-By Warner Todd Huston
A pro-Palestinian group has commissioned a new billboard ad now appearing at some New York Metro Stations. The ads attack Israel, U.S. foreign policy, and calls for an end to “Israeli Apartheid.”
American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), an Illinois-based advocacy group, bought space at 25 stations on the New York City Transit Authority’s Metro North line and will run these placards for a month before the campaign moves to another city.
AMP calls itself “a national grassroots organization educating the public about Palestine and its rich cultural and historical heritage.”
The placards quote South African Catholic Bishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Desmond Tutu: “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.”
The ad also says: “Americans give Israel $3 billion per year! End Apartheid NOW! Stop U.S. Aid to Israel.”
The ad features a silhouette photo of a gun-toting soldier and a small, crouching boy surrounded by prison-like concrete walls and towers.
“We timed the release of our ads with President Obama’s visit to the Middle East to underscore his administration’s failure to address the true cause of conflict: Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands and its racist apartheid policies, which subject Palestinians on a daily basis to humiliation, deprivation and a loss of their basic rights, including the freedom of movement,” said AMP chairman Dr. Hatem Bazian on the group’s website.
In an interview with New York media, Bazian said, “Today, we’re actually funding apartheid in Israel and it’s time for us to stop funding apartheid and to stand for universal justice.”
Pamela Geller and the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) have launched a rejoinder ad campaign responding to the claims made by AMP.
We submitted ads responding to the repulsive, anti-Semitic American Muslims for Palestine ads that were announced on Tuesday. Our ads will focus on the real apartheid, Islamic apartheid: the institutionalized oppression of women, gays and non-Muslims under Islamic law (Sharia). This is the fourth repulsive anti-Semitic campaign that Muslim Jew-haters are running in the New York City transit system. It is important to point out that it is these campaigns that were the impetus for the AFDI pro-Israel and #MyJihad campaigns. This latest Goebbels-style demonization of the Jews cannot go unanswered.
In an interview with Breitbart, Geller pointed out that Anne Bayefsky has written that there was once some 900,000 Jews in the Muslim world but now there are only a few thousand.
“They were given a choice,” Bayefsky said. “Die, convert or flee.”
“Our ads,” Geller concluded, “will focus on the real apartheid, Islamic apartheid: the institutionalized oppression of women, gays and non-Muslims under Islamic law (Sharia).”
Below are the ads that Geller and company are posting.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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