It is proof of the power of our faith that the spirit of Christmas prevails over all the reasons for cynicism.
I’m thinking now of Psalm 40:4 where we read: “Fortunate is the man who has puts his trust in God and has not turned to the arrogant and to those who stray after falsehood.”
Regarding “the arrogant and those who stray after falsehood,” take the case of the International Criminal Court, established in 2002 and located in the Hague, Netherlands.
Its mission sounds so essential and lofty – “Trying individuals for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression.”
But I am proud of our country that chose to not be part of it. The clear-thinking American leaders who kept our country out of this arrangement understood it would violate our sacred national sovereignty and American citizens could be called to so-called justice by international bureaucrats.
Consider the current scourge in our country known as “lawfare.” Lawfare is politicization of the law, use of the law by those with power to go after political enemies. President-elect Donald Trump can testify to the personal and financial costs that being on the wrong side of this can extract.
But if this can happen in our own country, where we have a Constitution and Bill of Rights, just think of an unencumbered international entity with charge to pursue global so-called justice.
Another country that had the common sense to stay out of this charade was our friend and ally Israel.
But choosing not to be part of the game doesn’t seem to provide insulation from “the arrogant and … those who stray after falsehood.”
Last month, ICC bureaucrats issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for alleged crimes associated with the war in Gaza.
This is a war Israel pursued in national defense after the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Hamas terrorists who murdered, mutilated and sexually violated some 1,200 Israeli civilians and took hundreds hostage. Hamas, a terrorist organization, has elimination of the State of Israel as its defined mission.
Now more outrage.
Jan. 27, 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, where some 1 million Jews were murdered.
However, Netanyahu cannot attend the ceremonies at Auschwitz because Polish deputy foreign minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski indicates he will be arrested in accordance with Poland’s commitment to the ICC.
Per Israel’s national Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, “On the eve of the German occupation of Poland in 1939, 3.3 million Jews lived there. At the end of the war, approximately 380,000 Polish Jews remained alive, the rest having been murdered, mostly in the ghettos and the six death camps: Chelmo, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
On June 7, 1979, the first Polish Pope, John Paul II, visited Auschwitz. He called it a “place built on hatred and on contempt for man in the name of a crazed ideology. A place built on cruelty.”
The Pope noted a plaque inscribed in Hebrew which “awakens the memory of the People whose sons and daughters were intended for total extermination. This People draws its origin from Abraham … as was expressed by Paul of Tarsus. The very people that received from God the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ itself experienced in a special measure what is meant by killing.”
The State of Israel, the world’s only Jewish State, was born out of this horror. The U.N. voted in 1947 to create a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews said yes, the Arabs said no and have never given Israel a day of peace.
Now, politicized international bureaucrats want to arrest Israel’s prime minister for defending his country.
The good news is the spirit of Christmas, of John Paul II, persists, as we now hear the sound of “joy to the world” in Christian countries worldwide.
