Dishes Amnesty International a big plate of skunk pie, that is. And at the secondary capital of liberal loonieness, HuffPo, even.
The two principal “human rights” organizations are in a race to the bottom to see which group can demonize Israel with the most absurd legal arguments and most blatant factual misstatements. Until last week, Human Rights Watch enjoyed a prodigious lead, having “found” – contrary to what every newspaper in the world had reported and what everyone saw with their own eyes on television – “no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack.”
Those of us familiar with Amnesty International’s nefarious anti-Israel agenda and notoriously “suggestible” investigative methodology wondered how it could possibly match such a breathtaking lie.
But we didn’t have to wait long for AI to announce that Israel was guilty of a slew of war crimes for “widespread attacks against public civilian infrastructure, including power plants, bridges, main roads, seaports, and Beirut’s international airport.”
(snip)
Amnesty’s evidence that Israel’s attacks on infrastructure constitute war crimes comes from its own idiosyncratic interpretation of the already-vague word “disproportionate.” Unfortunately for Amnesty, no other country in any sort of armed conflict has ever adopted such a narrow definition of the term. Indeed, among the very first military objectives of most modern wars is precisely what Israel did: to disable portions of the opponent’s electrical grid and communication network, to destroy bridges and roads, and to do whatever else is necessary to interfere with those parts of the civilian infrastructure that supports the military capability of the enemy. That’s how the America and Britain militaries fought World War II. (In fact, Israel shows far more restraint than Britain did during World War II. Prime Minister Churchill directed the Royal Air Force to bomb the center of towns with the express purpose of killing as many civilians as possible.) Had the Allies been required to fight World War II under the rules of engagement selectively applied to Amnesty International to Israel, our “greatest generation” might have lost that war.
I’m not always supportive of Mr. Dershowitz’s points, but with this one, as the saying goes Read.It.All.
If you wander into the comments section, you’ll find, among other things, a smattering of people accusing Dershowitz of being paid by the pro-Israel lobby for writing such things. It’s rather disgusting to see the hate come out like that, for the sole reason that he is correct.
Very shortly after Mr. Dershowitz’s post at the HuffPo, the co-founder of Air America Radio, Sheldon Drobney, posts a reply to it. I’d call it a rebuttal, but the guy never actually covers the subject. He really only tries to impress everyone with his knowledge of WWII history and somehow ends up talking about nuclear proliferation.
I wasn’t impressed with his knowledge and with this one, as the saying goes, read at your own peril.
It is in the comments section of Drobney’s post where the magic truly happens.
If you call rabid anti-Semitism “magic”.
Everything is a “war crime” to AI. That organization’s entire purpose centers around the utopian dream of eliminating conflict from the world entirely.
It stands to reason that they would try to do that by having any projection of force labeled a “war crime”.
You want war crimes? Look no farther than the urgings at your typical mosque on a typical Friday evening. Every time an Imam urges the establishment of the Caliphate, that is a War Crime in my book.
Hang ’em all.