US senators issue ‘mafia-style’ threat as Israeli military enters Rafah

A group of Republican lawmakers released an open letter threatening officials of the International Criminal Court and their families with reprisal if the body issues arrest warrants against Israeli officials, referencing a US statute commonly referred to as “The Hague Invasion Act.”

“When you read that letter, which I have – anybody can go online and find it – it looks like something from the mafia,” said host Garland Nixon on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program. “It’s a mafia-style letter. It is the US saying, ‘look, we’re not going to pretend like we’re liberal interventionists and we’re going around the world to do good. You will do what we say or, basically, we’ll come after you and your families.”

“It’s the honest face of US imperialism,” he concluded. “I got to give them credit. That is US imperialism without a mask on.”

“That’s the only difference, and when you look at what the US threatened to do – sanctioning employees, preventing members of the ICC and their families from coming to the United States, and then closing with ‘you have been warned’ – what a threat this is,” responded author Robert Fantina  (Algora Publishing 2006). “As you said, mafia, tin-pot dictator kind of behavior.”

“To issue this kind of a threat against an internationally-recognized body whose goal is world justice and the adherence to international law, it does pull the mask off the United States,” he said. “It’s a rogue nation. It believes in might makes right, has no interest in diplomacy, and has no interest in human rights or international law. It holds all those things in contempt,” Fantina emphasized.

Netanyahu has likewise warned the ICC against issuing arrest warrants, claiming that doing so would be an “unprecedented antisemitic hate crime.”

via Sputnik