Israel faces a perplexing conundrum. How to absorb potentially hostile citizens into the population without a peep of discrimination. Until Arabs give up vowing to eliminate Israel it won’t go away. We face a similarly intractable problem, albeit on a different scale. You may or may not believe that Israel is no more racist than any other country, and very much less than many.
The BBC perpetuates the theme that Israel is a racist state.
Being labelled racist is as bad as being labelled rapist. Another story that has been subjected to the BBC’s selective editing is the ‘rape by deception’ case that is doubly newsworthy as it concerns twin topics at the pinnacle of newsworthiness, race and rape.
An Arab Israeli has been sentenced to 18 months in jail. He was convicted of the curious crime of rape by deception. An Israeli woman discovered that the status of the stranger with whom she had had consensual sex was neither Jew nor eligible bachelor, as he had apparently led her to believe; he was an Arab. So she went to the police, as you do, or in other countries, probably don’t.
The BBC presents this case on the web page insinuating it’s a clear demonstration of Israel’s racism. The very idea of sex with an Arab is tantamount to rape, they imply. Only in Israel could there be a law against rape by deception, only in Israel could there be a jail sentence for pretending to be a Jew, and only an Arab could be convicted of this crime, because if he was a Jew pretending to be an Arab, no-one would care.
In Israel this case has caused a stir too. Many Israelis think this law is ridiculous. That’s a bit like in tolerant racially harmonious Britain, where many Brits find certain laws ridiculous.
However, the story is many faceted. The BBC has spun it their way, and Edward Stourton on the Sunday Programme was taken by surprise when he set out to prove, in best BBC fashion, how racist Israelis are. He bit off more than he could chew when he interviewed Daily Mail’s Jerusalem correspondent Matthew Kalman. Off he goes:
“Let’s be absolutely clear about this Matthew, there’s no question that the sex was consensual, it’s simply because he lied about being Jewish that he is now convicted of rape, is that right?”
“Yes Ed, the Israelis are so disgusted by the thought of having sex with Arabs that they have made a special law that interprets it as rape, the racist bastards” he replied.
Only joking. He didn’t really say that at all. But Ed was in his stride, and continued:
“And in this case it wasn’t that he lied about his wealth or anything of that kind, or indeed the fact that he was married which I think that he was, it was the fact that he lied about being Jewish when he was in fact an Arab.”
Hang on a minute, said Matthew, it wasn’t like that at all. He’s married with two children. That’s what the court emphasised, and that was what led to the conviction. But the law is controversial, and many Israelis, including the mainstream Israeli media sympathised with Mr Kashur the accused, and because of their support he now feels more a part of the country than before.
“Ahh!” said Ed, with a little wounded yelp or two. But undaunted, he persisted with the racist theme and asked Matthew to tell us all about the right-wing racist proposal for an oath of allegiance.
However, Matthew Kalman took the wind out of Ed’s sails a second time, patiently explaining that there is a perennial debate about how to define the rights of non Jewish minorities in Israel, and the new citizenship law might not even contain anything about an oath of allegiance.
There are several other non BBC articles about this case, and the fact that the deception was about the man’s race means it has a racial element. The usual suspects seize upon this and present it as a straightforward case of racial discrimination, but it’s clearly much more complicated. In simplifying this and packaging it to appeal to the audience-it-prepared-earlier, the BBC is only doing what comes naturally. Many aspects of the case are concerning, not least of which was the woman’s odd behaviour. But in this country some feminist ideas about rape have led to situations where a woman can allege rape if she simply regrets what she did last night. It’s a perplexing conundrum altogether.
I may be wrong, but I’m sure that the two met as a result of the woman placing an ad in a newspaper or using a dating agency where the woman stipulated she wanted to meet a JEWISH man. I don’t believe it was a chance meeting in the street as the media seems to be spinning it.
As I say, I may be wrong, but if it’s true that the woman had made that stipulation prior to the meeting then it is indeed a clear case of deception on the part of the Arab.
I don’t think there has been any doubt that it was deception. The controversy was because the charge and conviction was for rape, not fraud, or deception. I mean, it’s certainly a strange law, and a strange interpretation of the crime of rape.
We did away with the old breech of promise law I think, but there are some new-fangled feminist based interpretations of rape in the UK, where the woman suddenly withdraws her consent or changes her mind abruptly or retrospectively; the accused then states that the woman gave the impression it was consensual, or he genuinely believed she had. Then it boils down to one person’s word against another’s, and what the judge had for breakfast.
This cheating married impostor did violate the woman, took advantage of someone unbelievably gullible and foolish. I think the fact that she sought a serious romantic relationship, and one of the judges said:
“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. When the very basis of trust between human beings drops, especially when the matters at hand are so intimate, sensitive and fateful, the court is required to stand firmly at the side of the victims — actual and potential — to protect their wellbeing. Otherwise, they will be used, manipulated and misled, while paying only a tolerable and symbolic price.”
should have been enough to stop the BBC presenting this as a straightforward matter of Israel’s racism. After all, shouldn’t the left wing feminist BBC sympathise with this human rights type of legislation? I suppose the mission to demonise israel overrides all that.
It has been reported that they had consensual sexual intercourse. However, she had advertised for a Jew and had the intercourse because he deliberately deceived her about being a Jew. Had she known that he wasn’t a Jew, she wouldn’t have had the intercourse. On that basis, I presume under the law it wasn’t interpreted as consensual intercourse. She didn’t consent to having intercourse with an Arab. She was conned into it but the offence is more than merely a case of deception.
Not something you should get locked up for, surely. How many men have told a woman they love her just so she’ll part her legs for them? Should they be put in jail to?
Taking the BBC imperative out of this for a moment (that which beats Israel and Israelis with every stick it can find), I still can’t think of this judgment as anything other than bigoted and the law behind it poor..
Men and women have been tricking each other into bed since time immemorial – and there seems be no question here that the woman consented to sex, therefore Caveat Emptor seems to be the moral.
I suppose the only test would be whether the outcome would be the same if the origin of the parties were reversed.
All these points have been argued by the Israeli public who seem to have concluded that the rape conviction was all wrong, and they seem to have sympathised with the accused.
It may very well be that this case would never have come to court if the origin of the parties were reversed. Gideon Levy said that in the article I linked to, which is worth reading.
It’s possible that an Israeli Arab would find it harder to get away with committing any crime than a Jew would in Israel, I don’t know.
Perhaps I didn’t make my point very well, which was the way the BBC has spun the story.
Even the Guardian was more even handed than the BBC in its reporting.
The BBC was interested in only one thing. To emphasise that Israel is a racist state they presented the story as a case of racial discrimination, comparable to the bad old days of segregation. The BBC implied that Israelis view the very idea of sexual relations between a Jew and an Arab tantamount to rape. This strongly echoes the particular nastiness of apartheid, where white people feared sexual contact between “their” white women and what they felt were repugnant and predatory black men. That is how the BBC wants us to view Israel, and that is what people mean when they say it’s an apartheid state.
When Matthew Kalman explained to Ed Stourton that the court was primarily concerned with the deception – that a married father of two had posed as a single (Jewish) bachelor to get his wicked way, Ed was unable to hammer home the racist argument he was so keen to promote. So that’s what I was trying to say. The other aspects of the case itself have all been argued out. What was the stupid woman playing at, you have to wonder.
But the BBC has an agenda. It only sees Israel as racist, and racist is how it will present it. I made a transcript of the whole interview, but it was too long to include in the above post.
This is an incredibly complicated one and can’t really be adequately discussed without bringing in the entire history of the Israeli-Arab conflict for starters.
The first response, of course, is that there is no way this can be considered rape and he certainly should not be jailed. But taking into account the Arab drive to overcome the Jews by demographic means, since they have failed to do so militarily, a different light is thrown on the matter. Of course we are talking about an Israeli Arab here, not a Palestinian terrorist, but still:
*A number of Israeli Arabs have committed terrorist acts against Jewish civilians, the most recent being the two bulldozer attacks in Jerusalem, in which Jews were killed and injured, and the murder of eight teenagers at a Jerusalem school. Israeli Arabs have also used their citizenship as cover to assist terrorists in the infiltration of Israel and the murder of Jews.
*There is a good deal of radicalism among Israeli Arabs, some of it manifesting as Arab members of parliament visiting Israel’s enemies and expressing solidarity with them.
*An Arab majority in Israel would in time see the Jewish population transformed into an oppressed minority and worse, judging by the treatment of Jews in Arab countries.
What was the intention of our Arab friend here – to simply prove he could make it with a Jew or was there a deeper motive? Excuse the frankness, but was he using his penis as a weapon of war?
Anyway, we can’t expect the BBC to have any understanding of these issues, since that would presuppose an acknowledgement of Jewish rights in the conflict. And the fact is that Israeli Jews have to be racist to a degree at least in order to survive the Arab onslaught.
However, I think one has to conclude that the judgement is wrong on many levels. And until such time as Israel introduces a law banning sex for demographic domination (imagine trying to prove that one) the justice system should refrain from prosecuting such cases. There is little doubt that this will be overturned on appeal.
I agree with everything you say TT. But will someone please tell me if they thought Ed Stourton was doing what I thought he was doing, otherwise I’ll post the transcript of the whole item.
Then you’ll be sorry, scrollers.
The BBC was doing what it usually does: act in a knee-jerk fashion and with sympathy and interest very clearly on one side. Its account of the “facts” of the case and the issues arising from it is weighted accordingly.
Here we have a case where even on this thread we have two strikingly different accounts of how they met. I thought she advertised for a relationship but having just read the BBC website article linked above, I see that the Arab man says they met casually in the street.
Ed Stourton also pushed the Arab vs Jew angle rather than the single vs married element of the deception and he went on to impy that it had caused a storm byhuman rights sorts rather than a storm by Israeli press and people generally.
After being put right about the nature of the storm, he (and his editor) must have thought he would still manage to get two for the price of one by linking this to an idea about an oath of allegiance and the theme of Israeli identity.
The BBC salivates and pounces on anything where it can employ notions of racism and shout “Raaaacist!” and that is very clearly evident in the headline and introduction to the website article. Standard BBC knee jerk.
The Stourton interview is from 1minute in to about 5 30 on the link given in sue’s post.
I’m delighted that we agree, sue. I’ll listen to the interview now.
Yes, Israel is totally unlike South Africa. Apartheid South Africa outlawed sex and marriage across the colour bar. But I’m not aware that there was any great rush towards interracial sex and marriage post-apartheid. It’s probably fair to say that the majority of people prefer to stay with their own kind.
Yes, I tend to agree about Stourton. He approaches the issue with the typical judgemental BBC attitude towards Israel. I was quite impressed with this Matthew guy. He’s atypical BBC, or appears to be. Anuway, looks like Stourton has learned somehting. Perhaps it will sink in.
Can’t help being reminded of that day on the World Service a few years back when they kept on repeating the “research” conclusion that the majority of Israeli Jews are racist towards Arabs over and over on every newscast as the second most important story on the planet, and even regarded it as important enough to include on programmes like “World Briefing, I think it was.
The BBC positively salivates at the prospect of Israel being proven to be a racist state. Such “proof” would elevate the Palestinian cause to the holy of holies in the warped world view of the left. It would also validate the entrenched anti-Semitism at the BBC.
I don’t personally think it’s rape, more likely he was just being a ‘dirty arab’ as the saying goes. :-E
It’s quite shocking that stories such as this get such media coverage, especially whilst in the Islamic world women are getting stoned to death, even if someone ‘thinks’ they are have a CONSENTUAL sexual relationship.