Letter: The Rosa Parks of the International Court of Justice

Dear Letter to the Editor:

The leaders of the American civil rights movement included numerous Zionists such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Bayard Rustin and Rosa Parks.

Of course Dr. King famously said in Cambridge, Massachusetts shortly before his death: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews; you’re talking antisemitism.”

The foundational Zionism of Bayard Rustin and Rosa Parks is also well documented. (See: “The Zionism of Rosa Parks and Bayard Rustin“, Saul Jay Singer, JewishPress.com, 7/1/20).

Now in the tradition of Rosa Parks — a black woman and world renowned legal scholar, Hon. Judge Julia Sebutinde of Uganda — has refused to be cowed by the South African antisemitic judicial whirlwind that has engulfed the International Court of Justice and the rest of her esteemed colleagues.

An antisemitic judicial whirlwind in the perverse tradition of an esteemed military judicial tribunal’s persecution in France in 1894 of Alfred Dreyfus, in the perverse tradition in Germany of the People’s Court and other esteemed German jurists between 1934-1945 condemning thousands of Jews to death for “volk treason”, and in the perverse tradition of numerous esteemed jurists in Stalinist Russia condemning hundreds of Jews to death in antisemitic show trials in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Yet Judge Julia Sebutinde, like a 21st century Rosa Parks, has refused to go along with the antisemitic scapegoating of the Jewish people of Israel demanded by South Africa and her sixteen esteemed colleagues on the ICJ in Holland. In words that could reasonably place her as a judicial righteous gentile of our time, Judge Sebutinde wrote in her singular historic dissent:

“Unfortunately, the failure, reluctance or inability of States to resolve political controversies such as this one through effective diplomacy or negotiations may sometimes lead them to resort to a pretextual invocation of treaties like the Genocide Convention, in a desperate bid to force a case into the context of such a treaty, in order to foster its judicial settlement: rather like the proverbial ‘Cinderella’s glass slipper.’”

Richard Sherman
Margate, Florida