Lawyer says rights groups demonize Israel

BOSTON, Aug. 31 (UPI) -- Noted Harvard law Professor Alan Dershowitz has accused Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of falsely demonizing Israel for its conduct in Lebanon.

In an editorial in the Jerusalem Post, Dershowtiz says Human Rights Watch, of New York, claimed it found no cases of Hezbollah using civilians as shields against Israel's attack, contrary to what "every newspaper in the world had reported and what everyone saw with their own eyes on television."

Subsequently, Dershowitz writes, London-based Amnesty International, with "its nefarious anti-Israel agenda," found Israel guilty of war crimes.

These two groups, Dershowitz wrote, "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."

He said Amnesty's claim of Israel's attacks on infrastructure constituting war crimes "comes from its own idiosyncratic interpretation of the already-vague word 'disproportionate'."

He says Hezbollah was being armed by Syria and Iran and that Lebanon overwhelmingly supported Hezbollah's "indiscriminate rocket attacks against Israeli civilian population centers."

He said AI showed little interest "in condemning the terrorist organization that started the conflict, indiscriminately killed both Israeli civilians (directly) and Lebanese civilians (by using them as human shields)."