Biden sides with socialists; pressures Israel to protect activist judges
Joe Biden has taken a keen interest in Israel's internal politics, demanding that the nation's ruling coalition abandon efforts to rein in an activist Supreme Court that routinely nullifies “Israel First” legislation. This despite the coalition parties having campaigned, and having won, on election promises to return legislative power to the Knesset.
Biden picks judges, tells Netanyahu not to
The centerpiece of the so named “judicial reform” is a law to transfer the power to select new judges from the extreme left wing judges on Israel's High Court to the popularly elected Knesset. Interestingly, Biden had no problem with legislators choosing judges when, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he presided over hearings and votes to advance or block nominations of all federal judges, including those nominated to the Supreme Court. Now, acting as president, he makes those nominations himself, without ever suggesting that it would be better for the Supreme Court justices to pick their own successors. Yet, Biden in a CNN interview said, “I'm very concerned. I'm concerned that they [Israeli legislators] get this straight. They cannot continue down this road. I've sort of made that clear.”
Biden did not clarify what he would do to Israel to ensure that its leaders not “continue down this road” but added that the elected leader of Israel will not be granted a visit to the White House “in the near term,” prompting the prime minister to respond to the attack on his nation's independence:
Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.
Constitutional lawyer Nat Lewin, who “specializes in religious freedom cases before the US Supreme Court,” had this to say about Israel's proposed reforms:
This assignment of power to judges to select their successors would be a glaring violation of American constitutional separation-of-powers standards. It would be scandalous in the United States if a president openly asked a sitting Supreme Court Justice who to nominate for a vacancy in the Supreme Court or in any lower federal court.
In a subsequent interview, Lewin added:
The Israelis have been brainwashed into believing that the judges would select the best people to be judges. That’s ludicrous. If you did that in the US it would be an outrage . . . [Former Chief Justice] Aharon Barak grabbed . . . powers, threw out doctrines so that anybody can come before him and his court, and did away with things that he and the majority of the court that he selected did not approve of.
What's really at stake?
The extremists on Israel's Supreme Court are consistent in which laws they nullify, opposing attempts to rein in socialist revolutionaries destabilizing Israeli society and endangering Jewish and Arab citizens alike. The main beneficiary of these moves is the Palestinian Authority, a subsidiary of the terrorist PLO which itself is dominated by the Fatah party, a proud "member party" of the Socialist International. The PLO regularly kills Arabs in furtherance of its plans to effect a socialist takeover of Israel, as recorded in the documentary, "We Are the Next Target; Terrorism and the Betrayal of Israel":
Palestinians live in daily terror of these squads. Some one thousand palestinians have been killed by the terror squads, and many others injured.
An Israeli NGO opposing “radical leftist trends handcuffing” IDF soldiers has produced a video highlighting how the High Court has caused the death of Israelis with rules of engagement they created:
The ONLY way to return the IDF to its glory days - is by restraining the Supreme Court and returning the justice system to the people and to those who support the soldiers, not the terrorists!
Examples of extreme judicial overreach explained in the video include the Supreme Court blocking the government's decisions to:
- Destroy abandoned buildings used by terrorists to shoot at Israelis, even after terrorists from the so called “Supreme Court Houses” used those buildings to murder a young soldier, a young woman, and then a woman, her four daughters and her unborn son,
- Deport 400 Hamas terrorists to Lebanon and a suicide bomber to Gaza,
- Send neighbors to knock on the door of a wanted terrorist to reduce the chance of a gun fight that could injure the terrorists' family members,
- Destroy terrorists' homes as a deterrent to would be terrorists.
The video concludes with an appeal for judicial reform.
In 1987 there was only one human rights organization in Israel. By 2002 the number had grown to 26 [each of which are] focusing their efforts on appeals to the Supreme Court against the IDF and the security forces. Today countless organizations are appealing against the IDF and undermining its power.
The Chief of Staff can't run the army and certainly can't fight properly. Let's fix the judicial system. Let's let the IDF win.
Please see our previous articles on Israel's judicial reform:
