A woman from Brighton has been convicted of theft after stealing a poster of a murdered hostage from a memorial and throwing it in a bin.
Fiona Monro, 58, who removed the poster in February 2024, told the court that it should never have been put up, claiming it was “inflammatory” and there to “justify the genocide”, according to Brighton and Hove News.
The memorial in Palmeira Square was dedicated to Israeli hostage Tsachi Idan, who was abducted on October 7 and murdered in captivity after Hamas terrorists killed his daughter in front of him. Idan's cousin, Adam Ma’anit lives in Hove.
In court, Monro said: “The board was clearly there to justify the genocide that was happening.
“A large, laminated board with a photograph of a hostage was highly inflammatory [and] many people in that community clearly found it very upsetting to have that constantly thrust in our face daily.
“I gather that there have been 50 occasions when it was removed. One can argue that the people of Brighton and Hove are angry about this so-called memorial being there.”
Monro claimed she didn’t know there was a “Brighton connection” to the poster.
She also spoke of her husband, prominent Jewish anti-Zionist campaigner Tony Greenstein, and said that the memorial “didn’t represent our feelings”.
The poster was eventually retrieved from the promenade bin by Ma’anit and his wife, Heidi Bachram, and put back up.
At the hearing, Judge Stephen Mooney said: “This is not... a case of the state seeking to prosecute the defendant disproportionately for expressing her own views or otherwise interfering with her rights.
“It is a case of the state prosecuting the defendant for putting her views above those of others and causing them wholly unnecessary distress by so doing.”
The jury found Monro unanimously guilty of theft for the removal of the poster, but not guilty of criminal damage.
She was handed an 18-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay £1,200 prosecution costs.
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