Wiesenthal Center: "The Devil” is Still on Sale but Walmart Caved to Those Who Demonize Israel by Pulling IDF Costumes

October 28, 2015

The Simon Wiesenthal Center criticized Walmart’s decision to stop selling Halloween costumes depicting Israeli soldiers.

“We regret Walmart’s decision to pull the uniform of the Israel Defense Forces from its stores. The IDF, as its name emphasizes, is a citizen army of the State of Israel whose lone task is the defense of 8 million citizens of the only democracy in the Middle East, 18% of whom are Arab.

"It is only the bravery and steadfastness of these citizen soldiers that keeps the The Holy Land from becoming just another Middle East terrorist killing field, a place where no Jew, Christian, Druze or Muslim would be safe from unspeakable brutalities and death openly pursued and celebrated by ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish human rights NGO.

“It is tragic that at a time when Arab societies have imploded, hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions displaced in Syria, Libya, Iraq, with historic Christian communities being ethnically cleansed, for some, only the Jewish State of Israel is subject to incessant global campaigns of demonization and de-legitimization.

"We hope that Walmart will review its initial decision and make this children’s costume of this uniform available in the future,” Rabbi Cooper concluded.

For more information, please contact the Center's Public Relations Department, 310-553-9036, join the Center on Facebook, www.facebook.com/simonwiesenthalcenter, or follow @simonwiesenthal for news updates sent direct to your Twitter feed.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).