Amnesty International Redefines 'War Crimes'

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 mis-statements. 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.

Amnesty International has announced 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." But Amnesty is wrong about the law. Israel committed no war crimes by attacking parts of the civilian infrastructure in Lebanon. The strategy of destroying some infrastructure was particularly imperative against Hezbollah. Israel first had to ensure that its kidnapped soldiers would not be smuggled out of the country, then it had to prevent Hezbollah from being re-armed by Syria and Iran.

As law professor David Bernstein has written: "The idea that a country at war can't attack the enemy's resupply routes has nothing to do with human rights or war crimes, and a lot to do with a pacifist attitude that seeks to make war, regardless of the justification for it or the restraint in prosecuting it, an international 'crime.'" In other words, if attacking the civilian infrastructure is a war crime, then modern warfare is entirely impermissible, and terrorists have a free hand in attacking democracies and hiding from retaliation among civilians. Terrorists become de facto immune from any consequences for their atrocities.

The more troubling aspect of Amnesty's report is their inattention to Hezbollah. If Israel is guilty of war crimes for targeting civilian infrastructure, imagine how much greater is Hezbollah's moral responsibility for targeting civilians. But Amnesty has not issued a report accusing Hezbollah of war crimes.

For Amnesty, "Israeli war crimes" are synonymous with "any military action whatsoever."