Outrage as Davis: why anti-Hamas it’s right to ad rejected back Israel
THE TIMES has rejected a pro-Israel advertisement which carries a denunciation of Hamas by Shoah survivor and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, co-producer of the advert — headlined “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it is Hamas’s turn” — said he was shocked at the newspaper’s decision to refuse it.
In the text, Professor Wiesel says: “In my own lifetime, I have seen Jewish children thrown into the fire. And now I have seen Muslim children used as human shields, in both cases, by worshippers of death cults…”
Rabbi Boteach, a former Times Preacher of the Year, said his campaign had been prepared to pay £35,000 for a full-page slot.
He said that as Israel fights for its very existence, the “infamously skewed” British media refuses an advert accepted by major papers, including The Times’s sister publication, the Wall Street Journal.
A spokesman for the newspaper responded: “We reserve the right to reject advertisements.”
JEWISH LEADERSHIP Council chairman Mick Davis, strongly defended Israel’s campaign in an article in the Sunday Times.
He wrote that every “right-thinking person” should side with Israel in its conflict with Hamas.
“I side with Israel every morning because I believe in the fundamental right of Israel to exist, in the right of its citizens to security and in the essential duty of its democratically elected government to ensure that security,” he wrote. “Three simple beliefs which, if we replace the name of Israel with that of any western democracy, would not be controversial.”
Whilehefeltcompassionfortheinnocents in Gaza who had lost their lives, he said he could not use numbers “to judge what is right and wrong”. Behind them lay a disparity between how Israel protects its people and how Hamas uses its people as human shields.
Another communal leader, Liberal Judaism chief executive Rabbi Danny Rich, told its members in a letter that he had been silent on the situation until now because he felt “conflicted”.