A jury in England this week convicted a woman from Brighton of stealing the poster of an Israeli man whom Hamas had murdered on Oct. 7, 2023, before she threw it in a trash can.
The judge at Lewes Crown Court in East Sussex handed Fiona Monro, 58, a prosecution expenses bill of £1,200 ($1,614) and an 18-month suspended sentence for binning the poster of Tsachi Idan in February 2024, the Brighton and Hove News reported.
A cousin of Idan, Adam Ma’anit, lives in Hove and had placed a poster of his slain relative on a square in Brighton. It had been removed or vandalized dozens of times, according to the report.
Monro confessed to removing the poster but argued it was not placed on the square with a license and therefore was not under the protection of laws against theft. She also used a black marker in February 2024 to scrawl slogans about Palestinians slain in Gaza and was charged with vandalism, but the jury acquitted her of those charges, the paper reported.
Steve Winston, managing director of the National Jewish Assembly, a British-Jewish advocacy group, said it “welcomes the fact that this individual was found guilty and held accountable, but tearing down a hostage poster and defacing a memorial is not protest, it is the erasure of Jewish grief in a climate where antisemitism is increasingly normalized.”
This behavior, he told JNS, “does nothing for the Palestinian cause and only exposes how, for too many activists, hostility to Jews overrides any genuine concern for Palestinian lives.”
Monro’s husband is Tony Greenstein, an anti-Israel activist who is Jewish and was expelled from the Labour Party in 2016 for antisemitism. He has called Israel “Hitler’s bastard offspring” and helped mainstream the antisemitic pejorative “Zio.”
Monro cited her marriage to Greenstein in defending against the charges in court, the Brighton and Hove News reported. She claimed that Zionists had “exaggerated evidence” against her, the paper reported. She had also said she objected to the poster because it was “Zionist propaganda.”
Brighton is an affluent coastal city where Labour and the Green Party received more votes in the 2024 election than all other parties combined.
Posters of missing or dead Israelis, killed in the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack, have been removed, defaced or stolen across the West, British public intellectual Douglas Murray noted in his latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, which was published last year.
In Western cities, “people, often young women, jubilantly and exultantly ripped away at the posters,” Murray noted. In Dublin, relatives of Kfir Bibas, a boy who died as a captive in Gaza after Hamas kidnapped him at the age of 8 months along with his brother and parents, encountered a ripped-out poster of the toddler, Murray added.
“While Israelis protested daily for the return of the hostages, Western populations seemed to consider even recognizing the plight of these people as an affront, a terrible provocation, that must be repelled,” he wrote.
