JustASC

From NJJN: MetroWest, NJ federation leader urges readers to sound off to WQXR about rejecting the American Jewish Committee ad: 

WQXR’s dissonant sound

A colleague, David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, has brought to our attention the fact that WQXR, the New York Times’ classical music radio station, refuses to air an American Jewish Committee paid advertisement on Sderot.

Here was the text to be aired:

 Fifteen seconds. Imagine you had 15 seconds to find shelter from an incoming missile. Fifteen seconds to locate your children, help an elderly relative, assist a disabled person to find shelter.
That’s all the residents of Sderot and neighboring Israeli towns have.
Day or night, the sirens go on. Fifteen seconds later, the missiles, fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza, hit. They could hit a home, a school, a hospital. Their aim is to kill and wound and demoralize.
Imagine yourself in that situation.
The sirens blast. 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. The time to seek shelter has ended. The missiles hit.
This is what Israelis experience daily. But, amazingly, they refuse to be cowed. Help us help those Israelis.

The spot was broadcast several times on the CBS radio network, but WQXR refused to do so. Tom Bartunek, president of New York Times Radio and general manager of WQXR, explained his decision:

“First, the opening line…does not make clear that the potential target of the missile is not our listening area, and as a consequence, runs the risk of raising anxiety in a misleading way. Second, the description of the missiles as arriving ‘day or night’ and ‘daily’ is also subject to challenge as being misleading, at least to the degree that reasonable people might be troubled by the absence of any acknowledgement of reciprocal Israeli military actions. Finally, in my judgment the ‘countdown’ device and the general tone of the message do not meet our guidelines for decorum.” 

“In other words,” Harris writes, “according to Bartunek’s logic, the only way to broadcast the plight of Sderot’s residents over the airwaves is to equate Israel’s right of self-defense with Hamas’ and Islamic Jihad’s right to strike Israel at will.”

In a subsequent phone conversation, writes Harris, Bartunek went further. He explained “that the radio station does not run ads with sirens or gun shots, [neither of which was included in our spots], nor does it carry spots about hemorrhoid cream or sexual potency pills.”

The refusal to air this advertisement is insulting to the lives lost and hundreds injured by the jihadist Hamas terrorist organization, which took over the Gaza Strip, vacated by the Israelis as a peace initiative. Thousands of Israelis were expelled as a result with no peace dividend in sight.

WQXR’s decision comes as President Carter pays a fantasy-laden visit with a senior Hamas politician. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was responsible for the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, Carter’s partner in his one great claim to peacemaking. What a desecration of this great man’s memory!

To register your protest, please call WQXR at 212-633-7600, e-mail listener.mail@wqxr.com, or write to WQXR Listener Mail, 122 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10011.

Max L. Kleinman
Executive vice president
United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 12:42 pm and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.