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katie britt
GOP Senators Threaten ICC: 'Target Israel and We Will Target You'
"You have been warned," wrote 12 Republican lawmakers led by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
May 06, 2024
Just over a week before the International Criminal Court issued a statement condemning threats against the institution, a dozen Republicans in the U.S. Senate sent a letter to the ICC's prosecutor warning him against pursuing charges against Israeli officials over war crimes committed in the Gaza Strip.
The letter, dated April 24 and reported exclusively by Zeteo on Monday, explicitly threatens U.S. retaliation against the ICC if it issues arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top Israeli officials.
"Target Israel and we will target you," reads the letter, which was led by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a notorious war hawk, and signed by 11 others, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
The letter specifically threatens to sanction ICC employees and associates and bar them and their families from entering the United States, which is not a party to the ICC.
"You have been warned," states the letter, which invokes the American Service-Members’ Protection Act—a 2002 law informally known as "The Hague Invasion Act."
As Zeteo explained, the law "authorizes the U.S. president 'to use all means necessary and appropriate' to bring about the release not just of U.S. persons but also allies who are imprisoned or detained by the ICC."
Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), who delivered the infamous GOP response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union Address earlier this year, told Zeteo that the letter is "not a threat," but "a promise."
Read the letter from 12 Republican senators threatening ICC chief prosecutor @KarimKhanQC with "severe" consequences for him, his family & staff if he goes ahead with an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. "You have been warned."
Oh and subscribe to Zeteo too: https://t.co/pVvXi4IB6C pic.twitter.com/aXfKH03T16
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) May 6, 2024
The 12 Republicans sent their letter days before the office of ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan released a statement warning that its "independence and impartiality are undermined... when individuals threaten to retaliate against the court or against court personnel" as they conduct their investigations.
"Such threats, even when not acted upon, may also constitute an offense against the administration of justice under [Article] 70 of the Rome Statute," the statement added. "The office insists that all attempts to impede, intimidate, or improperly influence its officials cease immediately."
While the ICC statement did not mention any individuals or governments by name, it is apparent that its message was directed at least in part at Republican lawmakers in the U.S.
The Biden White House and Netanyahu have also spoken out against the ICC amid reports that it is considering arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister and other senior officials.
"We've been really clear about the ICC investigation," White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters late last month. "We do not support it. We don't believe that they have the jurisdiction. And I'm just gonna leave it there for now."
Since October 7, Israeli forces have killed more than 34,600 people in Gaza—a death toll that could surge if Israel moves ahead with its planned ground invasion of Rafah. Women and children account for up to 70% of those killed by Israel's military thus far.
Like the U.S., Israel is not a party to the ICC, but the court says it has jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territories. In 2021, the ICC launched a probe into alleged war crimes in the territories, including Gaza.
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Biden and Democrats Should Not Try to Match Trump and GOP's Cruelty on the Border
It would be horrible and unethical even if framing immigration policy this way was a vote winner for Democrats, but it isn’t.
Mar 18, 2024
It’s now all-but confirmed: the 2024 US election will be a rematch between Joe Biden and former president/insurrectionist Donald Trump.
In truth, it has long been clear that would be the case. After all, some of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Trump’s favour make it increasingly unlikely that his legal troubles, which include numerous criminal indictments, will hamper his bid to return to the White House.
General election season is well and truly here. And it arrived just in time for last week’s State of the Union address (SOTU), in which Biden tried to lay out all the ways he is different from Trump.
The headlines since make it clear the consensus of the American punditocracy is he did so very effectively. I don’t disagree. Biden gave an energetic, passionate speech and contrasted himself with Trump numerous times.
“My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January 6”, he stated plainly and provocatively. “I will not do that.”
At the same time, however, Biden seemed to want to have it both ways on immigration, representing himself (not inaccurately) as tough on border policy while also claiming to be more humane than Trump.
He pointedly described how he was ready to sign a tough, bipartisan border security bill that would give Republicans essentially everything they want. But this bill was tanked in the House of Representatives by speaker Mike Johnson, a right-wing Christian, who refused to bring it to a vote because Trump and the Republicans generally are running their campaign on border issues by stirring up racist fears of migrants.
Yes, there have been unusually large numbers of unsanctioned crossings documented at America’s southern border in recent months. But the Republicans are selling a demonstrably false narrative that those crossing are responsible for a wave of horrific violent and sexual crimes. I want to be very clear, that narrative is itself false, and there’s more to it – these supposed crimes are then blamed on Biden’s supposedly weak border policies, in an insidious sort of one-two punch.
What’s worse, the signs are that this deceptive, racist tactic may work – a significant plurality of Americans, 28%, currently see immigration as the country’s biggest problem, according to a Gallup poll.
Republicans know this. And they would love to make the 2024 presidential election about immigration rather than reproductive justice, which is a losing issue for them.
And while Democratic candidates can’t avoid the issue of immigration altogether, they need to be very careful about how they talk about it. They must avoid playing into the Republican narrative that puts Black and brown people – both American citizens and undocumented immigrants – in danger of violence.
Unfortunately, Democrats often allow Republicans to frame their debates, and that failure has both a high political cost and a high human cost. With his border security bill and his discussion of it during his SOTU address, Biden called the Republicans’ bluff, to be sure, but he did so on their terms.
No matter how far Biden leans into their phoney fears and draconian prescriptions, Republicans will continue to paint him as “weak” and “soft” on the issue. There is no winning for a Democrat here – except by refusing to play the game.
This approach from the Republicans was evident in their official response to the SOTU, delivered by Katie Britt, a senator from Alabama whose over-the-top fear-mongering about migrants and sex-trafficking was simply bonkers.
As regular readers of openDemocracy are likely aware, too often those who claim to be anti-trafficking advocates are moved by inflammatory disinformation, or are themselves creators and purveyors of this disinformation. Take, for example, the QAnon conspiracy theory that a cabal of liberal and Hollywood ‘elites’ are organising the trafficking of children for sexual abuse and other nefarious purposes. In the US in particular, many anti-trafficking efforts are hyper-focused on sex-trafficking and run by conservative Christians whose ultimate goals include blanket bans on sex work and pornography, in addition to banning abortion and stripping rights from members of the LGBTQ+ community.
The Christian Right’s paternalistic efforts in this area, then, are clearly not about defending individual bodily autonomy for vulnerable people. Instead, they represent a longstanding authoritarian pattern involving the externalisation of community anxieties in a framework that requires both ‘victims’ to be saved and a scapegoated group of ‘villains’ to blame.
This dynamic, which here in America is deeply rooted in white supremacy and often focused on ‘protecting’ (white) women and children, oozed from Britt’s response to the SOTU, in which the senator misleadingly invoked an anecdote about a woman supposedly trafficked by drug cartels to back up her claim that “president Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace”.
The woman in question, Karla Jacinto, has now come forward to set the record straight, stating she was never trafficked by cartels or within the US, but was trafficked by a pimp in Mexico – from 2004 to 2008, when, wait for it, George W Bush was president.
Britt has become a national laughing stock due to the absurdly overwrought tone of her speech, but the racist invocation of “scary” migrants is deadly serious. For example, the US has a history of representing Black men as sexually aggressive, and this stereotype, along with concepts of ‘honour’ and white racial ‘purity,’ led to numerous lynchings, including the 1955 case of Emmett Till, who was brutally murdered in Mississippi after being accused of whistling at a white woman.
Today, we see echoes of the same dynamic in Trump’s rhetoric. He referred to Mexican migrants as “rapists” in 2016, and last year he asserted that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”.
Biden denounced that rhetoric explicitly during his SOTU speech, but, in an unscripted back-and-forth with MAGA representative Marjorie Taylor Green, he referred to a murder committed by “an illegal” – a phrasing he thankfully later regretted.
In the US, people of Latin American descent have been subjected to a surge in hate crimes in recent years. When Democrats adopt racist Republican framing about the border and immigration, they fuel that hatred.
That would be unethical even if doing so was a vote winner for Democrats, but it isn’t.
While Biden calling out Republican hypocrisy on the refusal to pass his border security bill was necessary given the bill’s existence, I hope his administration and campaign will think carefully about the way they frame these issues going forward, instead of trying to compete with the hate and fear-based politics of their Republican opponents.
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'Beyond Misleading': Katie Britt Border Story Debunked With Bruising TikTok Takedown
"This is worth every minute," said one person who watched the 7-minute take down.
Mar 09, 2024
A freelance journalist is receiving widespread praise for his "must-see" critique of a story told by Alabama's Republican Senator Katie Britt during her official Republican Party response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union on Thursday night.
In the 7-minute and 23-second video posted to TikTok on Friday, reporter and book author Jonathan M. Katz deconstructs a key portion of Britt's speech, remarks overall that were widely panned as a "creepy" representation of the far-right, xenophobic, Christian nationalism that has found a home in Donald Trump's GOP.
The specific claim in question centers on Britt's telling of a story about a 12-year-old girl who suffered sexual violence, including rape, at the hands of drug cartels—but the details of the horrifying story, according to the facts established by Katz, reveal a clear effort to deceive those watching her speech.
"Holy moly... Jonathan Katz exposes Katie Britt as a lying sack of shit."
In the video, Katz says the facts he was able to determine about Britt's claims—which she delivered to millions of American viewers on Thursday night as the response was featured live on Fox News and countless live streams across the internet—was "beyond misleading."
Watch:
@katzonearth This isn’t going to make her like TikTok more. #katiebritt #sotu #stateoftheunion #lies #politicians #biden2024 #trump2024 #immigration #traffickingawarenes #mexico #bordersecurity #fyp ♬ original sound - Jonathan M. Katz
"Holy moly. This is worth every minute," said writer Nick Knudsen after watching the video. "Jonathan Katz exposes Katie Britt as a lying sack of shit."
Because the woman he identified as the source of the story, a Mexican activist named Karla Jacinto Romero, has retold her personal history repeatedly in public, including in front of Congress, for years and explained that events described took place in Mexico between 2004 and 2008 when she was a child and George W. Bush was president, Katz slammed Britt for making it seem "as if this woman had confided something in her and as if she was describing actions that had taken place on or even near the U.S.-Mexico border during Joe Biden's presidency," which just isn't true based on the record.
"I don't know even know what to say," Katz remarks in the video, "except that it is just fundamentally dishonest."
The gut-wrenching story that Britt told to fearmonger over Biden's border policy and denigrate immigrants and asylum-seekers to right-wing voters and unsuspecting viewers, explains Katz, "didn't happen in the United States" and "it's not an example of something that happened recently and is not even an example of something that happened on the border, and certainly not something that happened under Joe Biden."
But why would she do that? "It's very clear to me," says Katz, that Britt was "trying to create an association in the people's mind between Joe Biden, the border, Mexicans... or people of Latin descent, and sexual violence. That's what she's going for and she's doing it on the basis of what you can only say is just an out and out lie."
Katz said Friday he reached out to Britt's office for some kind of explanation but had yet to hear back. He said he would update his post if he learned more from the Senator or her office, "But for now it just looks like she got on national television and lied about something really horrific and really important for her own personal and her party's political gain."
The Washington Post later confirmed with Sean Ross, a spokesperson in Britt's office, that the women referred to during Thursday night's speech was Karla Jacinto Romero, but disputed anything about the senator's language was misleading.
But many who had watched Katz's seemed much more convinced of his case and others condemned Britt for exploiting Romero's story for cynical and deceptive political gain.
Josh Marshall, editor-in-chief of TalkingPointsMemo, congratulated Katz on the "amazing" piece and said the video revealed that Britt is "not only an emotionally disregulated freak, but a big fat liar."
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