Election Committee also claims that advertisement incites violence against migrant workers and asylum seekers.
By JEREMY SHARONEli Yishai(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
The Central Elections Committee on Sunday prevented the broadcast of a campaign advertisement by the Yahad party for being racist and for inciting violence against foreign workers and asylum seekers.The radio ad which was supposed to have been broadcast tomorrow included the sentence “The time has come to put an end to diplomatic concessions to terror and its emissaries, infiltrators and foreign workers.”The word infiltrators is often used to refer to asylum seekers and illegal migrant workers by opponents of any non-Jewish immigration to, or foreign labor in, Israel.Yahad chairman MK Eli Yishai waged a fierce campaign against African asylum seekers and migrant workers when he served as Minister of the Interior, saying they represented a bigger threat to the country than Iran and falsely implied that many of them carry AIDS.Yahad’s hard-right, ultra-nationalist political partners Otzma Yehudit have also been active in campaigning against African asylum seekers.Yahad volunteered to remove the words “infiltrators and foreign workers” from the broadcast and Joubran has allowed the advertisement to be broadcast in its changed format.
