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B’nai Brith Canada condemns decision to award Presidential Medals of Freedom to anti-Israel figuresPosted On 08/06/09
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
B’nai Brith Canada condemns decision to award Presidential Medals of Freedom to anti-Israel figures
TORONTO, August 6, 2009 – B’nai Brith Canada denounces President Obama’s decision to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson and former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
“It is appalling that the President of the United States has bestowed such an honourable decoration as the Presidential Medal of Freedom on these two extremely biased anti-Israel figures” said Frank Dimant, B’nai Brith Canada’s Executive Vice President. “Robinson and Tutu have been two of the most vicious and one-sided critics of Israel in recent memory. To put them, with this Medal of Freedom, in the same company as Martin Luther King Jr. and Natan Sharansky is beyond the pale.
“Mary Robinson, in her position as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, supervised the Human Rights Commission which even the U.N. decided had to be rebranded, albeit unsuccessfully, due to its extreme hostility towards and bias against the Jewish State. She also declared herself satisfied with the U.N.’s notorious antisemitic hate-fest in 2001, the Durban Conference on Racism.
“Desmond Tutu is a man who has compared Zionism to racism and has a long history of antagonism towards Israel. He has reportedly gone as far as to proclaim that Jews are ‘arrogant’ due to what he has described as their ‘powerful lobby’ in the West.”
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For more information, please contact, Dan Rabkin, Communications Officer:
416-633-6224 X 140 / cell: 416-312-9173
B’nai Brith Canada has been active in Canada since 1875 as the Jewish community’s foremost human rights agency
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