JSpace reported last week that the London Times has rejected an open letter written by Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel that attacks Hamas’s use of children as human shields. The ad was sponsored by The Values Network, founded by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and ran in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, among other papers. The London Times, however, refused to print the letter, reported the New York Observer.
The Times stated: “The opinion being expressed is too strong and too forcefully made and will cause concern amongst a significant number of Times readers.”
Hamas has been accused of placing munitions and fighters in areas near children. Estimates put the minor death toll in the hundreds during Operation Protective Edge. Titled “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it’s Hamas’ turn,” the ad ran last week.
“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,” Wiesel wrote. “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.”
Rabbi Boteach responded to the Times rejection, sayings, “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 antisemites.”
