January 5, 2012

NEW YORK (JTA) – The Simon Wiesenthal Center is protesting Canadian France-language broadcasting station V-Television after the host of a program used his show to air anti-Israel views.

Stéphane Gendron, host of the program Face à Face, urged watchers to boycott Israeli products on his Dec. 27th, 2011 episode. He also said that it was unfortunate that Israel has not yet collapsed, and that it had no right to exist.

Gendron, who is also the mayor of Huntingdon, a town in Quebec, called Israel an apartheid state that murders Palestinians indiscriminately on a show on Nov. 2, 2011. HonestReporting and other pro-Israel groups protested against the network, which has yet to take action against the host.
 
“(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 true democracy in the Middle East,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper of The Wiesenthal Center said in a Dec. 30, 2011 letter to Maxima Remillard, CEO of V-Television. “It is dangerously naïve and irresponsible not to believe that such escalating rhetoric—left unchallenged by V-Television—could impact intergroup relations in Quebec.”

Cooper acknowledged that while Gendron is free to share his beliefs, there is no reason for V-Television to provide a platform for his inflammatory remarks.
 
Remillard has yet to respond to the controversy.

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