A former JC reporter has been cleared of assaulting her neighbour in an argument over her children’s football. Susannah Marmot, 42, was found not guilty at the Old Bailey after just half an hour of jury deliberations. She faced one charge of actual bodily harm. Mrs Marmot, of Edgware, north west London, was accused of attacking George Louka and leaving him needing 10 stitches following a row outside their homes in October last year. He had confiscated a ball belonging to the children after it rolled into his garden. A series of alledged antisemitic attacks are being investigated by police in a Welsh seaside town where strictly Orthodox Jews were on holiday. Officers in Aberystwyth responded to reports of swastikas painted on grass and sheets of paper daubed with the Nazi symbol being scattered near a student village where dozens of Chasidic Jews were staying. But Dyfed-Powys police said they had found no evidence of the grass incident and had received no complaints from the Jewish visitors. A row has broken out after a senior Reform rabbi publicly attacked two high-profile Progressive colleagues over comments made about Israel. Rabbi Steven Katz, senior minister at Hendon Reform Synagogue, spoke out after the JC published the opinions of prominent British Jews on the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Britain later this month. A call for food retailers to boycott all Israeli goods has been condemned by the Israeli ambassador and anti-boycott campaigners. In an article for trade magazine The Grocer this week, prominent food writer Joanna Blythman calls on retailers and importers “actively to look for alternatives to so-called Israeli produce”. Ivan Lewis, the Middle East minister, has asked the Palestinian leadership for help in securing the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Making his first visit to Israel and the territories since taking up his Foreign Office post in June, Mr Lewis spent four days in the region. The trip followed a visit to Syria and Lebanon earlier this month. Mr Lewis, MP for Bury South, a former vice-chairman of Labour Friends of Israel and chief executive of the Manchester Jewish Federation, said his aim was to help realise the goal of a two-state solution. Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi is to be released from jail on compassionate grounds. The decision comes 24 hours after the parents of Jewish victim Marc Tager said such a move would be “ridiculous”. Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill today rejected a prisoner transfer request which would have seen al-Megrahi serve the rest of his sentence in his home country. But he agreed to the release on grounds of al-Megrahi suffering from terminal prostate cancer. The executive of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation has postponed a disciplinary hearing for the rabbi of Bevis Marks Synagogue in the East End of London because he is understood to be on sick leave. Rabbi Natan Asmoucha received a final warning after a first hearing two weeks ago when the mahamad (executive) said he had taken part without authorisation in an interfaith demonstration against high bank interest rates last month. A Jewish family say they are being tormented by antisemitic abuse and harassment from a family of nine travellers living next door at taxpayers’ expense. Jeremy and Hannah Kaye, an administrator for the Hanoar Hatzioni youth group, and their sons Jamie and Charlie, say they have been taunted with shouts of “Yids, Yids” and had glass jars and sacks of rubbish thrown at their home. An online comedy about a group of Muslim suicide bombers in Britain could cause “gratuitous offence”, the chief executive of the Board of Deputies has warned. Living with the Infidels, a sitcom which was launched on the web on Thursday, centres on a Bradford-based terror cell who are “set on a path to martyrdom” but are tempted by football, the pub and busty women. The production company, The System Predicts, led by film-maker Aasaf Ainapore, claim the series has been made with the support of a senior, though unnamed, member of the Muslim Council of Britain. A committee of MPs has said it was regrettable that arms components made in the UK were “almost certainly” used by Israel in the conflict in Gaza earlier this year. In a report published on Wednesday, the arms export controls committee recommended that the government "continue to do everything possible to ensure that this does not happen in future". It also backed the refusal to licence the sale of certain components to Israel since the Lebanon war of 2006. Binyamin Netanyahu is hardly looking forward to his visit to Britain next week. Relations between the two governments are going through a rocky period and Israel does not consider Gordon Brown a critical partner given his current political situation. The meetings at Downing Street and the Foreign Office will have little diplomatic value. They will consist mainly of lectures by the hosts on the evils of settlements and attempts by Mr Netanyahu — mostly unsuccessful —to move the debate on to the Iranian threat. It is not just the numbers — 12 civilians murdered in less than three weeks since the beginning of August, an abnormally high body count for crime in Israel. It is also the utter senselessness of most of the deaths. Amnesty International says it has withdrawn its support from a concert in Israel because it did not receive sufficiently widespread support from Israelis and Palestinians. Organisers of the Leonard Cohen concert, which sold out in a day and is due to take place in Tel Aviv next month, approached the US branch of the human rights charity to set up a fund which could distribute the profits of the concert to Israeli and Palestinian charities. A revolutionary halachic ruling that will allow religious homosexual men to marry women and have children with them is currently being discussed at one of the most prestigious Orthodox institutes in Israel. Rabbi Menachem Burstein is founder and head of the PUAH Institute, recognised in Orthodox circles as the leading organisation on matters of fertility and Jewish law. He confirmed this week that he has “been dealing with this subject for quite some time”. One of Israel’s top television stars, Dudu Topaz, has committed suicide in prison, the Israeli Prison Service has announced. Mr Topaz, 62, apparently hanged himself in the shower at the Nitzan Detention Centre in Ramla while awaiting trial for multiple charges of conspiracy to commit a crime, aggravated assault and obstruction of justice. Mr Topaz was on suicide watch but no security cameras could see him in the shower. Zion Amir, Mr Topaz's lawyer, blamed the media circus around his trial for driving his client to suicide. An academic who renounced his Israeli citizenship is the first man of Jewish descent to be elected to Fatah’s Revolutionary Council. Dr Uri Davis, 66, a lecturer at Al-Quds University, received Palestinian citizenship when he renounced his Israeli passport in the 1980s in protest of what he calls Israel’s “apartheid politics”. He was one of 700 Fatah members who were competing for 89 seats in the Council. Dr Davis, who is married to a Palestinian woman and lives in Ramallah, was elected on a ticket to represent “non-Arabs who support the Palestinian cause”. The Israel Antiquities Authority has launched a furious attack on the World Archaeological Congress claiming Israeli archaeologists were excluded from a conference held in Ramallah. Together with the Archaeological Council of Israel, the IAA claimed WAC officials had “set out with the goal in mind of inserting political issues into the professional archaeological experience” during the Overcoming Structural Violence conference. “The truth is that neither officers nor soldiers really want to hear me when I tell them not to do initiation ceremonies,” admits Colonel Yigal Slovik, commander of the 401st Armoured Brigade. “Everyone wants a bit of tradition. They want it to be like it was in their day, or in the days of their predecessors. If not, they feel unfulfilled. But if we let these things carry on, we will see more scenes of worsening brutality. I don’t want us to be like the Russian Spetsnaz, where soldiers die at the hands of their comrades.” The dispute over Shabbat in Jerusalem worsened this week when a group of Charedi men attacked Mayor Nir Barkat and stoned his car. The weekly battles which have raged for the past two months over the Shabbat opening of a large car park at the Mamilla Shopping Centre near the Old City show no sign of abating. Last weekend, for the first time, strictly-Orthodox demonstrators managed to block the entrance to the car park despite the attempts of police to block them. An Israeli woman has paid El Al $32,000 to reserve the whole of a business class section of a flight from Paris to Tel Aviv for herself and her boxer dog “Or”, whom she refused to leave alone in the hold. The 60-year-old woman, who gave her name only as “Rivkah,” said she wanted to make sure that she would be able to calm him down. Rivkah hired a vet to accompany them on the flight. A secret “peace conference” held in Switzerland earlier this month brought together senior establishment figures from Hamas, Fatah and Israel to discuss a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. The meeting was organised by London-based group the Next Century Foundation, which describes itself as a “second track” diplomatic foundation working towards conflict resolution. Its first objective is to provide a forum for Israelis and Palestinians. Over the past few years, non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch has managed to portray Israel as one of the greatest human rights violators on earth. The group has produced dozens of heated condemnations of Israel over the Gaza blockade yet only criticised Egypt, which also maintains the blockade, a few times in passing — and Egypt has not even been under rocket attack. During the 2006 Israel-Hizbollah war, HRW officials repeatedly accused the IDF of intentionally targeting civilians, a claim utterly without substance. Reports of a major failure in a missile firing test in Syria has drawn attention once more to the military co-operation between North Korea, Iran and Syria. According to the report by the Japanese news agency Kyodo, two improved Scud missiles were fired in a test at the end of March. Both missiles veered off-course, and one of them landed in a marketplace in a town near the Turkish border, killing 20 people and wounding 60. North Korean and Iranian experts reportedly participated in the trials. After a bumpy start and a last-minute scramble to find a home, New York’s first state-funded primary school to specialise in the teaching of Hebrew will open its doors on Monday. The Hebrew Language Academy is open to Jews and non-Jews alike. Because it is publicly funded and America has a strict separation between church and state, the school had to be vetted by New York State’s board of education to ensure there would be no religious instruction. For now, the store owners are smiling in Nablus, a city usually known for its violent uprisings, armed gunmen prowling the streets and hard-hitting clampdowns by Israeli soldiers. The economy is lifting off after Israel eased or removed the checkpoints ringing the city, a process also underway elsewhere in the West Bank. In a recent report, the International Monetary Fund forecast a seven per cent growth rate for the West Bank for 2009. Dr Fredrick Toben, the Holocaust denier who avoided extradition from Britain to Germany last year, is finally behind bars in Australia. Toben, 65, the director of the Adelaide Institute in South Australia, was found guilty in May on 24 counts of contempt of a 2002 court order to remove antisemitic material from his website. This included claims that gas chambers did not exist at Auschwitz and that the Holocaust was “a lie”. The reporter who penned the Israeli organ trafficking story for a Swedish newspaper has said he does not know whether the report is true. Journalist Donald Bostrom, who wrote that IDF soldiers were killing Palestinians for their organs in Swedish daily Aftonbladet, told Israel Radio: "Whether it's true or not - I have no idea, I have no clue." "I have a personal opinion; it concerns me that it's true.” A Swedish newspaper has claimed that IDF soldiers murdered Palestinian youths to sell their organs, prompting a shocked Israeli government to call the suggestion a “blood libel.” The Israeli Foreign Ministry called the article in the Swedish daily Aftonbladet “a shocking example of Israel’s demonisation.” The paper, which is Sweden's biggest-selling daily, ran the headline "They plunder the organs of our sons" and a double-page spread devoted to the article. The Prince of Liechtenstein has outraged Jews in Germany by apparently using the Holocaust to defend its secretive banking practices. Prince Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein, 64, slammed the German government for putting pressure on the alpine principality to clamp down on wealthy Germans who use the confidential Lichtenstein banking system to evade taxes. The prince claimed many Jews had been saved during the Holocaust because they were able to buy their safety using secret bank accounts. Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic is reported to be in talks with El Al about a possible deal between the two airlines. A number of options were under consideration and a takeover or substantial investment in El Al by Virgin Atlantic had not been ruled out, a source told Globes Online But Shoma Amin, a spokeswoman for Virgin Atlantic was quick to deny rumours.She said: "We explore many opportunities but can confirm we will not be taking over or investing in El Al."
UK news
Ex- JC reporter cleared of assault
Swastika mystery in Aberystwyth
Rabbis row over settlements
Food writer Joanna Blythman calls for Israel boycott
Ivan Lewis on Israel visit calls for Gilad Shalit release
Lockerbie bomber released
Beavis Marks Rabbi’s hearing delayed
Family's trauma over neighbours 'from hell'
Suicide-bomb sitcom attacked by Board
MPs 'regret' use of UK arms by Israel in Gaza
Israel news
Analysis: Mr Netanyahu’s London visit could be a summer break he would prefer not to take
Fears over policing as crime surges in Israel
Amnesty stops its support for Cohen concert
Israeli rabbis back gay parenting
Dudu Topaz kills himself in prison
First Jewish man elected to Fatah Council
Israelis banned from world conference
Public outcry over IDF initiation ‘abuse’
Mayor stoned in Jerusalem Shabbat war
Dog flies first class — for $32,000
World news
Israelis and Hamas have secret talks in Switzerland
Analysis: The halo drops from Human Rights Watch
Syrian missile test fails, killing 20
Hebrew school opens - but it is not Jewish
Cautious optimism as PA economy booms
Denier Fredrick Toben jailed in Australia
Swedish reporter: "I don't know if IDF story is true"
"Blood libel": IDF organ trafficking claim
Liechtenstein's banks "helped Holocaust victims"
Virgin Atlantic "in talks" with El Al
Friday, 21 August 2009
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