Paris, 13 October 2009

In a letter to the British daily newspaper, The Guardian, and its Editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Director for International Relations, Dr Shimon Samuels, called "ingenuous" the excuses made by the Guardian's news editor, Simon Rogers, for his arguably discriminatory omissions.

Samuels noted that the Guardian's "omitting only Israelis from a list of Nobel Peace Prize winners, dating since the first award in 1978, has been lamely presented as 'technical', 'an accident' in 'data transfer' of 'joint winners'."

The letter suggested that this was "perhaps so for the 1994 entry of Arafat, alphabetically preceding Peres and Rabin. Yet logic would dictate that, for the 1978 entry, Begin would have eclipsed Sadat, not the contrary."

Samuels proposed that, "If a policy of excluding Israeli Nobel laureates should recur, perhaps in the fields of medicine or other sciences, the Guardian must draw the natural conclusion by recommending that its staff and readership deny themselves the research benefits of those scholars."

The Centre lamented: "Excuse us the trauma of recent historical memory if we see in your discriminatory deletion another small step along the path towards the 1930s abyss of Nazi delegitimization and exclusion."