This legal decision, though not binding and merely an “advisory opinion” by the Court to the UN General Assembly at the request of the Arab states, has been exploited ever since by Israel’s worldwide critics who still reflexively refer to the security barrier as being “illegal” and “in violation of international law” on the basis of this decision. In this instance, says Jeremy Rabkin, professor of government at Cornell, lawfare had an insidious effect and the International Court of Justice unfortunately “admonished that the nations of the world are obligated not to pressure Palestinians to abandon terrorism, but to pressure Israel to dismantle its security fence.”

With their one-sided ideological approach to mediating legal and diplomatic issues that might better be left to state actors whose actions reflect the will of the populaces they represent, NGO’s use of lawfare against Israel also strengthens the efforts of Israel’s enemies by providing the cover of propaganda and distortion of actual facts on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank, for instance. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, two NGO ‘superpowers,’ have regularly chimed in with respect to Israel’s alleged offensives regarding its treatment of Gaza leading up to the present incursions by the IDF against Hamas. Even though Israel fully disengaged from Gaza in 2005, offering the Palestinians free reign to demonstrate their state-building potential and turning over all governmental control, Human Rights Watch continues to assert that Gaza’s social and economic dysfunction is Israel’s fault, that the Jewish state still is an occupying force. “Israel continued to occupy the Gaza Strip,” HRW says, “by virtue of its effective control over Gaza’s borders, airspace, territorial waters, tax collection, and population registry."

The International Court of Justice, parroting many in the world community, refers to Israel’s actions related to Gaza a "siege" and further suggested, even before the December incursions, that Israel employs "indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force" against Palestinians. After Israel began clamping down on border crossings to shore up weapons smuggling and as a response to incessant shelling by Hamas into Israeli towns, it was not long before loud cries went out about the ‘humanitarian crisis’ being caused by Israel, not Gazans themselves, how, according to Amnesty International, Israel’s "blockade has prevented the entry into Gaza of all but the minimum and insufficient quantities of fuel, food and basic necessities."

NGO Monitor’s Executive Director, Professor Gerald M. Steinberg, says that his organization’s reports expose “the NGO bombardment of the world’s courts with bogus claims against Israel. Given that not one court has upheld their complaints, it is clear that NGOs continue to manipulate judicial systems, not out of concern for human rights, but as part of the campaign to demonize Israel.” More telling is the fact that the investigations reveal that while Israel is hypocritically and repeatedly singled out for legal actions, “NGO Monitor was unable to find a single suit initiated by the self-proclaimed ‘human rights’ NGOs . . . against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Qaeda; against their leaders such as Yassir Arafat, Khaled Mashal, and Hassan Nasrallah; or against their government sponsors such as the Palestinian Authority, Iran, and Syria.”

As proof that lawfare against Israel can embolden and even provide moral and legal cover for some of the world’s most egregious human rights offenders, Iran has inanely announced that it was establishing a special court to try Israeli officials, in absentia, for their war crimes committed in the current Gaza operations. Justified by a 1948 U.N. convention on the prevention of genocide to which Iran is a signatory, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki asserted that Israel obviously was committing "genocide against humanity" in Gaza, and that Iran, one of the world’s most deficient nations for the protection of human rights, would now stand in judgment of Israel. "The court is in a special branch in Tehran,” crowed judiciary spokesman Alireza Jamshidi, “and entrusted with the task of dealing with the executors, planners and officials of this [Israeli] regime who have committed crimes."

In an inverted moral universe where enemies of the Middle East’s only democratic state regularly seek its destruction, the tactic of lawfare—with its once-meaningful language of genocide, international human rights, and war crimes—is now being used, by state and non-state actors alike, as an alternate, but equally dangerous, weapon in the unrelenting jihad against Israel.

Sorry - never going to happen. Salon's been around what, 10 years? And it never met a terrorist organization it didn't 'understand', 'appreciate' and sympathize with. Eventually when Iran nukes Israel, Salon will be the first to complain that all the Jewish corpses are stinking up the place and creating a crime against mother nature.

Link please.

Where gasoline combustion emits only the sweet fragrance of socialist revolutionary freedom.

Last week he asserted the the MSM 'hides' the truth. Really? I guess they don't have TV down in Brazil. Because yesterday BOTH CNN and MSNBC were open mikes for al Jazeera and al Hayat. They both offered the floor unchallenged and unquestioned to reps from both organizations who went on to screech and soapbox for long stretches of time. In the studio, in English. If that's hiding the truth then Greenwald really is the Nazi he pretends not to be. What else does he want? al Manar Hezbollah channel to get 24/7 airtime? Maybe he can invite Nick Griffin of the BNP to swoop in do his best Oswald Mosley impression?