Shas insists on dismissal of Channel 10 chairman

The Shas party said Monday it would continue to seek the dismissal of Channel 10’s new board chairman, Rami Sadan, who is accused of making racist statements.

In a meeting earlier in the day between Shas chairman Aryeh Deri and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Deri demanded that Sadan be fired “due to his racist comments against Shas and against the movement’s voters.”

Sadan is accused of making disparaging remarks about Deri, who heads the Sephardi Orthodox party, as well about Mizrahi Israelis of African and Middle Eastern descent, initially reported by the Haaretz daily on June 2.

The Knesset hearing to discuss Sadan’s fate was canceled on Monday because the staff of the news station did not show up.

The Knesset Economic Affairs Committee was meant to discuss Sadan’s appointment as well as the protection of press freedom in Israel’s commercial news channels. Representatives of the Prime Minister’s Office, the Communications Ministry and Channel 10 board members and workers were slated to attend.

Committee chairman Eitan Cabel (Zionist Union) made the decision to cancel the hearing.

“I take this issue very seriously and I do not intend to ignore the fact that the management of Channel 10 decided not to attend this hearing,” Cabel said.

“It is not right for a media organization to behave like this. Rami Sadan informed me that he was sick, and the management told me it was inconvenient.”

Sadan, a political lobbyist and former close associate of the Netanyahu family, was quoted by Haaretz as having told the Channel 10 News board of directors: “Let’s tell the truth: I, like you, part of the elite, hate the Shas movement and that thief Aryeh Deri. But we, as the elite, have to broaden the channel’s circles and appeal to the audience of Shas, to Massouda from Sderot,” using a stereotype referring to a person of Mizrahi descent living on Israel’s periphery.

Deri served a prison sentence between 2000 and 2002 for graft, before resuming his political career ahead of the 2015 Knesset elections. The interior minister is currently under investigation on new graft suspicions.

Immediately after the comments were published, Shas called on Netanyahu — who is also communications minister — to fire Sadan, threatening to break coalition discipline and skip Knesset votes until he did. Shas MKs have stayed away from the plenum, entering only to vote against an opposition bill on conversion.

Without Shas’s seven Knesset members, the coalition will have just 59 votes out of the 120-seat plenum

Though Sadan has denied making the controversial statement, two officials from the TV station have come forward saying he had in fact made the remarks, though their versions differed slightly from Haaretz’s.