French anti-terror soldiers attacked outside Jewish community center
(JNS.org) French soldiers on anti-terrorism patrol were attacked by a knife-wielding man outside of a Jewish community center in southern French city of Nice on Tuesday.
French police said the attacker pulled approximately 8-inch knife on the soldiers, lightly wounding three before being apprehended.
According to Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi, the attacker had an identity card with the name Moussa Coulibaly, the same surname as the terrorist who recently killed four hostages at a kosher supermarket in Paris, The Associated Press reported. It is unclear if the two are related, as the surname is common among people from Mali.
The injured soldiers were part of an anti-terror patrol deployed by the French government following last month’s terrorist attacks around Paris. Some 10,000 soldiers have been dispatched throughout France, in addition to 4,700 police officers deployed at more than 700 Jewish schools in the country.
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Poll: 61% of Israelis believe Obama will defy security objections to Iran deal
(JNS.org) Sixty-one percent of Israeli Jews believe there is a high probability that U.S. President Barack Obama will approve the signing of a nuclear agreement with Iran even if Israel expresses that the deal endangers the Jewish state’s security, according to the newly released Peace Index poll by the Israel Democracy Institute.
The U.S. is willing to make concessions in the nuclear talks with Iran in exchange for Iran using its influence to ensure stability in Middle East hotspots such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, Army Radio reported Tuesday.
Regarding March’s Knesset elections, 58 percent of Israeli Jewish respondents in the Peace Index said that a government headed by current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is best suited to deal with Israel’s security issues, compared with 27 percent who prefer a government led by Tzipi Livni and Isaac Herzog on security matters.
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Israel critic William Schabas steps down as head of U.N. Gaza probe
(JNS.org) William Schabas, the Canadian academic heading a United Nations Human Rights Council investigation of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza last summer, said Monday that he would step down following the revelation that he did consulting work for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Schabas was already known for his past criticism of Israel, including a call for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former president Shimon Peres to be prosecuted for human rights violations. The Israeli government has not participated in the U.N. probe, which is examining Israel’s actions but not those of Hamas during the 50-day war.
In 2012, Schabas was paid $1,300 for a legal opinion he wrote for the PLO. In a letter obtained by Reuters that announced his resignation from the U.N. investigation, Schabas wrote that the work he did for the PLO was not different from advice he gave other governments and organizations, but that he was stepping down so that the issue would not overshadow the U.N. probe.
“My views on Israel and Palestine as well as on many other issues were well known and very public,” Schabas wrote.
The report compiled by Schabas’s committee is due to be published in March. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the report “needs to be shelved.”
“It is Hamas, the other terrorist organizations and the terrorist regimes around us that need to be investigated, not Israel, which this past summer acted in accordance with international law as it defended itself against the Hamas war criminals who used residents of Gaza as human shields to fire at Israeli citizens,” Netanyahu said.
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After a half century of columns, Cleveland Jewish News writer retires at 98
(JNS.org) Nonagenarian Cleveland Jewish News columnist Violet Spevack on Jan. 30 announced her retirement after five decades with the newspaper. Spevack, 98, is believed to have written one of the longest continuously published weekly column in the U.S.
Spevack launched her column, “Cavalcade,” in 1965, just six months after the newspaper’s founding. Since then, she has written at least 2,500 columns and hundreds of other feature stories.
In her writing, Spevack covered both local and national leaders and celebrities, such as Don Rickles, George Burns, Joan Rivers, Milton Berle, Monty Hall, Buddy Hackett, and others.
“I’ve had the time of my life covering our Jewish community through the lens of my society column,” Spevack wrote in her final column. “I can’t thank you all enough for reading my columns and most of all, for letting me into your homes every week.”
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Auschwitz ‘bookkeeper’ to face trial over Holocaust crimes in April
(JNS.org) Oskar Groening, a 93-year-old former guard at the Auschwitz death camp, will go on trial in Germany in April on at least 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. More than 425,000 people are estimated to have been deported to Auschwitz between May and July 1944, and at least 300,000 of them were murdered in the camp’s gas chambers.
Groening is known as the “bookkeeper” of Auschwitz. He counted the paper money collected from the luggage of camp prisoners and then passed the funds on to Nazi SS authorities, according to prosecutors. He also removed the luggage of previously delivered prisoners in order to hide the true nature of the camp from new arrivals.
Groening knew that the Jews and other prisoners “were murdered directly after their arrival in the gas chambers of Auschwitz,” prosecutors said, ABC News reported. His trial will take place in the northern German city of Lueneburg, with Holocaust survivors and their relatives as plaintiffs in the case.
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