Charles Krauthammer heaps well-deserved scorn on the UN’s International Court of Justice, and their attempt to render Israel defenseless against Arab terrorism: The ICJ vs. Israel.

The ICJ’s main business was to order Israel to tear down the security fence separating Israelis from Palestinians. The fence is only one-quarter built, and yet it has already resulted in an astonishing reduction in suicide attacks into Israel. In the last four months, two Israelis have died in suicide attacks, compared with 166 killed in the same time frame at the height of the terror.

But what are 164 dead Jews to this court? Israel finally finds a way to stop terrorism, and 14 eminences sitting in The Hague rule it illegal — in a 64-page opinion in which the word terrorism appears not once (except when citing Israeli claims).

Yes, the fence causes some hardship to Palestinians. Some are separated from their fields, some schoolchildren have to walk much farther to class. This is unfortunate. On any scale of human decency, however, it is far more unfortunate that 1,000 Israelis are dead from Palestinian terrorism, and thousands more horribly maimed, including Israeli schoolchildren with nails and bolts and shrapnel lodged in their brains and spines who will never be walking to school again.

From the safe distance of 2,000 miles, the court declared itself “not convinced” that the barrier Israel is building is a security necessity. It based its ruling on the claim that the fence violates Palestinian “humanitarian” rights such as “the right to work, to health, to education and to an adequate standard of living as proclaimed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.”

I’m sure these conventions are lovely documents. They are also documents of absolutely no weight — how many countries would not stand condemned for failure to provide an “adequate standard of living ” — except, of course, when it comes to Israel. Then, any document at hand will do.

What makes the travesty complete is that this denial of Israel’s right to defend itself because doing so might violate “humanitarian” rights was read in open court by the chief judge representing China, a government that massacred hundreds of its own citizens demonstrating peacefully in Tiananmen Square. Not since Libya was made chairman of the Commission on Human Rights has the U.N. system put on such a shameless display of hypocrisy.