israel sentences arab to 18months for consentual sex

OutOfBreath

Not against the law to be a slimeball. He should get his, but I would say a good kick in the nuts from the woman accusing him would have been sufficient to satisfy me.

Peace
Dan

Pepe Silvia

the guy tells a different story...he claims he met her on the street, she struck up a conversation with him, she asked his name which is a common nickname for jews and then she asked him for a ride....he's still a dick because he was married but according to him a serious relationship or ethnicity never came up.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/ju ... ion-charge



Saber Kushour: 'My conviction for "rape by deception" has ruined my life'

Saber Kushour, an Arab convicted of 'rape by deception' of a Jewish woman, gives his side of the story in an exclusive interview


Saber Kushour apologises as he asks his guests to move the plastic chairs on his breeze-block balcony a little closer to the door to his house. If he were to sit where they are now, he explains, the electronic tag attached to his ankle would set off an alarm.

Kushour's edginess is understandable – he is recalling a 15-minute encounter almost two years ago which he says "has destroyed my life".

Last week the married father of two from east Jerusalem was sentenced to 18 months in jail for the "rape by deception" of a Jewish woman who claimed she would not have had sex with him had she known he was an Arab. What might have been a tawdry episode – casting neither Kushour nor the woman in a favourable light – exploded into a debate in Israel about racism, sexual mores and justice.

"I am paying the price for a mistake that she made," Kushour, 30, told the Observer. "I was shocked at the sentence – it shows a very vivid and clear racism." The message from the judge, he says, was that "because you are an Arab and you didn't make that clear, we are going to punish you".

In his verdict, Judge Zvi Segal conceded that it was not "a classical rape by force". He added: "If she hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated. The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls."

At his home in Sharafat, where he is confined while awaiting an appeal, Kushour tells a different story. The woman has not been identified and has not gone public with her account.

Kushour was buying cigarettes in September 2008 when an unexpected opportunity presented itself for a casual sexual encounter. "Any person in my shoes would have done the same thing," he says.

A woman in her 20s struck up a conversation as he left the shop to return to his job delivering legal papers around Jerusalem by scooter. "She said 'you have a nice bike' and other things which I don't remember." Within minutes, he says, he realised that her interest was not confined to small talk.

Kushour speaks fluent, unaccented Hebrew, as do many Palestinians living and working in Jerusalem. The woman asked his name and Kushour replied "Dudu" – a common Israeli name. "Since I was a kid everyone calls me Dudu – even my wife calls me Dudu. It's a nickname." At no point, he says, did the woman – who gave her name as Maya – ask if he was Jewish, although he has acknowledged that he said he was single.

The pair went to a small roof area in a nearby office block. "When we were having sex, she was worried that someone would see us, but she never told me to stop. She was more than willing – she initiated it."

It has been suggested that Kushour presented himself as a bachelor interested in a long-term relationship. If that had been Maya's concern, Kushour points out, she might have asked him more about his background. After the brief encounter, Kushour tapped Maya's mobile number into his phone and left. "I didn't treat her like garbage – this is what she wanted."

Unknown to him, Maya contacted the police after the encounter to lodge a complaint. Kushour says he doesn't know how or when she realised he was not Jewish. The woman was given a medical examination, presented in court, which showed, according to Kushour, no signs of force or injury.

Six weeks later Kushour was idly flicking through numbers in his mobile's address book. "I saw 'Maya' and I thought 'who is Maya?' I had already forgotten about her. I rang the number to see who it was, and then I realised it was the girl. I said 'Can I see you?' and we arranged to meet."

Maya didn't show up and didn't respond to Kushour's calls and texts. But, crucially, she now had a vital piece of information for the pursuit of her complaint – his contact details.

Three days later Kushour received a phone call from the police. "They told me I had a problem and to come to the police station." He was interrogated for five to six hours, without a lawyer.

In the final hour of questioning, the police began to mention a rape claim. Eventually Kushour was handcuffed and taken to a cell. Over three days the questioning continued. "This was the hardest moment of my entire life," says Kushour. "I didn't have a clue what they were going to do." On the third day, Kushour was taken to court – by this time represented by a lawyer found by his brother – and charged with rape. He spent the next two months in prison and since then has been electronically tagged and confined to his home. The case came to court last week. His lawyer has told him that, because of the publicity surrounding the case, the appeal may be expedited. In the meantime, says Kushour, "I can't leave the house, I can't work, I can't feed my children."

Kushour's conviction has transfixed Israel. Some see echoes of a primeval – and racist – instinct to protect "our" women against outside marauders. Others are outraged at what they see as a blatant injustice, pointing to a backdrop of widespread, systematic and – some say – growing discrimination against Arabs who make up 20% of Israel's population.

"This is a most amazing decision by the court," says Tamar Hermann of the Israel Democracy Institute. "Deception is one thing – but to be convicted of rape?" It has, she says, "struck a sensitive chord in the Israeli mainstream of Arabs pretending to be Jews."

The issue of identity is paramount in a land where both communities regard each other with suspicion and hostility.

Yuval Yonay, a sociology professor at Haifa University, in one of Israel's few mixed cities, says Kushour's behaviour "might be improper but it is not rape".

He says that in 16 years of teaching at a university where 20-25% of the student population is Arab, he has "never even heard of a mixed relationship". Discrimination against Arabs is, he says, evident at all levels.

Some have defended the verdict. "We all have different characteristics, and it is a person's right to have sexual relations with a person knowing the facts about those characteristics," Dana Pugach of the Noga Centre for Victims of Crime told the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Kushour says he has had a lot of support over the past week from Israeli Jews. "The problem is not with the people themselves, but those in power," he says. "I just want justice."

Whatever the outcome of his appeal, his brief encounter with Maya has turned his life upside down. His relationship with his wife has been severely tested. "I asked her last night to forgive me. She said yes, but I can see the pain and hurt in her eyes."

• This article was corrected on Sunday 25 July 2010. We referred to Saber Kushour as an Arab Israeli but Kushour is Palestinian. This has been corrected.

yosi

A large story in Haaretz came out over the weekend about this case. Apparently the testimony of the female complainant has been under a court imposed gag order and was just made public. Basically, this guy (Kashur) was originally arrested on charges of forcible rape (apparently he picked this girl up, took her to a building he claimed was his office, and then forcibly raped her in the stairwell, leaving her naked and bleeding). The woman, however, has a history of sexual abuse by her father, and the prosecution didn't feel that she would be able to hold it together on the stand under defense-cross, so they offered to plea Kashur out for the lesser charge of rape by deception. The defense agreed to the plea, but then the media got hold of the story at sentencing, and all of a sudden the story is about Israel's racist judicial system, and the prosecutors couldn't do anything cause they already had a signed plea bargain, and the complainants original testimony was under gag.

...Which just goes to show you once again how making assumptions makes an ass out of u and me.

catefrances

rape by deception??? what an asinine charge.

TriumphantAngel

yosi wrote:

A large story in Haaretz came out over the weekend about this case. Apparently the testimony of the female complainant has been under a court imposed gag order and was just made public. Basically, this guy (Kashur) was originally arrested on charges of forcible rape (apparently he picked this girl up, took her to a building he claimed was his office, and then forcibly raped her in the stairwell, leaving her naked and bleeding). The woman, however, has a history of sexual abuse by her father, and the prosecution didn't feel that she would be able to hold it together on the stand under defense-cross, so they offered to plea Kashur out for the lesser charge of rape by deception. The defense agreed to the plea, but then the media got hold of the story at sentencing, and all of a sudden the story is about Israel's racist judicial system, and the prosecutors couldn't do anything cause they already had a signed plea bargain, and the complainants original testimony was under gag.

...Which just goes to show you once again how making assumptions makes an ass out of u and me.

do you have a link to your story?

i just want to see if you deliberately left out the part where, according to Deputy Prosecutor Danny Wittman, the woman had made numerous allegations of sexual assault in the past, with some resulting in confessions and convictions and others not.

i wonder if they were worried this allegation of rape may again, not result in a conviciton? Wittman also said, they wanted to keep the case from going to trial where she’d be forced to relive "another" traumatic experience.

considering she had made numerous allegations of sexual assualt in the past, i wonder why they decided one more would be 'too traumatic"?

yosi

I don't, I read the article in the print version, but clearly you've seen an article on the story on your own. The point is that this guy wasn't convicted because of some sort of racist sentiment. He was facing a full on rape charge and agreed to plea to a lesser offense.

Commy

if she was fine with consensual sex with a jew, later to press charges once it was found out he was arab...that's pretty fucked up.




and a justice system that backs up that mentality....racist..bottom line.

TriumphantAngel

yosi wrote:

I don't, I read the article in the print version, but clearly you've seen an article on the story on your own. The point is that this guy wasn't convicted because of some sort of racist sentiment. He was facing a full on rape charge and agreed to plea to a lesser offense.

from the initial media release...

"If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated," the judges said in their ruling.

as for racist sentiment Yosi, there's plenty of proof of that already. Jews are legally forbidden to intermarry in Israel. Israel, has obstructed intermarriage between its Jewish and Arab citizens by refusing to recognise such marriages unless they are performed abroad.

why's that again?

Commy

TriumphantAngel wrote:

yosi wrote:

I don't, I read the article in the print version, but clearly you've seen an article on the story on your own. The point is that this guy wasn't convicted because of some sort of racist sentiment. He was facing a full on rape charge and agreed to plea to a lesser offense.

from the initial media release...
"If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated," the judges said in their ruling.

as for racist sentiment Yosi, there's plenty of proof of that already. Jews are legally forbidden to intermarry in Israel. Israel, has obstructed intermarriage between its Jewish and Arab citizens by refusing to recognise such marriages unless they are performed abroad.

why's that again?

fucking elitism.


like why do people sometimes have to convert to judaism before they can marry a jew?


its like they aren't good enough unless they are jewish too.
'

religion is so stupid. talking about things that happened (maybe) 2ooo years ago like it has some relevance on your life today.

"we were persecuted"

no actually you weren't. you were off on your iphone updating your pointless twitter account, THEY were persecuted.

yosi

Dude, what are you even responding to?!

Hugh Freaking Dillon

I know a LOT of guys that should be in jail right now then. Myself included for one such offence when I was 18.

yosi

You violently raped someone? Cause then yeah, you should be in prison.

Hugh Freaking Dillon

WTF is wrong with you? no, I was referring to being less-than-truthful with a woman about my intentions to get sex. That's how ridiculous this charge is.

yosi wrote:

You violently raped someone? Cause then yeah, you should be in prison.

Hugh Freaking Dillon

maybe QOTSA should redo Make It Wit Chu, and call it Make It Wit Jew:

"I'll only make it
I'll only make it with Jews

(anytime, anywhere....)"

yosi

I figured. In all seriousness I just looked up rape by deception on wiki. Apparently Mass. and Cali. have similar laws (they call it "rape by fraud"). There was a case in MA where a woman was allegedly having sex with a man she thought was her husband, but in reality it was her husbands identical twin...which is, I think we can all agree, a little different than your run of the mill fudging of the truth to get laid.

Hugh Freaking Dillon

obviously, that's different from what I'm talking about, and is also different from the case in the original post. all this guy did was go along with her thinking he was Jewish. Big fuckin' deal. If she was going to hop into bed with someone after just meeting them, then she can't complain when she finds out he wasn't who she thought he was.

If he can get charged with rape, she should get charged with being a stupid slut.

yosi wrote:

I figured. In all seriousness I just looked up rape by deception on wiki. Apparently Mass. and Cali. have similar laws (they call it "rape by fraud"). There was a case in MA where a woman was allegedly having sex with a man she thought was her husband, but in reality it was her husbands identical twin...which is, I think we can all agree, a little different than your run of the mill fudging of the truth to get laid.

yosi

Dude, you obviously haven't read the entire thread. Here's the summary version from wikipedia:

An alleged case of rape by deception that drew “international outrage” when first reported later turned out to have been a plea bargain in which the records were sealed by the judge to protect the victim of a violent rape. [4] [5]
Sabar Kashur, a Palestinian Muslim accepted a plea bargain on the reduced charge of rape by deception in 2010. After Israel was widely condemned in the international press,[6] the judge unsealed the records to show that this had in fact been a plea bargain in a case in which Kashur was originally charged with violent rape of a woman who he left naked, bruised and bleeding in an apartment building stairway. [5] The court sent the victim, a woman who was also a victim of sexual abuse by her father, to a mental hospital for treatment and convicted the rapist on a lesser charge. [4] According to The Guardian, prosecutors agreed to the plea bargain in order to spare the “traumatized” victim a long cross-examination

polaris_x

yosi wrote:

Dude, you obviously haven't read the entire thread. Here's the summary version from wikipedia:

An alleged case of rape by deception that drew “international outrage” when first reported later turned out to have been a plea bargain in which the records were sealed by the judge to protect the victim of a violent rape. [4] [5]
Sabar Kashur, a Palestinian Muslim accepted a plea bargain on the reduced charge of rape by deception in 2010. After Israel was widely condemned in the international press,[6] the judge unsealed the records to show that this had in fact been a plea bargain in a case in which Kashur was originally charged with violent rape of a woman who he left naked, bruised and bleeding in an apartment building stairway. [5] The court sent the victim, a woman who was also a victim of sexual abuse by her father, to a mental hospital for treatment and convicted the rapist on a lesser charge. [4] According to The Guardian, prosecutors agreed to the plea bargain in order to spare the “traumatized” victim a long cross-examination

you should also point out that the victim has filed numerous charges in the past ... and that every time she gets cross-examined by defence lawyers, she is typically confused ...

so, we get a guy who had no prior convictions and a woman who has a troubled past, who was formerly a prostitute, and who has accused many others of rape ... i'm not passing judgement as I don't know the details but it's not as one sided as your post makes it out to be ...

yosi

Perhaps. But when a woman claims to be violently raped, and the police find her naked, bruised, and bleeding in a stairwell, and the hospital finds evidence of forcible sex (vaginal tearing, etc.) I'm inclined towards believing the alleged victim, and frankly I think you would be as well if this case weren't caught up in the politics of Israel-Palestine.

polaris_x

yosi wrote:

Perhaps. But when a woman claims to be violently raped, and the police find her naked, bruised, and bleeding in a stairwell, and the hospital finds evidence of forcible sex (vaginal tearing, etc.) I'm inclined towards believing the alleged victim, and frankly I think you would be as well if this case weren't caught up in the politics of Israel-Palestine.

please forward where there is proof of forcible sex ... from what i read - it appears to be only heresay ... where are the records of the ambulance picking her up right after? ...

all i know is that if i violently raped someone and got a plea bargain ... i wouldn't go out and create more publicity around the event ... but that's just me ...