Radical Haredi paper managers to be indicted for blackmail

The heads of an extremist Haredi paper called HaPeles are going to face charges for blackmailing businesses into advertising with them:

The Tel Aviv District Attorney’s Office has decided to indict eight workers from the Hapeles newspaper for conspiracy to commit a crime, harassment, and blackmail.

Hapeles is the mouthpiece of the extremist Jerusalem Faction, which is connected with Rabbi Shmuel Auerbach and has been locked in a power struggle with the mainstream haredi community ever since the death of Torah Sage Rabbi Sholom Elyashiv in 2012. The Jerusalem Faction considers Bnei Brak-based Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman - the spiritual leader of the non-hasidic Lithuanian haredi community to be an illegitimate leader and has rejected his authority, splitting the hierarchical haredi world.

According to police, Hapeles CEO Natan Grossman and employees Shmuel Elyashiv, Avraham Trager, Chaim Yavrov, Netanel Shtapfer, Shabtai Fein, Yisrael Israel Tropper and Moshe Berliman embarked on a deliberate harassment campaign against haredi business owners after major haredi rabbis banned advertising with Hapeles, causing the publication's revenues to drop.

On a related note, the government stopped advertising with the same paper because of their anti-army stance:

Israel's Government Advertising Agency has decided to yank all government advertising from the haredi Hapeles publication in wake of the newspaper's extremist stance against haredi IDF soldiers.

The move was approved by the Justice, Defense, and Internal Security Ministers, who decided that the government should not be supporting Hapeles when it has been running virulent incitement against haredi IDF soldiers for years.

They should've been more careful about advertising with them, and checked the content of their paper earlier to see what their positions were. They're but one of the reasons why there's been riots in Mea Shearim and vandalism. That's not real journalism any more than the leftarded news companies they actually have a lot in common with.