Anti-Israel ads posted on NY subway
Pro-Zionist supporters gear up for a response to posters calling on US to end aid to the Jewish state
Stuart Winer is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
Posters calling for an end to US aid to Israel were posted at 25 New York subway stations by a pro-Palestinian American group.
The posters noted that the US provides Israel with $3 billion a year in aid, and called for an end to the support program in order to “End Apartheid Now,” the New York Newsday reported on Tuesday.
“Allowing this foreign aid to go to Israel, the US is essentially supporting the Israeli policy of expansion, of continued building of settlements, of human rights violations,” said Hatem Bazian, the chairman of the American Muslims for Palestine organization, which is behind the ads.
The posters also contain a quote, attributed to South African social rights activist and former bishop Nobel Peace prize winner Desmond Tutu, comparing the situation in the Holy Land to that of black people living under apartheid in South Africa.
Bazian, whose group paid for the ads, said the posters were coordinated to coincide with US President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel last week and will remain on the stations’ walls for a month.
The appearance of the adverts seemed set to start a poster-war with the pro-Israel American Freedom Defense Initiative, which sharply condemned them.
“I can assure you that this latest Goebbels-style demonizing of the Jews will not go unanswered,” said blogger Pamela Geller of the AFDI — the American Freedom Defense Initiative. “We are working right now to get ads, responding to these, ready for submission.”
Geller is a veteran of the New York public transport poster wars. In September 2012 she won a court order permitting a poster campaign — which compared Muslim radicals to savages — after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York initially refused to run the ads.
