Derfner apologizes - but what does he really think?

Larry Derfner, columnist for the Jerusalem Post, has come under a lot of criticism for the vile article he wrote on his blog recently justifying Palestinian Arab terror and saying it was a "right."

He has now apologized in what is clearly an attempt for him to keep his job:

I have an apology to make for “The awful, necessary truth about Palestinian terror,” which I posted here and on Facebook on Sunday. I didn’t mean to say anything “good” about Palestinian terror against Israelis – I see nothing good in it whatsoever, and I thought I made that clear, but I see now that I didn’t.

I wrote that because of the occupation, Palestinians are “justified” in attacking, even killing Israelis, that they have the “right” to do so. Later on I stressed that I didn’t want them to kill my countrymen, and that I would do anything necessary to stop it. I meant those two points to show that I wasn’t “for” terrorism, that while I thought the occupation justified it, that didn’t mean I supported it. But I see now that the distance from “justified” to “support” is way, way too short – and I am as far away as anybody can be from supporting attacks on Israel and Israelis.

Writing that the killing of Israelis was justified and a matter of right took a vile image and attached words of seeming approval to it. This, I’m afraid, produced an “obscene” effect, as one critic wrote. I don’t want to write obscenity about Israel. I didn’t mean to, and I deeply regret it.

These three paragraphs are emphasizing that he does not approve of terrorism. But he did make that clear in his original disgusting article. The offensive part was that he said very clearly that terrorism was a "right" and it was "justified" - even if he personally disapproves.

Then he backtracks completely:

My intention was to shock people into recognition, but I ended up shocking many of them into revulsion, and twisting what I wanted to say into something I didn’t and don’t mean at all.

What I mean is this: The occupation does not justify Palestinian terror. It does, however, provoke it. Palestinians do not have the right to attack or kill Israelis. They, do, however, have the incentive to, and part, though not all, of that incentive is provided them by the occupation.

This is the exact opposite of what he wrote before:

If those who oppose the occupation acknowledged publicly that it justifies Palestinian terrorism, then those who support the occupation would have to explain why it doesn’t.

Palestinians have the right to resist [the occupation] – to use violence against Israelis, even to kill Israelis....But while I think the Palestinians have the right to use terrorism against us, I don’t want them to use it....Whoever the Palestinians were who killed the eight Israelis near Eilat last week, however vile their ideology was, they were justified to attack.

His attempt to reconcile the two makes it clear that his apology might be sincere in that he didn't mean to upset people so much, but he has not really changed his opinion. He's just suppressing it.

And one day in a couple of years he'll write an article complaining about how the horrible Israeli system forces people to self-censor their true feelings.

One can be sure that his compatriots in the anti-Zionist Left will not look at this apology critically at all. In fact, they are breathing a sigh of relief at being off the hook from having to publicly say whether they agreed with his original article or not.

(I'm not even going to bother to expand on the racist assumption that Palestinian Arabs have no free will to decide whether to attack Jewish civilians or not, that somehow Israeli actions "force" them to murder. Well, a small percentage of them. For some unexplained reason 100% of PalArabs aren't attacking Jews every day, as racists like Derfner expect them to.)

(h/t Noah Pollak)