Renowned civil-rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz tells Newsmax TV he is standing by his pledge to leave the Democratic Party if Rep. Keith Ellison is tapped to run the Democratic National Committee.

"Absolutely! For 60 years I've been a loyal Democrat. I started campaigning for Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, but I could not be part of a party that had Keith Ellison as its chairman," Dershowitz said Friday to J.D. Hayworth on "Newsmax Prime."

"[Ellison is] a man who didn't even recognize the anti-Semitism of [Nation of Islam leader Louis] Farrakhan. Everybody else in the world recognized it but he apparently didn't.

"Just yesterday, he was one of the few congressmen who voted against the resolution condemning the [UN] Security Council's singling out of Israel for being the only country that's responsible for the lack of peace in the Middle East."

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Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat, is a practicing Muslim and one of several contenders hoping to take over the top DNC post, has had his share of controversy.

He once proposed the idea for a blacks-only society within the United States and also called for reparations and was once paid by a group connected to the Muslim Brotherhood to take a pilgrimage to Mecca in 2008.

And Ellison once called Farrakhan a role model for black youth.

Last month, Ellison told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that stories about his past are "bad reporting" and a "smear campaign" that have nothing to do with current issues.

Dershowitz — a Harvard Law School professor emeritus and author of "Why I Left the Left, but Couldn't Join the Right: The Case for a Return to the Vital Center," to be published in March by Harper — told Newsmax Prime:

"[Ellison's] record over the years has always been the wrong record to be somebody who's head of the DNC."