GAZA AND THE DEATH OF INTERNATONAL LAW: Last week, I spoke at a Scalia Law School Jewish Law Students Association memorial service for the murdered hostages, including the Bibas boys. My speech turned into a column, with this highlight:

Two particularly absurd manifestations of the IHL [international humanitarian law] world’s anti-Israel bias stick out in my mind. First, there was the condemnation of Israel’s pager operation against Hezbollah. For months, IHL activists had been alleging that at best Israel was not narrowly targeting Hamas terrorists and at worst was engaging in genocidal indiscriminate bombing. So you think these groups would rejoice and praise Israel when it managed to kill or wound three thousand enemy terrorists with almost no civilian casualties. Instead, various IHL organizations and prominent individuals accused Israel of terrorism.

After that, we may have reached the reductio ad absurdum a few months ago, when Amnesty International came out with a report accusing Israel of genocide. The report acknowledged that Israel’s actions didn’t really seem to meet what it called the prevailing “overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence” that would “effectively preclude” finding that Israel committed genocide. Amnesty’s solution to that quandary, since it really, really wanted to accuse Israel of genocide, was to make up a new definition of genocide that would encompass Israel’s actions.