Dershowitz to sue CNN over Dee terror attack

BY DAVID SAFFER

Professor Alan Dershowitz is to represent Rabbi Leo Dee pro bono in a lawsuit against CNN.

The case follows CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour’s inaccurate comments following the murders of Rabbi Dee’s wife Lucy and daughters Maia and Rina, in a terror attack last month.

Amanpour, on April 10, referred to the killings on April 7 during her show as a “shootout” in an interview with Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh.

After what appeared a lull in the story, a huge response earlier this month followed Honest Reporting calling on Amanpour to apologise. They tweeted: ‘A shootout is two sides firing at each other. A mother & her two daughters were shot at close range by Palestinian terrorists.’

Amanpour privately then publicly apologised to the Dee family, both were dismissed by the family.

After a week of further complaints, Amanpour apologised on

CNN, on Monday evening. She said: “During that live interview (April 10) I misspoke and said that they were killed in a shootout, instead of a shooting. I have written to Rabbi Dee to apologise and make sure that he knows that we apologise for any further pain that may have caused him.”

Rabbi Dee has announced he is to sue CNN and Amanpour over the “shootout” comments and blasted the apology. “Too little, too late, I don’t accept it,” he told Channel 12 News.

Rabbi Dee slated CNN’s bias in

“When the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “They make moral equivalencies between us and between terrorists,” he said. “They keep doing it and they have no intention to stop doing so… that’s what we’re dealing with.”

He told i24NEWS: “It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on, because when you make a statement in front of a hundred million people on prime time television and then you apologise in an email to a single person, it has one one-hundred-millionth of the impact.”

Rabbi Dee also told i24NEWS that CNN’s reporting that his family were ‘killed’, and not ‘brutally murdered by evil Palestinian terrorists funded by Iran’ was typical CNN-ism.

Dershowitz confirmed to i24NEWS he was taking on the Dee case on Tuesday. “This was not a slip of the tongue, this was not an honest mistake,” he said.

The esteemed lawyer explained to the broadcaster: “This is part of a pattern that CNN and Amanpour have engaged in over a decade or more. Amanpour constantly creates a moral equivalence between terrorists who murder people in cold blood and innocent victims, like the three innocent victims in this case.”

Noting observations by CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), Dershowitz said they had “documented” a long pattern by CNN and Amanpour “constantly citing against Israel” and creating a “moral equivalence between innocent victims of terrorism and actual terrorism”.

The US lawyer and Harvard professor added: “They are not mistakes. They are part of a deliberate pattern of trying to create a moral equivalence of events in which there’s no moral equivalence.

“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 hear what Amanpour says, not in a scripted apology, but under my cross-examination and the cross examination of other lawyers.”

CAMERA states on its website that it is ‘devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East’.

Amanpour has made controversial comments before. In a 2013 interview with Naftali Bennett, she referred to Judea and Samaria as the “occupied West Bank” claiming it was “an international term”. Last year, when Bennett was Prime Minister, Amanpour, said the West Bank had been occupied since 1967. In 2019, she referred to Haifa as being in the West Bank.

Rabbi Dee’s wife and daughters were murdered when terrorists fired at their car as they were going on a family holiday. Israeli security forces ‘settled the score’ with Hamas militants Hassan Katnani and Maed al-Masri behind the murders. Both were killed in a 90-minute operation earlier this month.

A third Hamas terrorist, Ibrahim Hura, who helped Katnani and al-Masri hide was also killed.

Rabbi Dee and his surviving children have met recipients of Lucy’s donated organs at Rabin Medical Centre in Petach Tikva.