israel sentences arab to 18months for consentual sex

Man, I'm going to have to stop pretending to be Tiger Woods. Didn't know you could go to jail for that.

rafie wrote:

Pepe, for once I agree with you. I read this the other day and my mouth dropped open. But you do realize that this was one judge and not a whole country that convicted the poor sucker, right?

one racist judge, mirroring the thoughts of many others apparently. disgusting.

Israel bids to stop interracial dating

By Jonathan Cook, Middle-East Online – 25 Sept 2009
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=34559

Israel sets up special team to identify young Jewish women dating Arab men to stop them

NAZARETH, Israel

A local authority in Israel has announced that it is establishing a special team of youth counsellors and psychologists whose job it will be to identify young Jewish women who are dating Arab men and “rescue” them.

The move by the municipality of Petah Tikva, a city close to Tel Aviv, is the latest in a series of separate – and little discussed – initiatives from official bodies, rabbis, private organisations and groups of Israeli residents to try to prevent interracial dating and marriage.

In a related development, the Israeli media reported this month that residents of Pisgat Zeev, a large Jewish settlement in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, had formed a vigilante-style patrol to stop Arab men from mixing with local Jewish girls.

Hostility to intimate relationships developing across Israel’s ethnic divide is shared by many Israeli Jews, who regard such behaviour as a threat to the state’s Jewishness. One of the few polls on the subject, in 2007, found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage should be equated with “national treason”.

Since the state’s founding in 1948, analysts have noted, a series of legal and administrative measures have been taken by Israel to limit the possibilities of close links developing between Jewish and Arab citizens, the latter comprising a fifth of the population.


Largely segregated communities and separate education systems mean that there are few opportunities for young Arabs and Jews to become familiarised with each other. Even in the handful of “mixed cities”, Arab residents are usually confined to separate neighbourhoods.

In addition, civil marriage is banned in Israel, meaning that in the small number of cases where Jews and Arabs want to wed, they can do so only by leaving the country for a ceremony abroad. The marriage is recognised on the couple’s return.


Dr Yuval Yonay, a sociologist at Haifa University, said the number of interracial marriages was “too small to be studied”. “Separation between Jews and Arabs is so ingrained in Israeli society, it is surprising that anyone manages to escape these central controls.”


The team in Petah Tikva, a Jewish city of 200,000 residents, was created in direct response to news that two Jewish girls, aged 17 and 19, were accompanying a group of young Arab men when they allegedly beat a Jewish man, Leonard Karp, to death last month on a Tel Aviv beach. The older girl was from Petah Tikva.


The girls’ involvement with the Arab youths has revived general concern that a once-firm taboo against interracial dating is beginning to erode among some young people.


In sentiments widely shared, Hezi Hakak, a spokesman for Petah Tikva municipality, said “Russian girls”, young Jewish women whose parents arrived in Israel over the past two decades, since the former Soviet Union collapsed, were particularly vulnerable to the attention of Arab men.


Dr Yonay said Russian women were less closed to the idea of relationships with Arab men because they “did not undergo the religious and Zionist education” to which more established Israeli Jews were subject.


Mr Hakak said the municipality had created a hotline that parents and friends of the Jewish women could use to inform on them.


“We can’t tell the girls what to do but we can send a psychologist to their home to offer them and their parents advice,” he said.


Motti Zaft, the deputy mayor, told the Ynet website that the municipality was also cracking down on city homeowners who illegally subdivide apartments to rent them cheaply to single Arab men looking for work in the Tel Aviv area. He estimated that several hundred Arab men had moved into the city as a result.


Petah Tikva’s hostility to Arab men mixing with local Jewish women is shared by other communities.


In Pisgat Zeev, a settlement of 40,000 Jews, some 35 Jewish men are reported to belong to a patrol known as “Fire for Judaism” that tries to stop interracial dating.


Unusually for a settlement, Pisgat Zeev has attracted a tiny but growing population of Arab families, both from East Jerusalem and from inside Israel. Because Pisgat Zeev sits within Jerusalem’s municipal borders, Arabs with Israeli residency rights can live there as long as Jewish settlers are willing to rent to them.


One member, who identified himself as Moshe to the Jerusalem Post newspaper, said: “Our goal is to be in contact with these girls and try to explain to them the dangers of what they’re getting themselves into. In the last 10 years, 60 girls from Pisgat Zeev have gone into [Palestinian] villages [in the West Bank]. And most of them aren’t heard from after that.”


He denied that violence or threats were used against Arab men.

Last year, the municipality of Kiryat Gat, a town of 50,000 Jews in southern Israel, launched a programme in schools to warn Jewish girls of the dangers of dating local Bedouin men. The girls were shown a video titled Sleeping with the Enemy, which describes mixed couples as an “unnatural phenomenon”.


Haim Shalom, head of the municipality’s welfare department, is filmed saying: “The girls, in their innocence, go with the exploitative Arab.”


In 2004, posters sprang up all over the northern town of Safed warning Jewish women that dating Arab men would lead to “beatings, hard drugs, prostitution and crime”.

Safed’s chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, told a local newspaper that the “seducing” of Jewish girls was “another form of war” by Arab men.


Both Kiryat Gat and Safed’s campaigns were supported by a religious organisation called Yad L’achim, which runs an anti-assimilation team publicly dedicated to “saving” Jewish women.


According to its website, the organisation receives more than 100 calls a month about Jewish women living with Arab men, both in Israel and the West Bank. It launches “military-like rescues [of the women] from hostile Arab villages” in co-ordination with the police and army.


“The Jewish soul is a precious, all-too-rare resource, and we are not prepared to give up on even a single one,” says the website.

When the Arabs stop beating women for walking with a man she is not married to then complain. When the Arabs stop treating woman like they are dogs then complain.

For the record I don't agree with the result of the thread topic. However they should not complain until they themselves ensure equality.

unsung wrote:

When the Arabs stop beating women for walking with a man she is not married to then complain. When the Arabs stop treating woman like they are dogs then complain.

For the record I don't agree with the result of the thread topic. However they should not complain until they themselves ensure equality.

i can't believe you just wrote that.

really, i cant.

It appears all nations, societies and cultures are becoming more polarised in their hatred and bias. Just when the world needs leadership and love we see more examples of hatred - people not learning from history.

Dems v GOP, Liberal v Labor, Tory v Labor, Gay v Straight, Arab v Jew v Black v Latino v White v Asian, 'Football v Football, 'Terror' v 'Freedom', Rich v Poor,, Wall St v Main St, FoxNews v Sanity...

Fuck, I just hope it never get to Man v Woman: As Joe Jackson sang 'If there's war between the sexes then there'll be no people left...'

Real Men - Joe Jackson (1982)

Take your mind back
I don't know when
Sometime when it always seemed
To be just us and them
Girls that wore pink
Boys that wore blue
Boys that always grew up better men
Than me and you

What's a man now
What's a man mean
Is he rough or is he rugged
Cultural and clean?
Now it's all changed
It's got to change more
We think it's getting better
But nobody's really sure

And so it goes, go round again
But now and then we wonder who the real men are

See the nice boys
Dancing in pairs
Golden earring, golden tan
Blow-wave in the hair
Sure they're all straight
Straight as a line
All the guys are macho
See their leather shine

You don't want to sound dumb
Don't want to offend
So don't call me a faggot
Not unless you are a friend
Then if you're tall, handsome and strong
You can wear the uniform and I could play along

And so it goes, go round again
But now and then we wonder who the real men are

Time to get scared
Time to change plan
Don't know how to treat a lady
Don't know how to be a man
Time to admit
What you call defeat
'cause there's women running past you now
And you just drag your feet

Man makes a gun
Man goes to war
Man can kill and man can drink
And man can take a whore
Kill all the blacks
Kill all the reds
If there's war between the sexes
Then there will be no people left

And so it goes, go round again
But now and then we wonder who the real men are

TriumphantAngel wrote:

show previous quotes

rafie wrote:

Pepe, for once I agree with you. I read this the other day and my mouth dropped open. But you do realize that this was one judge and not a whole country that convicted the poor sucker, right?

one racist judge, mirroring the thoughts of many others apparently. disgusting.

Israel bids to stop interracial dating

By Jonathan Cook, Middle-East Online – 25 Sept 2009
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=34559

Israel sets up special team to identify young Jewish women dating Arab men to stop them

NAZARETH, Israel

A local authority in Israel has announced that it is establishing a special team of youth counsellors and psychologists whose job it will be to identify young Jewish women who are dating Arab men and “rescue” them.

The move by the municipality of Petah Tikva, a city close to Tel Aviv, is the latest in a series of separate – and little discussed – initiatives from official bodies, rabbis, private organisations and groups of Israeli residents to try to prevent interracial dating and marriage.

In a related development, the Israeli media reported this month that residents of Pisgat Zeev, a large Jewish settlement in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, had formed a vigilante-style patrol to stop Arab men from mixing with local Jewish girls.

Hostility to intimate relationships developing across Israel’s ethnic divide is shared by many Israeli Jews, who regard such behaviour as a threat to the state’s Jewishness. One of the few polls on the subject, in 2007, found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage should be equated with “national treason”.

Since the state’s founding in 1948, analysts have noted, a series of legal and administrative measures have been taken by Israel to limit the possibilities of close links developing between Jewish and Arab citizens, the latter comprising a fifth of the population.


Largely segregated communities and separate education systems mean that there are few opportunities for young Arabs and Jews to become familiarised with each other. Even in the handful of “mixed cities”, Arab residents are usually confined to separate neighbourhoods.

In addition, civil marriage is banned in Israel, meaning that in the small number of cases where Jews and Arabs want to wed, they can do so only by leaving the country for a ceremony abroad. The marriage is recognised on the couple’s return.


Dr Yuval Yonay, a sociologist at Haifa University, said the number of interracial marriages was “too small to be studied”. “Separation between Jews and Arabs is so ingrained in Israeli society, it is surprising that anyone manages to escape these central controls.”


The team in Petah Tikva, a Jewish city of 200,000 residents, was created in direct response to news that two Jewish girls, aged 17 and 19, were accompanying a group of young Arab men when they allegedly beat a Jewish man, Leonard Karp, to death last month on a Tel Aviv beach. The older girl was from Petah Tikva.


The girls’ involvement with the Arab youths has revived general concern that a once-firm taboo against interracial dating is beginning to erode among some young people.


In sentiments widely shared, Hezi Hakak, a spokesman for Petah Tikva municipality, said “Russian girls”, young Jewish women whose parents arrived in Israel over the past two decades, since the former Soviet Union collapsed, were particularly vulnerable to the attention of Arab men.


Dr Yonay said Russian women were less closed to the idea of relationships with Arab men because they “did not undergo the religious and Zionist education” to which more established Israeli Jews were subject.


Mr Hakak said the municipality had created a hotline that parents and friends of the Jewish women could use to inform on them.


“We can’t tell the girls what to do but we can send a psychologist to their home to offer them and their parents advice,” he said.


Motti Zaft, the deputy mayor, told the Ynet website that the municipality was also cracking down on city homeowners who illegally subdivide apartments to rent them cheaply to single Arab men looking for work in the Tel Aviv area. He estimated that several hundred Arab men had moved into the city as a result.


Petah Tikva’s hostility to Arab men mixing with local Jewish women is shared by other communities.


In Pisgat Zeev, a settlement of 40,000 Jews, some 35 Jewish men are reported to belong to a patrol known as “Fire for Judaism” that tries to stop interracial dating.


Unusually for a settlement, Pisgat Zeev has attracted a tiny but growing population of Arab families, both from East Jerusalem and from inside Israel. Because Pisgat Zeev sits within Jerusalem’s municipal borders, Arabs with Israeli residency rights can live there as long as Jewish settlers are willing to rent to them.


One member, who identified himself as Moshe to the Jerusalem Post newspaper, said: “Our goal is to be in contact with these girls and try to explain to them the dangers of what they’re getting themselves into. In the last 10 years, 60 girls from Pisgat Zeev have gone into [Palestinian] villages [in the West Bank]. And most of them aren’t heard from after that.”


He denied that violence or threats were used against Arab men.

Last year, the municipality of Kiryat Gat, a town of 50,000 Jews in southern Israel, launched a programme in schools to warn Jewish girls of the dangers of dating local Bedouin men. The girls were shown a video titled Sleeping with the Enemy, which describes mixed couples as an “unnatural phenomenon”.


Haim Shalom, head of the municipality’s welfare department, is filmed saying: “The girls, in their innocence, go with the exploitative Arab.”


In 2004, posters sprang up all over the northern town of Safed warning Jewish women that dating Arab men would lead to “beatings, hard drugs, prostitution and crime”.

Safed’s chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, told a local newspaper that the “seducing” of Jewish girls was “another form of war” by Arab men.


Both Kiryat Gat and Safed’s campaigns were supported by a religious organisation called Yad L’achim, which runs an anti-assimilation team publicly dedicated to “saving” Jewish women.


According to its website, the organisation receives more than 100 calls a month about Jewish women living with Arab men, both in Israel and the West Bank. It launches “military-like rescues [of the women] from hostile Arab villages” in co-ordination with the police and army.


“The Jewish soul is a precious, all-too-rare resource, and we are not prepared to give up on even a single one,” says the website.

I actually live in Petach Tikva and never heard of this initiative before I started coming to the moving train. Just goes to show you how serious it actually was.

Pepe Silvia wrote:

it was actually three judges that decided this, not just a single person

I just read another article on the subject (it is in hebrew, so I am not putting a link here) and it turns out that the punishment was part of a plea bargain signed by the accused (the minimum punishment for someone accused of rape in Israel is 4 years in prison). So it looks like the judges just approved the deal and were not the ones to decide the punishment. Despite that, I still think this is messed up.

TriumphantAngel wrote:

show previous quotes

rafie wrote:

Pepe Silvia wrote:

it was actually three judges that decided this, not just a single person

I just read another article on the subject (it is in hebrew, so I am not putting a link here) and it turns out that the punishment was part of a plea bargain signed by the accused (the minimum punishment for someone accused of rape in Israel is 4 years in prison). So it looks like the judges just approved the deal and were not the ones to decide the punishment. Despite that, I still think this is messed up.

good morning,

i'm from the hasbara department of the Israeli foreign ministry.

love

rafie.

Do you really find it so hard to believe that people have different ideas and thoughts than you? I have continually tried to answer your posts and questions to me in a polite, direct and informative manner, little did I know I was dealing with an immature troll. Have a good weekend, I'm done with you.

rafie wrote:

show previous quotes

Pepe Silvia wrote:

it was actually three judges that decided this, not just a single person

I just read another article on the subject (it is in hebrew, so I am not putting a link here) and it turns out that the punishment was part of a plea bargain signed by the accused (the minimum punishment for someone accused of rape in Israel is 4 years in prison). So it looks like the judges just approved the deal and were not the ones to decide the punishment. Despite that, I still think this is messed up.

The point is there should not have been any plea bargaining because this man should not have been arrested. The judges could have just let him go - but of course they wouldn't.

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


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

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."