Pamela Owen: Newspaper Publisher Apologises for saying Israel should Assassinate Obama!

The publisher of a Jewish newspaper who suggested that Israel assassinate Barack Obama in a weekly column, has apologized. Andrew Adler made the controversial statement in the Atlanta Jewish Times, a paper which serves the Jewish community in Atlanta, US. He claimed ordering an assassination of President Obama could be one of three ways to protect the people of Israel. Mr Adler suggested that attacking Hezbollah and Hamas or ordering the destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities were also a possibility. In the original article, he said: "Yes, you read "three" correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel's existence. "Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don't you think that this is an almost unfathomable idea, which has been discussed in Israel's most inner circles? 'Another way of putting "three" in perspective goes something like this: How far would you go to save a nation comprised of seven million lives, Jews, Christians and Arabs alike? 'You have got to believe, like I do, that all options are on the table.' Mr Adler was presenting a hypothetical situation from the perspective of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's potentially disastrous conflicts with the Arab world. He claimed he has not received this much reaction about anything he has written since the 1970s. Mr Adler has now issued a formal apology and insisted he only wrote the piece to provoke a reaction from his readers.