Anti-Israel Bus Ads in Seattle Cause International Stir

If you live in Seattle, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be coming soon to a commuter bus near you.

A group called the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign has paid King County about $2,760 to rent ad space on the sides of 12 city buses. The ad shows a Palestinian family standing next to a demolished house in Gaza, with the words "Israeli war crimes: Your tax dollars at work." It also lists a website that encourages supporters to write to Congress and ask lawmakers to revoke U.S. military aid to Israel.

It's the latest in a series of controversies over ads that involve religion. Last week, the transportation board in Fort Worth, Texas, banned all religious advertising on local buses after Christians complained about an atheist group's ad that read, "Millions of Americas are good without God." Similar ads also ran on London buses last year, without legal action.

The Seattle ads debut Monday, on the second anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, a three-week Israeli military incursion into Gaza that killed about 1,400 Palestinians. But the plans have sparked ire as far away as Israel, and prompted King County officials to order a review of the bus company's advertising policies after they got thousands of e-mail complaints.

"I think the city should be sued," one Israeli reader wrote today in response to a story on the Israeli website Ynet. "The city is complicit in spreading ... anti-Semitism."

"Maybe there should be a counter campaign showing all the American citizens murdered by Palestinian and Islamic terrorists," wrote another. But others, even on Israeli media websites, voiced support for the group placing the ads, writing, "Good for you, Seattle!"

"As an American I am so disgusted knowing that my taxes go to Israel. A lot of people out there do not realize how bad our government is, with our money being given to this criminal state," another reader wrote on Ynet.

Now, two other groups that say they're offended by the proposed ads are jumping into the fray, promising to run their own pro-Israel ads on the same Seattle buses -- creating a dueling war of words in Seattle's bus lanes.

One group, called Stop Islamization of America, is run by Pamela Geller, an anti-Muslim blogger who has been one of the most vocal opponents of a proposed Islamic community center near ground zero in lower Manhattan.

"I asked for the same deal as the Jew-haters received," she said in a statement released by her group, describing her efforts to lease advertising space on Seattle buses. Her proposed ad reads: "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Islamic jihad."

The David Horowitz Freedom Center, founded by the conservative U.S. writer and political activist of the same name, also announced it has purchased bus panels to parody the anti-Israel ads. The Horowitz ads will run a graphic photo of an Israeli bus in flames, with the words, "Palestinian war crimes: Your tax dollars at work."

On his blog, Horowitz described his motivation.

"These ads are part of an escalating attack on Israel by the left throughout American culture. We expect this sort of obscene propaganda in our radical universities but not on our city streets. These lies cannot go unanswered," he wrote.

Seattle administrators seem to have been caught off guard by the controversy and are puzzling over how to handle it. Bus company officials are meeting today with members of the county council, as well as representatives of the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish groups.

The AJC's regional director, Wendy Rosen, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Tuesday that her group has "deep concerns" over the ads but that it won't ask the city to remove them, "since that would likely gain Seattle Mideast Awareness even more publicity and media attention."

As of now, the agency that leases out advertising space on Seattle buses forbids any ads that feature pornography, alcohol, tobacco or incitements to violence. But neither of the proposed political ads violates those rules.

"I think that we followed the rules," Ed Mast, a spokesman for the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign, told The Seattle Times. "We have been scrupulous in following the rules and avoiding hate speech and not showing photos of violence and carnage in action, in having things approved, in telling the unspoken side of the truth."

Still, local councilman Peter von Reichbauer wrote to the county executive earlier this week, calling the upcoming ads inappropriate in view of Seattle's history. In January, a Muslim man was sentenced to life without parole for a shooting rampage at a Seattle Jewish center in 2006.

"We do not have to reflect long in time to remember that on July 28, 2006, a madman broke into the Seattle Jewish Federation building, shooting six women, one fatally, and now I ask the question why a public transportation system would advertise polarizing political statements," von Reichbauer wrote in a letter excerpted by the Post-Intelligencer. "I am a strong advocate of freedom of speech and a strong believer of common sense. And I believe very strongly that dangerous language can create dangerous environments in a society."