Ben-Dror Yemini. Photo: University of Cork, Ireland.

A veteran Israeli investigative journalist, known for decades of hard hitting local reporting, now says, “Enough!” to what he calls an “industry of lies” in the international and local press obsessively defaming and demonizing Israel.

“They have simply gone mad,” Ben-Dror Yemini said in a no-holds barred interview with Israel’s Channel 2 News, aired over the weekend, in the run up to the English-language publication of his account, “Industry of Lies.”

Internationally respected for his non-partisan reports for the local Maariv daily, as well as a host of other news outlets over the years, Yemini said that, in light of the grotesque development of a rising Islamic State and other brutal jihadists, that the narrow focus and near-exclusive blame on Israel for the state of the middle east “…is exploding in our faces today.”

“The monster is not Israel, the monster is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” charges Yemini, listing far-lesser covered killing fields across the middle east and Africa.

“There is no connection between the thousands killed each month throughout the world because of jihad, in Nigeria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen – certainly Iraq and Syria – and Israel,” he stressed to the interviewer.

But as to his own politics, Yemini stressed, he’s no right-winger by any standards, calls the settlement enterprise as no less than “disastrous for Zionism,” and supports a “two-state” solution for settling the conflict with the Arabs.

However, he points out, comparatively, that “every territory we left was taken over by radical Islam,” he noted. “Does it mean we should make the same mistake in Judea and Samaria; in the West Bank? No.”  But “does it mean we should continue with settlements? Absolutely not.”

Watch the interview: