Offensive Cartoons Point Spotlight On Arab Leaders To End Double Standard On Jews And Christians

February 5, 2006

OFFENSIVE CARTOONS POINT SPOTLIGHT ON ARAB LEADERS TO END DOUBLE STANDARD ON JEWS AND CHRISTIANS

     The Simon Wiesenthal Center said today that the worldwide protests in the Moslem world to the cartoons published in Europe raises the bar of what Christians and Jews have a right to expect from Arab and Moslem leaders when their religions are regularly defamed and desecrated in the Arab press and on Arab television. 

     “Today, the Foreign Minister of Egypt demanded from Kofi Annan that the Danes apologize and Jordan has jailed the Editor of the newspaper that published the cartoons,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center.  "But where are those same government leaders when their television stations and newspapers write or carry programs that deny the Holocaust, depict Jewish rabbis of draining the blood of Arab children to bake matzohs for Passover, and depict Jewish doctors as carving out the eyes of Arab children to give to Jews?  Then the response of the Arab world has always been their inability to interfere with freedom of the press,” he continued.  “Apparently that inability no longer exists when Moslems are the target of defamation,” Hier concluded.

   The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States.  It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS and the Council of Europe.

    For more information, contact the Center’s public relations department, 310-772-2458.  Your call will be promptly returned.