Wiesenthal Center to V-TV: Pull the Plug on Host who says Israel does not "Deserve to Exist"

The Simon Wiesenthal Center protested to V-Television, a French language broadcaster in Canada, for allowing the host of its Face à Face program, Stéphane Gendron to usehis show as a platform to air what it called, “hateful propaganda canards against the State of Israel.”

According to reports from the media monitoring site, HonestReporting.com, Gendron, who is also the Mayor of the Quebec town of Huntingdon, used the December 27, 2011 showto urge continued support for boycott campaigns against Israel goods and services, because, “Unfortunately, Israel has not yet collapsed,” and that it did not “deserve toexist.”

Earlier, on a November 2nd show, Gendron claimed the Israel was an “apartheid state” that indiscriminately murders Palestinians while bulldozing their properties. Despite protests fromHonest Reporting and community activists , the network has not taken action.

“Gendron has a history of denigrating the Jewish state,” charged Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading international Jewish HumanRights NGO. “During the 2006 Hezbollah War, he charged that Israelis are modern-day Nazis ("Les Israéliens, ce sont les nazis des temps modernes").”

In a December 30, 2011 letter to Maxima Remillard, CEO of V-Television, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, wrote that Gendron’s views are“shared by the likes of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran's ruling Mullatocracy and its president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for annihilation of the only truedemocracy in the Middle East…” Cooper said that “it is dangerously naïve and irresponsible not to believe, that such escalating rhetoric—left unchallenged byV-Television—could impact intergroup relations in Quebec.”

Rabbi Cooper told Remillard that while Gendron has every right to share his views, V-Television is “under no obligation to continue to provide a respectable platformfor broadcast into the homes of the people of Quebec.”

“It's time for your station to pull the plug on Mr. Gendron,” Cooper concluded.

As of the middle of this week, Remillard has yet to respond.

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 internationalagencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).

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