Nanterre – A French billboard advertiser scaled back a campaign for the Jewish
dating site JDate after its billboards were vandalized.
Thierry Courrault, a regional director for the JC Decaux billboard
giant, said his company decided to pull 18 billboards out of 100 advertising
JDate and which carried the site’s Star of David-shaped logo.
The reason was “vandalism against our property [swastika graffiti and
broken windowpanes],” he told the French Jewish news site Juif.org. “In this
very particular current context, it was to avoid the proliferation of such
acts,” he added.
The decision he added, “was commercial and does not represent any
position on the issue.”
Many of the withdrawn posters advertised JDate in the western Paris
suburb of Nanterre.
On Jan. 19, Jewish worshippers found the remains of a freshly
slaughtered wild boar on the doorstep of the Saint-Brice-sous-Foret synagogue
north of Paris. The following day, swastikas were discovered on the facade of
the Chabad synagogue as Boulogne- Billancourt, a western suburb of the French
capital.
