The Times of London rejected an ad featuring Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel speaking out against Hamas’ reported use of children as human shields.
The ad sponsored by The Values Network, which was founded by one-time Oxford Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, has run in The New York Times, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, among other U.S. newspapers.
According to a report by the JTA, The Times refused the ad because “the opinion being expressed is too strong and too forcefully made and will cause concern amongst a significant number of Times readers,” according to a statement from a representative of the newspaper.
Unverified Palestinian reports claim hundreds of children were killed in Gaza during Hamas’ latest conflict with Israel. Hamas is accused of placing munitions and fighters in areas near children, using them as human shields, as Israel would attempt to avoid firing on locations with a likelihood of civilian casualties.
Headlined “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it’s Hamas turn,” the ad began running last week. It reads, in part: “In my own lifetime, I have seen Jewish children thrown into the fire. And now I have seen Muslim children used as human shields, in both cases, by worshippers of death cults indistinguishable from that of the Molochites.
“What we are suffering through today is not a battle of Jew versus Arab or Israeli versus Palestinian. Rather, it is a battle between those who celebrate life and those who champion death. It is a battle of civilization versus barbarism.”
Countering the Times statement, Boteach said, “Elie Wiesel is one of the most respected human beings alive, a Nobel Peace Laureate, and is the living face of the Holocaust. No greater expert on genocide exists in the whole world. His call for the end of child sacrifice by Hamas, who use children as human shields, and a stop to their genocidal charter, which calls for the murder of Jews everywhere, could only offend the sensibilities of the most die-hard anti-Israel haters and anti-Semites.”