Terrorism Justifier Welcomed on NYT Pages

On August 18, 2011, a series of coordinated attacks were carried out near Eilat by four groups of Islamic terrorists that included Palestinians and Egyptians. Six civilians were murdered, as well as a soldier and police officer who had come to assist the victims and 31 were wounded. Three days later, after returning home from a vacation abroad, Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner wrote a column on his blog justifying Palestinian terrorism. He began:

I think a lot of people who realize that the occupation is wrong also realize that the Palestinians have the right to resist it; to use violence against Israelis, even to kill Israelis, especially when Israel is showing zero willingness to end the occupation, which has been the case since the Netanyahu government took over (among other times in the past).

And later:

… the Palestinians, like every nation living under hostile rule, have the right to fight back, that their terrorism, especially in the face of a rejectionist Israeli government, is justified…

…Whoever the Palestinians were who killed the eight Israelis near Eilat last week, however vile their ideology was, they were justified to attack. They had the same right to fight for their freedom as any other unfree nation in history ever had. And just like every harsh, unjust government in history bears the blame for the deaths of its own people at the hands of rebels, so Israel, which rules the Palestinians harshly and unjustly, is to blame for those eight Israeli deaths…

Even though Derfner acknowledged at the time that his own justification of terrorism could be used by other terrorists as encouragement — “The possibility that Israel’s enemies could use my or anybody else’s justification of terror for their campaign is a daunting one; I wouldn’t like to see this column quoted on a pro-Hamas website, and I realize it could happen” — it did not stop him. Apparently overcome by his own moral rightness, he felt he just had to show those Israelis that it was really them who were “compelling [Palestinians] to engage in terrorism”, and “that the blood of Israeli victims is ultimately on [Israeli] hands.” Derfner’s readers and his employers at the Jerusalem Post were not quite as taken by the righteousness of his terror justification, and he was fired from his post at the newspaper.

Fast forward five and a half years. The New York Times has now welcomed Larry Derfner on their Op-Ed page to spout the same twisted views that blame Israel, rather than Islamic terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, for spawning violence. Again, masquerading as the righteous, maverick truthteller, Derfner writes:

What hardly any Israelis will consider, though, and virtually no influential voices in the West will publicly suggest, is that Israel — not Hezbollah in Lebanon, nor Hamas in Gaza, nor the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria — is provoking the next war. Counterintuitive though it may be to Israeli and most Western minds, Israel, not its militant Islamist or brutal Syrian enemies, is the aggressor in these border wars…if Israel keeps rubbing their noses in their weakness — as Mr. Netanyahu is now doing — national honor at some point will compel them to hit back with force. The “inevitable” next war will begin.

Where else but on the pages of the New York Times would such illogical and twisted views find such a welcoming home?