Simon Wiesenthal Center Condemns Planned Picket At Miners’ Memorial Service

January 13, 2006

Simon Wiesenthal Center Condemns Planned Picket At Miners’ Memorial Service

The Simon Wiesenthal Center strongly condemns the planned picket by the Westboro Baptist Church, operators of the “God Hates Fags” website, (which is listed as one of the sites of the Center’s Digital Terrorism And Hate CD-ROM report) at the memorial service for the miners lost in the Sago mine tragedy this Sunday, January 15, at the West Virginia Wesleyan Campus in Buckhannon, WV.

“It is repugnant that this organization would co-opt a memorial service honoring the memory of men who lost their lives in a tragic accident for their own extremist agenda,” said Mark Weitzman, Director of the Center’s Task Force Against Hate.  “The Westboro Baptist Church has a history of taking seemingly unrelated events and twisting them to meet their own program of hatemongering and fear.  Their proposed action in West Virginia and their ongoing picket campaign at funerals of fallen soldiers from Iraq is especially heinous.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is an international human rights organization dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust by fostering tolerance and understanding through community involvement, educational outreach and social action.  The Center confronts important contemporary issues including racism, anti-Semitism, terrorism and genocide and is accredited as an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, and the Council of Europe.

For further information, please contact Mark Weitzman at 917/864-5133 or Sydney Pringle at 917/952-9862.