JNS
March 9, 2015

After being listed as a speaker for the upcoming national conference of the left-wing J Street lobby, Hillel International President and CEO Eric Fingerhut announced Monday that he will pull out of the conference due to concerns regarding other speakers’ history of “inflammatory statements” against Israel. The current list of J Street conference speakers includes Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that collapsed in the spring of 2014. Erekat has called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “filthy war criminal.” He has also said that the internationally recognized terrorist organization Hamas is “a political, not a terrorist movement.” Another controversial J Street conference speaker is James Baker, the U.S. secretary of state under former president George H.W. Bush. READ MORE