One of the most common defences used by Nazis during the Nuremberg trials was what became known as the Nuremberg defence: that is, “I was just following orders.” After all, under Nazi Germany, anti-Jewish persecution was the law. It wasn’t morally right, but it was the law.

But a law on its own is not just or unjust, a point made by philosophers through the centuries, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Thomas Aquinas to Hannah Arendt and more.

Linda McQuaig would do well to ponder that concept.

The Toronto Star columnist and regular anti-Israel detractor published a commentary on November 28 entitled: “Pierre Poilievre is trying to own Justin Trudeau for respecting international law,” where she criticized Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre for his challenge of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s comments that Canada would respect a recently-issued arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

By taking issue with the ICC’s warrant, McQuaig wrote that Poilievre is “sneering at international law” and that Trudeau, by saying he would arrest Israeli leaders on the ICC’s dictates, “respected the rule of law.” Despite her weak appeal to authority, the mere fact that the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Israeli leaders did not, in itself, make them legitimate nor reasonable. Eighty years ago in Europe, not reporting a Jewish family hiding would have been against the law. Thus, the law, like any other, must be examined on its own merits. And on these merits, the ICC’s allegations against Israel fall flat.

As McQuaig stated, the ICC’s case against Israel related to its accusations of “war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, persecution, and starvation as a weapon of war.”

Yet according to experts in warfare, Israel has conducted its counter-terrorist operations against Hamas in Gaza with precision that is virtually unparalleled in modern history, achieving a dramatically lower proportion of civilian casualties as a result. Israel actively warns Gazan civilians in advance of operations, deliberately puts its own soldiers in harm’s way, avoids strikes when the risk to civilians is too high, and more. As for the charge of intentional starvation, there is enough food both entering Gaza and being produced in the territory to feed the entire population, according to relevant experts.

McQuaig mocked Poilievre for saying that he rejected “the legitimacy of the ICC charges against Netanyahu, on the specious grounds that Netanyahu was democratically elected,” sneering that “How is that relevant? Netanyahu isn’t charged with failure to secure an electoral mandate.”

Contra McQuaig, it is highly noteworthy that the ICC has never before targeted a liberal democracy before Israel. While that does not in itself make Israel innocent, it certainly does raise questions as to on what basis Israel is put into the same lot as despotic dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Libya’s Moammar Khadafi, whose warrants were issued by the ICC.

Joining other Toronto Star columnists in grossly embellishing the significance of pro-Palestinian (anti-Israel) protests, McQuaig wrote that protesters “around the world” are driven to demonstrate because “they consider it deeply unjust that Palestinians (including women and children) are defenceless — under constant bombardment without an army to protect them against two of the world’s most heavily-armed nations, the U.S. and Israel.”

Ignorance on the part of protesters about the terrorist threat to Israel’s existence, and Jerusalem’s moral efforts in war do not constitute a basis for international law, let alone anything remotely resembling moral law. Israel is, simply put, not guilty of the heinous crimes the ICC accuses it of committing, and McQuaig’s knee-jerk tendency to see the Middle East through a lens of Israel perpetually being the culprit not only does a disservice to her readers; it blurs the line between what is right and wrong.