The English-language Jerusalem Post said on Tuesday it had terminated the employment of a columnist who wrote in a private blog that Palestinians "have the right to use terrorism" against Israelis. The right-leaning daily announced on its front page that US-born writer Larry Derfner was being dismissed "due to a professional disagreement connected to his personal blog."
Derfner could not immediately be reached by AFP but in a post on his Israel Reconsidered blog entitled "I got fired by the Jerusalem Post today," he wrote that the paper had received "hundreds of notices of cancellations" from subscribers after they read an earlier blog he had posted on Sunday.
Entitled "The awful, necessary truth about Palestinian terror" the 1,000-word essay expressed Derfner's position that the Palestinians have the right to fight the Israeli occupation - even violently. The post was not connected to his "Rattling the cage" column in the Post.
"My intent was not to encourage terror but the opposite," he wrote. "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."