US lawyer and professor Alan Dershowitz told i24NEWS on Tuesday that he was taking on the Dee family case and vowed to make CNN News pay, as Rabbi Leo Dee pursues a legal case against the news agency and its host Christiane Amanpour for her phrasing about the terror attack that took the lives of his wife and two daughters.
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"This is part of a pattern that CNN and Amanpour have engaged in over a decade or more," Dershowitz said, noting that he was taking on the case pro bono. "Amanpour constantly creates a moral equivalence between terrorists, who murder people in cold blood, and innocent victims. This was not a slip of the tongue, not an honest mistake."
The lawyer referred to findings by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America NGO, which he said "documented a long pattern by CNN and Amanpour of constantly citing against Israel and trying to create a moral equivalence between innocent victims of terrorism."
"They are not mistakes, they are part of a deliberate pattern. There's no moral equivalence between people who shoot families in cold blood and people who suffer as a result of terrorism. So let's wait to see what Amanpour says, not in a scripted apology, but under my cross-examination," he said. "All that has to be proved is that the family suffered emotional distress and harm, and we will be able to prove that.
"The harm that was suffered from this horrible statement by Amanpour… will become the subject of a significant lawsuit against CNN. "Amanpour hasn't apologized for years of misleading the world about the Israel-Palestine conflict and about terrorism. They have suffered enormous harm, and you can't take that back. An apology doesn't undo defamation."
The i24NEWS interview with Dershowitz came a day after Leo Dee spoke with the channel about his efforts to obtain an apology from Amanpour, who referred to the April murders by a Palestinian terrorist of the rabbi's wife and daughters – Lucy, Maya, and Rina – as a "shootout."
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Hours after Monday's interview with Dee, Amanpour made a short on-air statement saying she "misspoke" and that she wrote to the rabbi "to apologize and make sure that he knows that we apologize for any further pain that may have caused him."
But Dee responded by saying that the apology was "not worth the paper it's printed on" and demanded not just a public apology, but most importantly "that they [CNN] change their attitude toward Israel."
"They continue to tell anti-truths about Israel," he continued, adding that he was consulting with legal experts about pursuing a case against the news agency.
This article was first published by i24NEWS.
