Larry Derfner
THIS IS TOTAL BULLSHIT DERFNER! I AM NOT JEWISH AT ALL, AND YOU DERFNER ARE JEWISH, BUT YOU ARE ONE COMPLETE BULLSHITTER!
FURTHERMORE A 5 YEAR OLD COULD WRITE BETTER THAN YOU DO, AND DO YOU HAVE A WRITING POSITION ON THE JERUSALEM POST?
Lauren Booth and Hamas…same as Derfner really
THIS IS WHAT DERFNER WROTE ON HIS BLOG. IT .IS NO LONGER THERE. lET US READ IT FIRST BEFORE COMMENTING.
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).
But people don’t want to say this, especially right after a terror attack like this last one that killed eight Israelis near Eilat. And there are lots of good reasons for this reticence, such as: You don’t want to further upset your own countrymen when they are grieving, you don’t want to say or write anything that could be picked up by Israel’s enemies and used as justification for killing more of us. (These are good reasons; fear of being called a traitor, for instance, is a bad reason.)
But I think it’s time to overcome this reticence, even at the cost of enflaming the already enflamed sensitivities of the Israeli public, because this unwillingness to say outright that Palestinians have the right to fight the occupation, especially now, inadvertently helps keep the occupation going.
When we say that the occupation is a terrible injustice to the Palestinians, but then say that Palestinian terror/resistance is a terrible injustice to Israel, we’re saying something that’s patently illogical to anyone but a pacifist, and there aren’t many pacifists left, certainly not in Israel. The logical, non-pacifist mind concludes that both of those statements can’t be true – that if A is hurting B and won’t stop, then B damn sure has the right to hurt A to try to make him stop. But if everybody, not only the Right but the Left, too, is saying that B, the Palestinians, don’t have the right to hurt A, the Israelis, then the logical mind concludes that Israel must not be hurting the Palestinians after all, the occupation must not be so bad, the occupation must not be hurting the Palestinians at all – because if it was, they would have the right to hurt us back, and everybody agrees that they don’t. So when they shoot at us or fire rockets at us, it’s completely unprovoked, which gives us the right, the duty, to bash them and bash them until they stop – and anybody who tries to deny us that right doesn’t have a leg to stand on, so we’re just going to keep right on bashing them. And when the Palestinians complain about the occupation, we Israelis can honestly say we don’t know what they’re talking about.
This, I’m convinced, is how the Left’s ritual condemnations of terror are translated in the Israeli public’s mind – as justification for the occupation and an iron-fist military policy.
http://israelleft.com/2011/08/21/the-awful-necessary-tr…
THE ABOVE BY DERFNER IS NO LONGER ON HIS SITE, OR THE ORIGINAL SITE. I COPIED IT FROM http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=124×361398
I focus on one sentence from the above and I think this may be enough:
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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).
But people don’t want to say this, especially right after a terror attack like this last one that killed eight Israelis near Eilat. And there are lots of good reasons for this reticence, such as: You don’t want to further upset your own countrymen when they are grieving, you don’t want to say or write anything that could be picked up by Israel’s enemies and used as justification for killing more of us. (These are good reasons; fear of being called a traitor, for instance, is a bad reason.) It is the last sentence I am after. Why is fear of being called a traitor, to the Jews, a bad reason. If there is a danger of that you would think it would make Derfner reflect.
The essence is that he says “Palestinians” have the right to kill Jews.
Derfner also gave his backing to the al Durah france 2 Hoax as this by Augean stables shows
MOS meets Al Durah Forgery: Larry Derfner Weighs InPosted on May 29, 2008 by Richard Landes
Larry Derfner has an op-ed at the Jerusalem Post on the Al Durah Affair which lays out in a quite striking fashion the aggressive aspect of the mentality of the Masochistic Omnipotence crowd (MOS) crowd. In the Dreyfus Affair the term “intellectual” was coined to describe someone who was capable of looking at the empirical evidence and changing his or her mind. Derfner’s rant suggests that the term could not, by the remotest stretch of the imagination, be applied to him. On the contrary, one has to wonder what could drive him to such heights of irrationality as to assault people who call into question so base a story as that of al Durah. I have already discussed some of Larry Derfner’s writings, whose liberal cognitive egocentrism stands out even in a crowd of his friends, so I guess this piece didn’t come as a complete surprise to me. But I must confess, the vehemence and adolescent quality of the rhetoric and the lack of any substance in the argument (the best he gets is quoting Fallows which is now five years old), did surprise me. But sometimes surprises are good because they make you think about things in new ways. I have long meditated on the peculiar attachment of the Israeli left to the al Durah story, and now, Larry Derfner’s rant sheds new light on a puzzling phenomenon. http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2008/05/29/mos-meets-al-durah-forgery-larry-derfner-weighs-in/
So the big question is not his support for the killing of Jews but rather why he is allowed to live in Israel, and even more, be paid a wage by the Jerusalem Post |
Derfner took the piece down and replaced it with “apologies” but the big issues have not gone away.
Apology
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.
I meant, instead, to shock Israelis and friends of Israel into seeing how badly we’re hurting the Palestinians by denying them independence: It’s so bad that it’s helping drive them to try to kill us. This is something I believe, something liberal Israelis and friends of Israel believe, and I wrote that if we were to start saying so publicly, it might force other Israelis to finally confront the reality of what we’re doing to the Palestinians, and thereby get them to see that it’s wrong and must stop.
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. I believe that if Israel gives the Palestinians their independence, we have enough military power to neutralize whatever leftover incentive they would have to attack us. So my purpose with regard to Palestinian terror against Israelis is not to legitimize it, God forbid, but to end it.
Again, I regret what I wrote on Sunday. I apologize to everyone who was offended by it, and I apologize to my countrymen. The post is no longer on my blog; I’ve taken it down.
A new appreciation for Israel
It’s a little ironic – the post I wrote here a few days ago on Palestinian terrorism has gotten me branded a traitor by all sorts of right-wingers, but until the attack a week ago near Eilat, the thing I was planning to write when I got back from vacation in Sweden was how I’d gained a new appreciation of what Israel means to Diaspora Jews, and of the insecurity of Jews in Europe. After I came under this shitstorm from the Right, I thought maybe I shouldn’t write that post because people will think I’m trying to apologize, trying to prove my Jewish patriot’s credentials, but to hell with second guessing myself – I think it’s worth writing about, so here are some observations from Sweden.
We spent time with a couple of friends – one a Swedish-born Jewish woman we’d known in Israel who moved back to Stockholm, and a Jewish guy I’d known back in Los Angeles who’s lived in Sweden for the last 30 years. Both are mainstream in their Jewish identities – not religious, but proud of being Jewish; supportive of Israel, but also of compromise with the Palestinians.
The woman told me that neither she nor any Jew she knows wears a star of David in public for fear of reaction from Muslims and neo-fascists. “I’ll wear a chai because they don’t know what it is,” she said. (There are 18,000 Jews in Sweden, as many as 500,000 Muslims and some small number of neo-fascists.)
One night we were talking about Israel, and I said that when the Zionist movement began at the turn of the 20th century, the Jews needed a state of their own because of anti-Semitism, but that if there were no Israel today, nobody would need to invent it because anti-Semitism, while still around, is no longer so oppressive that Jews need to get away to their own country.
My friend from L.A. disagreed, saying that without Israel, Jewish nationalism would still arise naturally today out of a Jewish need for strength, a need that Israel has filled. “Jews with guns is a radical idea,” he said. “Israel gives Jews an image of strength. Now the anti-Semites know they can’t mess around with Jews so easy, that Jews can hit back.” Our Swedish-Israeli friend agreed.
This is not the first time I’ve heard this. An elderly South African man, also a mainstream Jew, once told me about the challenges he faced starting out as a young lawyer in the Afrikaner heartland. ”I’ve been a Jew in the Diaspora when there wasn’t an Israel, and I’ve been one when there was an Israel, and let me tell you, there’s a difference.”
Growing up around Jews in New York and L.A., I never for one moment felt insecure about being Jewish, so being in Sweden gave me a new appreciation of the importance of Israel. Interestingly, while there I read the novel The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, which revolves around the insecurity of Jews in London today, and I figured he had to be exagerrating. But right after I came back, the New York Times’s Roger Cohen, one of my very favorite, columnists, gave the same picture. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/opinion/sunday/cohen-jews-in-a-whisper.html?_r=1&ref=global
So actually, I’m somewhat more of a Zionist now that I was a couple of weeks ago. And I still don’t see any contradiction between being a Zionist and believing that the Palestinians have as much right to fight for their independence today as the Zionists did before 1948.
4international 
Felix- Larry Derfner is entitled to his opinion as anyone living in our democracy.