I got fired by The Jerusalem Post today. The paper got hundreds of notices of cancellations of subscription after my blog post (“The awful, necessary truth about Palestinian terror”) of Sunday last week; the reason being given for my firing, though, is the substance of the essay, despite the apology I published later. A page-one notice to this effect will be published in the Post tomorrow.As I noted when he apologized, no one is saying that he supports or encourages terror. What he was doing, explicitly, was justifying it. And from what he has written, it seems that he truly believes that attacking civilians is a "right" even if he personally believes it is wrong.
My apology was to have run in the Post yesterday, but a logistical mix-up prevented it. Today the paper ran a column by Isi Liebler titled “Justifying murder – an abomination,” which, like nearly all of the right-wing websites attacking my original essay (I took it down from my blog upon publishing the apology), it gives extremely short shrift to all the things I wrote that show my intent was not to encourage terror, but the opposite.
That is what is offensive. His inability to realize that would be comical if it wasn't so sad.
Instead, he goes into martyr mode:
What bothers me most is not that I got fired, but that I’m not being given the opportunity to fill in the picture that’s been so distorted in today’s Post column and in right-wing Web commentaries. The parts of the picture being obscured or outright hidden would show that while I misspoke myself harmfully, my intent was not to support, endorse, advocate, encourage or call for terror against Israelis, but to end it. This intent was clear not only in my apology, but in my original essay. By skewing my words so badly, today’s Post column, the Web commentaries and Post publishes on page one tomorrow portray a writer announcing that he wants Israelis to get killed, instead of one who’s trying to stop that from happening.I didn't read most of the other critiques of Derfner but I did not see any that claimed that Derfner personally wants Israelis to be killed. I am certain that my original denunciation of his essay was not predicated on the idea that he supports terror. And nothing he has written since disproves anything I wrote about his original essay - that he believes that Palestinian Arabs have a "right" to attack and kill Jews, and he cannot find a single ethical problem with Palestinian Arab terrorism, even if he personally doesn't approve of it.
(h/t CHA, Zach N)