when it is imposed on a world that does not share its basic assumptions.

The Western mind often begins with its own inherited furniture: individual rights, consent, personal autonomy, minority protection, the rule of law, secular politics, and the comforting belief that words like “freedom” and “resistance” mean roughly the same thing everywhere.

Then it looks at the Middle East, especially at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and tries to squeeze that reality into familiar templates.

Oppressor and oppressed. Colonizer and indigenous. Powerful and powerless. Brown and white. Resistance and occupation.

It is clean. It is emotionally efficient. It fits perfectly on a campus banner, which is usually the first warning sign.

Fawzia’s story tears through that script.

She was not Jewish. She was not Israeli. She was not a soldier. She was a Yazidi girl, a member of a persecuted Middle Eastern minority, swallowed by the same jihadist, patriarchal, tribal order that devours anyone outside its hierarchy.

In that world, women can become property. Minorities can become prey. Children can become trophies. And “marriage” can be the polite administrative term for rape.

This is the part many Western observers refuse to process. They read Gaza as if it were a misunderstood European suburb with worse infrastructure and an unfortunate public-relations problem. They cannot, or will not, confront the deeper reality: parts of the region are still governed by medieval instincts that have learned to speak the language of modern politics, human rights vocabulary, NGO reports, smartphones, and occasionally a press office.

Fawzia survived ISIS. She survived Gaza. She survived the moral obscenity of being told, after all of it, that perhaps she had been there by choice.

She later testified that her childhood had been stolen and that she had lived in Gaza “for years in slavery.”

And then Israel, the country so routinely accused of every crime imaginable by people who have turned selective outrage into a respectable profession, helped get her out.

That fact should matter. Because Israel is not fighting a misunderstanding. It is fighting an ecosystem of terror movements, ideological cruelty, hostage-taking, sexual violence, minority persecution, and a political culture in which civilians are used as shields, women as instruments, and truth as disposable packaging.

Fawzia Amin Sido’s name should be known.

Her suffering exposes the fraudulence of so much Western commentary on this conflict. The Middle East is not a seminar room. Gaza is not an abstract symbol. Hamas is not a social justice movement with unfortunate branding. And the victims of this world are not always the ones Western activists have been trained to recognize.

There is no need to dress this story in theory.

One young Yazidi woman, rescued from Gaza after a decade of slavery, tells us enough.

The world should have listened sooner.

It still can..

Just Out of Curiosity

 (With thanks to Forest Rain Marcia)

Every once in a while random people show up on my feed and ask:

"Out of curiosity, do you ever think of the families on the other side, most of whom are collateral damage ?"

And they usually do it on posts expressing our anguish for our loved ones.

Perhaps these people do not realize that this, done in this way, is a deeply hateful question.

They wouldn't make the assumptions they make if they had not internalized hate.

And I know many Jews respond to things like this with facts and figures detailing the extreme lengths Israel goes to save lives on the other side.

That's why I think it's important to highlight my latest response to this question.

No explanations - because the hateful are not really interested in facts.

No apologies - because they should be apologizing to us, not the other way around.

My answer:

First of all, my family comes before the families of the people trying to kill me. It is morally twisted to do or expect anything else.

Secondly, why in the world do you assume that most of them are collateral damage?

The Gazan elderly, women and children who invaded behind the Hamas fighters? They are the ones who set fires and looted everything in sight.

The civilians who beat the hostages in the streets?

The children who spat on the bodies of raped and murdered women?

The women who made cookies to celebrate their great victory?

The young people who watched the live stream of the Hamas horrors in the square outside the Shifa hospital, laughing and cheering at the seeing Jews being tortured and slaughtered?

Are they the collateral damage you are referring to?

Or perhaps the people who held hostages in their homes?

Or their neighbors that knew and didn't help, even when the IDF promised 1 million dollars and safe passage for their family to a new country just for information? Are they the collateral damage you are referring to?

Out of curiosity

 

Hezbollah Tunnel on Israel's Border

 Only a few kilometers from Israel’s northern border, 

Hezbollah constructed a sophisticated underground 

drone facility designed to support its ongoing

 campaign against Israel.