Religious Zionism movement rabbis have joined a call to boycott the Strauss foods empire after the company pulled its advertising from right-wing Israeli television Channel 14.
The move followed an incident in which a Channel 14 leftwing commentator said that Yigal Amir, the man who murdered PM Yitzchak Rabin, should be released from jail. To be more accurate, contextually, he did not actually mean that. He was comparing the ex post facto law that was written after the murder specifically for Amir, which was then used to jail Amir for life, to the claim that the Incapacitation clause that was recently added to the Basic Law was personally written for PM Benjamin Netanyahu and should therefore be annulled.
He was saying if the Incapacitation law must be annulled as a “personal law” then the Yigal Amir law which jailed him for Amir for life should certainly be annulled as it was the most blatant “personal law” this country has ever written.
Realizing that they were going to have a problem, the commentator was immediately fired, but apparently this did not satisfy the Strauss and others, which instead pulled its advertising and launched a boycott of Channel 14.
Rabbinic leaders, including Rabbis Eli Sadan, Eliyakim Levanon, Shmuel Eliyahu, Tzvi Kostiner, David Fandel, Shlomo Binyamin, Shabtai Sabatu and Eran Tamir, called on their followers to boycott Strauss in response.
“Channel 14 is the only channel that balances all the other media channels, including the state-run media, which all operate with a biased voice in favor of the left and the opposition,” the rabbis wrote in a letter that was echoed by one of the most popular news outlets in the haredi religious sector, B’Cheder Ha’Haredim.
“The ultra-Orthodox public must consider their steps in front of this thuggish society,” the news outlet wrote in an article slamming the economic boycott against Channel 14. “Everyone standing in front of refrigerators and supermarket shelves, it is important that they remember this. As you know, there are always substitutes.”
The Religious Zionism rabbis warned that the boycott against Channel 14 “reminds us all of the dark period of Communist Russia. We cannot in any way allow this to pass in silence,” they wrote.
“We call on our students and their families to follow our path and refrain from supporting products of commercial firms who try to silence the media,” the letter concluded.
