bedazzle me like one of ur italian corpses

henmazzig:

“Are you a Mossad agent?”

That’s what Christiane Amanpour put to Sarah, the ICC lawyer accusing chief prosecutor Karim Khan of sexual abuse. A Malaysian Muslim woman, showing her face for the first time, describing groping and coercion by one of the most powerful men in international law. And CNN’s move is to make her answer for Israel.

Some will call it fair journalism, giving her the chance to deny the rumor on camera. I don’t buy it. You don’t launder a smear by repeating it to the victim’s face. No one asked Weinstein’s accusers if they were foreign assets. The question exists because Khan’s defenders planted it, and CNN watered it.

Sarah answered anyway: “If ever there was even a hint of suspicion that I was a state agent of any kind, I would have been dismissed.” She passed the highest security clearances at the court, under Khan and under Bensouda before him.

We watched people deny the testimony of women raped on October 7. Now a woman accusing the ICC’s own prosecutor has to prove she isn’t an Israeli spy before anyone will hear her. Invoking Israel has become the fastest way to discredit an inconvenient woman. Shameful is too small a word.

Members of the International Criminal Court (ICC) have voted to dismiss Karim Khan as chief prosecutor for alleged sexual misconduct.

Elected the ICC's third prosecutor in 2021, Khan was suspended last month. The decision to remove him was passed with 82 votes in favour.

The court's oversight body found in June he had committed a "serious breach of duty and serious misconduct" by engaging in an improper sexual relationship with a junior ICC staff member and seeking to stop her pursuing her complaint.

Khan has repeatedly denied all the allegations against him. His lawyer said he would challenge "the lawfulness and fairness of the decision through all available legal mechanisms".

It was not immediately clear what legal avenues remained open to the ousted prosecutor.

In a statement after the vote, the ICC "took note" of the decision of the Special Session of the Assembly of States Parties - the 125 member states which voted to remove Khan.

"The Court will continue to attach the utmost importance to maintaining a safe, inclusive, and respectful working environment for all personnel," the ICC statement said.

The entire process, however, goes beyond the fate of a single prosecutor and could reshape the world's only permanent war‑crimes tribunal.

The misconduct investigation has put the institution under a glaring spotlight, intensified divisions inside it and played out alongside an unprecedented campaign to weaken, and in fact dismantle, the ICC in its entirety.

The fear among its supporters is that the court will emerge weakened and less able to face the gravest global threats.

Khan, a prominent British lawyer, has been on voluntary leave to fight the allegations since May 2025. He remains suspended from practising law in the UK, after the Bar Standards Board imposed an interim ban while it conducts its own inquiry.

He was unable to attend the vote, held in the United Nations headquarters in New York, because he is barred from entering the United States under sanctions imposed by the Trump administration over the ICC's investigation into alleged war crimes by Israeli officials in Gaza.

Regardless of his removal, the controversy is unlikely to end there.

The decision follows a highly sensitive process that has left the court under intense scrutiny.

In May 2024, allegations that Khan had engaged in sexual misconduct involving a female staff member were reported to the ICC by a third party.

The court's Independent Oversight Mechanism (IOM) opened an investigation, but the case was later closed after the alleged victim declined to participate.

Critics of the process argued that the investigation had been mishandled, undermining confidence in the IOM.

Investigators ultimately said there was insufficient evidence to substantiate the allegations.

A second referral was made in October 2024. The matter was then transferred to the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), which conducted a broader investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse of authority.

That inquiry ran from November 2024 to December 2025 and generated more than 5,000 pages of evidence and testimony.

The OIOS findings were subsequently reviewed by a panel of three judges tasked with advising whether Khan's conduct amounted to serious misconduct, less serious misconduct, or no misconduct.

The allegations have unfolded during a period of exceptional pressure on the ICC, coinciding with wider political tensions.

The United States imposed sanctions on Khan after he sought arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged crimes linked to the war in Gaza.

Washington's attitude to the court in general has become increasingly hostile in recent years.

Earlier this month, the US launched a new "whole‑of‑government" campaign to dismantle the ICC "brick by brick" in what it calls a threat to American sovereignty, promising visa bans, asset freezes and diplomatic pressure on allies to withdraw from the court or reject its jurisdiction over their nationals.

yeah, we’ve noticed. it’s why Jews no longer feel safe in groups that are just about knitting or nail polish or biking or any fandoms. that’s what you’ve all done with this issue.

‘man introduces various shapes to a cup of goo whilst sweet father-child bonding music plays’ is simultaneously one of the funniest and most emotional scenes from star trek to me, and I think about it all the time

In the 10 years that I have worked on sharing queer history, I have never been attacked as intentionally and with as much consistency as I have in 2026. Most regularly, I'm called a groomer or harassed for mentioning Palestine.

I joke about it to my friends, because I don't actually have anyone in my life under the age of 20, how could I possibly be a groomer? It is easier to cope with all of it when I can laugh with people. No one finds it funny anymore, not even me.

When the first waves came calling me an anti-Semite, I felt compelled to ask some of the Jewish people in my life whether there was something I wasn't seeing. They assured me that I was doing nothing wrong, and I dug further into my studies. The further I got into researching the accusations levied against me, the more I was harassed for the moments I shared of my journey.

As a 29 year old adult, when I share that I read queer (often specifically trans) books, the comments are predictable. When I share that some of the books I read include sex, things get worse. When I post a book that discusses the experiences of queer Jewish people during the holocaust, I know that there will be immediate backlash, and there is. Then I am asked to edit a book synopsis to remove mentions of genocide from a poetry book about Palestine.

All of this to say, I have experience in what upsets these people and it is books that are being targeted. It is reading, readers, and anyone who encourages literacy that activates the worst people to respond. Which is why I HAVE to keep pushing you to read more. Read widely, read anything, read books that disagree with you, read porn, read queerly, read physically, read ebooks, read audiobooks, and fight the book bans sweeping North America.

turns out, us jews have secretly been on the side of the book bans all along!

a statement like that certainly doesn't carry any heavy historical implications with it, nothing about comparing jews to another group of people famous for oppressing us, or anything like that

sarcasm aside, i have a genuine question, op. why did you lump (mostly queer!) jews who are concerned with the mishandling of the history of the shoah and unethical treatment of holocaust survivors and their families in with homophobes, far-right authoritarians, purity culture assholes, and people who get mad when palestinians exist? is that intellectually, academically, or rhetorically honest? are you doing the jewish community favors by portraying us in this way?

also, i recommend you learn more about judaism, because "i asked these jews a question and they think something different than these other jews" thing is not the own you think it is. we literally have our own saying for that—"two jews, three opinions"

that is why they tokenize and fetishize jews and faux jewish groups who divorce themselves from actual, traditional judaism and jewish history. who bastardize judaism and squeeze it into a box that pleases people who hate us. like jvp—jvp isn’t jewish, it doesnt prioritize jews, it wasnt created by jews, and it truly pushes ignorance and erasure of judaism, but it’s seen as acceptable for this reason.

and so, the only acceptable judaism is a judaism that isn’t jewish at all. a judaism that is so watered down, so shrunken and small and apologetic, that is barely exists.

THAT is why they erase our history and deny our indigeneity, why they demonize half the world’s jewish population and the only jewish state, why they so easily believe libels about us killing children etc (lies that are hundreds of years old), why they choose actual colonizers and oppressors over us, the colonized and the oppressed.

their modern movement is an extension of nazism, pan arabism, and ussr antizionism: all movements that wanted jews eradicated. and it really shows.