Guardian,  Stoppers

Stoppers protest anti-Hamas ad in The Guardian

Stop the War’s latest source of outrage of course isn’t the murder of hundreds of Iraqi Yazidis and the threatened extermination of thousands more.

Rather it’s an advertisement scheduled to appear Monday in The Guardian (The Times refused it) featuring Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel condemning Hamas for practicing and encouraging child sacrifice in Gaza.

That this in effect is what Hamas does is not open to serious dispute, as you can see from these videos:

The Stoppers (and Socialist Unity’s John Wight) are asking people to sign the following letter to The Guardian:

We write to condemn the Guardian’s decision to print a wildly inaccurate and inflammatory advert from supporters of the state of Israel branding Palestinians opposing Israel in Gaza as ‘child killers’. [The ad specifically blames Hamas and doesn’t use that phrase, but never mind.] This is especially sickening when Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza has killed close to 400 Palestinian children. Amnesty International has condemned the deliberate targeting of schools and hospitals by Israel as a war crime.

Among the advert’s very many inaccuracies is the claim that those forces opposing Israel do not have the support of Palestinians when the current Israeli offensive is against a united Hamas-Fatah government which commands the support of the majority of Palestinians.

Sadly the decision to print this advert, rejected by The Times newspaper, is another sign of the increasingly pro-Israeli bias of the Guardian’s editorial policy, including the gross underestimate of the size of last Saturday’s Gaza protest demonstration. You are repeatedly running the slur that those who campaign in support of Palestine are anti-Semitic when the very many Jews in the movement and the movement as a whole have repeatedly made it absolutely clear that this is not the case. [Well, as long as they’ve repeatedly made it absolutely clear…]

We call on the editor to redress the balance in future coverage.

I realize that for some of our readers it would go against every fiber in their bodies; but maybe some letters of appreciation to The Guardian are in order for running the ad and likely angering a significant share of their readers.