Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center Prepares to Launch Campaign Against Hate If QuAIA Welcomed in Toronto's Gay Pride Parade

TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - May 17, 2012) - In response to the news that an anti-Israel hate group is once again planning to march in the 2012 Gay Pride parade, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies (FSWC) has announced it is prepared to launch a massive campaign against public and corporate funding if the hate-based fringe group is permitted to march.

"We believe Pride Week should continue to be a celebration of tolerance and not devolve into a hate fest - pitting one community against the other. The question must be asked: why is Israel, home to hundreds of gay Palestinians who fear for their lives in the West Bank and Gaza, and whose largest city of Tel Aviv has been voted Best of Gay Cities 2011 in an American Airlines survey, relentlessly and obsessively attacked by a radical fringe group of the gay community and embraced by Pride Toronto with the tacit approval of the gay community?" asked Avi Benlolo, President and CEO of FSWC. "Israel's northern neighbour, Syria, is slaughtering hundreds of people every day with no end in sight, yet this horrific abuse of life merits no mention by the gay community. It's time to out support for the antisemitism inherent in QuAIA's mission of hate and work to put an end to it," he stated.

FSWC has called upon Pride Toronto for the past two years to end the division between our communities by rejecting the slander of QuAIA and the use of the term 'apartheid', which continues to be used by radical organizations opposed to the right of the Jewish people to a homeland in Israel and to delegitimize and ultimately destroy the Jewish state.