Zionist group panned for Jewish cash logo
UK Independence party’s ‘Friends of Israel’ symbol challenged for unintended money allusion
Stuart Winer is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
An Israel-supporting group attached to the British right-wing UK Independence Party has been called out for having an inadvertently offensive icon as its badge.
The UKIP Friends of Israel Group uses a melding of the Star of David together with the UKIP party’s logo — a British pound sterling symbol inlaid with “UKIP.”
However, the resulting graphic is a Star of David with a money symbol stamped in the middle of it, which some might say evokes anti-Semitic canards about the money-grubbing Jew.
Although the graphic has been the symbol of the pro-Israel group for three years, the offensive tinge was only pointed out on Wednesday in a tweet by Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard.
You have to wonder how blind to nuance a Friends of Israel group has to be to come up with this conjunction: pic.twitter.com/NMsX3VhuIx
— Stephen Pollard (@stephenpollard) December 3, 2014
The UKIP Friends of Israel was quick to respond that it had never noticed the problem in the past and apologized if it was deemed offensive.
https://twitter.com/FOI_in_UKIP/status/540207968487477248
The group also noted that it would soon hold a meeting of its public relations team about the matter, although it did not say if the logo would be changed.
UKIP was founded in 1993 and is led by European Parliament Member Nigel Farage. The party is considered to lie to the right of the British political field and has been dogged with allegations of harboring members with extreme right-wing racist views.
UKIP recently won its two first seats in the House of Commons and is a rising force in British politics.
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