Weekly roundup of world briefs

Hundreds of Palestinians protest barriers in Jerusalem during Ramadan

By Ben Sales

(JTA) — Hundreds of Palestinians have been protesting barriers placed in the Old City of Jerusalem during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

The protests have centered around the Damascus Gate, a landmark and meeting point in the eastern section of the city. Palestinians typically sit on and around the steps leading to the gate following nighttime prayers during Ramadan, a month of daylong fasts that end at sunset.

This year, police placed barriers on the steps of the gate, effectively preventing people from gathering there. Police said the barriers were erected to ease the flow of crowds in the area, according to Haaretz.

It is unclear if the restrictions are related to stopping the spread of COVID-19. Israel has vaccinated its population at the fastest rate in the world and recently eased a mandate on wearing masks in public. The Arab Israeli vaccination rate has lagged behind the Jewish Israeli vaccination rate.

Protests have taken place nightly since last week, when Ramadan began. In the sixth night of clashes with police Sunday, three Palestinians were arrested and four were injured, according to the Times of Israel. Police used water hoses and stun grenades in confronting the crowd. One video circulating on social media shows a police officer striking a person in custody on the head.

This week has also seen several videos circulating on social media of Palestinians attacking visibly Orthodox Jews, seemingly unprovoked. The videos show attackers slapping or throwing stones at the victims.

Macron calls for change in law after killer of French Jewish woman avoids trial

By Cnaan Liphshiz

(JTA) — After a man who killed his Jewish neighbor successfully pled that he was unfit to stand trial because of what a court called a marijuana-induced psychotic episode, French President Emmanuel Macron is calling for a change in his country’s legal system.

“Deciding to take narcotics and then ‘going mad’ should, not in my view, remove your criminal responsibility,” Macron told the Le Figaro newspaper in an interview published Sunday. “I would like the justice minister to present a change in the law as soon as possible.”

A high court recently ruled that the killer Kobili Traore should not stand trial for beating Sarah Halimi to death and throwing her out the window of her third-story apartment in 2017.

The CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities called it a “miscarriage of justice.” The founder of the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, a communal watchdog known as BNVCA, said he “no longer had full confidence that anti-Semitic hate crimes in France are handled properly.”

Traore, who is Muslim, called Halimi “demon” as he hit her for more than 30 minutes and shouted about Allah, witnesses said. After defenestrating her, he shouted: “A lady fell out the window” and tried to escape but was detained nearby. He was placed in a psychiatric facility and may be released if deemed no longer dangerous.

Delivery man who refused to service French Jews deported back to his native Algeria

By Cnaan Liphshiz

(JTA) — French immigration authorities deported a 19-year-old immigrant from Algeria who was jailed for refusing to deliver food to Jews after it was discovered he was living France illegally.

Dhia Edine D. was sentenced in January to four months in jail for declining to deliver food made by a kosher restaurant in Strasbourg while he was working there as a food courier for the Deliveroo delivery company.

Upon his arrest, following a complaint to police by the restaurant’s owner for discrimination, the courier was found to have been living illegally in France.

In announcing the deportation on Saturday, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin wrote on Twitter: “Anti-Semitic hatred has no place in France.”

Oscar-nominated filmmakers to produce documentary on French Nazi hunters

By Gabe Friedman

(JTA) — Two of the world’s most famous Nazi hunters, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, are getting the documentary treatment.

Alexander Nanau, a Romanian filmmaker whose documentary “Collective” is up for both best documentary and best foreign film at this year’s Oscars on Sunday, will executive produce a film about the Klarsfelds, who have exposed Nazis around the world for decades.

“It has been a huge privilege to have gained the trust and cooperation of Beate and Serge to document their extraordinary lives both past and present,” co-director Mike Lerner said in a statement Monday to The Hollywood Reporter.

Lerner’s 2011 documentary “Hell and Back Again” about a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder was nominated for an Oscar in 2012.

The Klarsfelds have brought several prominent Nazis and French Vichy collaborators to justice, including the infamous Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie.

Conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf claims Anthony Fauci ‘doesn’t work for us’

By Ben Sales

(JTA) — Conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf suggested that Dr. Anthony Fauci is beholden to Israel rather than serving the United States.

Wolf, an anti-vaccine activist who has also promoted conspiracy theories about ebola and ISIS, appeared Monday on Fox News to criticize pandemic restrictions promoted by Fauci. The one-time Democratic consultant said Fauci was “so conflicted” and doesn’t serve the cause of “public health for the American people.”

“He doesn’t work for us,” she said in a segment reposted by the liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America. Among the examples of purported conflicts Wolf cited was an award that Fauci received from an Israeli university.

“He got a million dollars from the state of Israel for a humanitarian gift,” she said.

In fact, Fauci received the Dan David Prize, a prestigious $1 million award that comes not from the Israeli government but from a foundation affiliated with Tel Aviv University. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was cited for achievement in public health and praised, according to a statement, for “speaking truth to power in a highly charged political environment.”

The Fox host who interviewed Wolf, conservative pundit Ben Domenech, did not address Wolf’s mention of Israel. After the statement, Domenech said Wolf’s skepticism of public health restrictions would be “vindicated.”

Wolf has harshly criticized Israel before. In 2019, responding to a Twitter poll asking “Which nation is the biggest threat to peace in the world?” she replied, “Where is Israel?”

Dutch museum will pay $240K to owners of Nazi-looted painting it won’t return

By Cnaan Liphshiz

AMSTERDAM (JTA) — A Dutch museum will compensate the rightful owners of a Nazi-looted painting the government said it could keep because displaying it would benefit the public interest.

Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle has agreed to give $240,000 to the descendants of Jewish Holocaust victims who under duress sold the 1635 painting “Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well” by Bernardo Strozzi, the Noordhollands Dagblad reported Monday. It has not been assessed, thus its value is unknown.

The painting, which was sold by Richard Semmel of Berlin, is one of several artworks that the Dutch government’s Restitutions Committee has acknowledged as looted art. The committee holds, however, that the museums should be allowed to keep and display the paintings because the public’s right to have access to the culturally significant works outweighs the interests of the rightful owners.

This approach, which is unique among countries that say they are interested in resolving ownership issues among Nazi-looted art, has exposed the Netherlands to international scrutiny and criticism.

It risks “turning the Netherlands from a leader in art restitution to a pariah,” restitution expert Anne Webber and Wesley Fisher, the director of research for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, wrote last year in an op-ed.

The best-known looted item on display in the Netherlands is “Painting with Houses” by Wassily Kandinsky, whose worth is valued at $20 million at least. Amsterdam’s municipal museum, Stedelijk, acknowledges it was looted but has not offered to compensate the rightful owners, who have sued the museum and lost.

Iran, IAEA begin talks aimed at clarifying source of uranium traces

(JNS) — The International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran have begun talks aimed at obtaining clarifications from the Islamic Republic on the source of uranium traces discovered at undeclared sites, Reuters reported on Monday.

Due to the talks, European powers delayed a decision to use a meeting of the IAEA’s 35-country Board of Governors to pass a resolution criticizing Iran over the matter, according to the report. Such a resolution could have negatively impacted parallel nuclear talks underway between Iran and world powers, aimed at reviving the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal.

Since 2019, IAEA inspectors have found processed uranium traces at three locations not declared by Iran as being related to its nuclear program. At least one of the sites, at Turquzabad, was named by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a secret Iranian nuclear site in 2018, following a Mossad operation to retrieve Iranian nuclear archives. In July 2019, IAEA inspectors visited that site and took samples.

On Monday, Iranian officials said Tehran and world powers made progress towards finding a path to re-enter the JCPOA, which was abandoned by former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2018.

A blast tore through the key Iranian uranium enrichment site at Natanz on April 11, and Tehran has accused Israel of being behind the incident, which an Iranian official claimed had damaged thousands of centrifuges.

Man rams car into Chassidic group walking in Brooklyn section of Williamsburg

(JNS) — A 26-year-old man was arrested in New York City after he hit several Chassidic men with his car on Saturday evening after the end of Shabbat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, N.Y.

According to New York Police Department Det. Sophia Mason, a spokesperson for the office of the deputy commissioner of public information, police responded to a 911 call and upon arrival, “officers discovered five males who came into a contact with a gray Honda SUV which reversed into them. One of the victims, an 82-year-old male, sustained a foot injury and was removed by EMS to Cobble Hill Hospital for treatment.”

Video of the April 17 car-ramming was uploaded to the Internet.

Another video shows, Mini Van arriving, driver coming out, looking around, waiting for people to get behind him wait to cross, backs straight into them, comes out of the car to check how many ppl he hit then getting back into the car & fleeing the scene.

It appeared to show the suspect, identified by police as Shokhobiddin Bakhritdinov, stopping his car at an intersection, getting out and looking around before getting back in, putting his car in reverse and hitting several Jewish men. He then appears to get out of his car before returning and speeding off.

The suspect has been charged with leaving the scene of an accident. The investigation remains ongoing.

Aide for New York city council candidate says Upper West Side ‘too Jewish and white’

(JNS) — The campaign manager for a Democratic New York City Council candidate said last week that Manhattan’s Upper West Side is too white and Jewish, the Jewish Press reported.

Quinn Mootz, who is Jewish, serves as campaign manager for Sara Lind’s run to replace Councilman Helen Rosenthal in the Upper West Side (District 6) in the June 22 Democratic primary. On April 13, Mootz said in a series of Twitter posts, which have since been deleted, that “Jews are not POC [People of Color] for just being jewish sorry.”

Mootz also tweeted, “As of 2018: 10.8 percent of the population is Asian, 4.1 percent black, 14.1 percent hispanic, and 68.4 percent white. So yeah ima go ahead and say the UWS has a diversity problem. Of your 191,000 residents … 130,795 are white.”

Upper West Side resident Steven Dzik said, “I have to assume the campaign manager’s views reflect the candidate’s. Mootz’s comment shows contempt for the residents of the neighborhood she hopes to represent,” the New York Post reported.

“The Upper West Side is not simply predominately white. More than half the white people are Jewish,” he continued. “Jews have been a separate people for a millennia. To simply group Jews as white people comprising one undifferentiated homogenous group is bigoted and is engaging in simplistic stereotyping.”

Jordan Jayson, a spokesperson for the Lind campaign, said Mootz’s comments “are being taken out of context to be used against [her]. They’re liars.”

Lind’s campaign is now officially off Twitter because of the backlash Mootz received.

Israeli scientists find brain’s ‘hunger switch’

By Jon Schiller 

(Israel21C via JNS) — When Hebrew University of Jerusalem medical student Hadar Israeli studied a family with multiple members suffering from severe obesity and plagued with constant hunger, she found that they all shared a common mutation affecting a specific receptor in the brain: Melanocortin Receptor 4, or MC4.

Though scientists have long known that the MC4 receptor was in some way connected to hunger and appetite, Israeli helped uncover just how instrumental it was in regulating our sensations of hunger and fullness.

To further investigate this matter, Israeli turned to Moran Shalev-Benami of the Weizmann Institute’s chemical and structural biology department. Could new advances in electron microscopy help explain how this mutation produces such a devastating effect of constant hunger?

Shalev-Benami decided to launch a study into the structure of MC4, inviting Israeli to join her lab as a visiting scientist.

Together with postdoctoral fellow Oksana Degtjarik, Israeli isolated large quantities of pure MC4 receptors from cell membranes and let them bind with a drug used to treat obesity called Setmelanotide. They then determined MC4’s structure using cryogenic electron microscopy.

The 3D modeling revealed that Setmelanotide activates the MC4 receptor by entering its binding pocket—that is, by directly hitting the molecular switch that signals fullness, even more potently than the natural satiety hormone.

Furthermore, they discovered that when entering the MC4 receptor’s binding pocket, an ion of calcium enters as well, enhancing the drug’s ability to bind to the receptor.

“This was a truly unexpected finding,” said Shalev-Benami. “Apparently, the satiety signal can successfully compete with the hunger signal because it benefits from the assistance of calcium, which helps the brain restore the ‘I’m full’ sensation after we eat.”

The findings may help develop improved and safer anti-obesity drugs that will target the MC4 receptor with greater precision.

The study, published in Science on April 15, included additional researchers from Hebrew University, Weizmann Institute of Science and Queen Mary University of London.

This article was originally published by Israel21c.

After being cut off for payment issues, Israel closes deal for millions more Pfizer vaccines and adds Moderna

By Gabe Friedman

(JTA) — Israel locked down new deals to purchase more Pfizer vaccines and added Moderna doses to its arsenal on Monday, just two weeks after Pfizer had cut off the nation’s vaccine supply over its failure to pay.

The country has the highest vaccination rate in the world at over 50% of civilians, but still needs a final push to reach the threshold of herd immunity, which experts say comes at a vaccination rate of around 70%.

The Hebrew media reported that Israel, a country of some 9 million people, arranged to buy 18 million more doses from Pfizer and Moderna, according to The Times of Israel.

Pfizer had halted a shipment of nearly a million doses that was supposed to arrive on April 4. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted that political infighting over budgetary concerns led to the delay in payment.

“There were some obstacles in Israel that we had to overcome, and we found a way to overcome them,” Netanyahu told reporters Monday.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said last week that people will likely need a COVID-19 booster vaccine shot within a year of their initial vaccination. He has noted that “governments around the world are working on longer-term pandemic preparedness,” with Israel leading the way on that front.