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.
Jonathan Cook reports.
Daniel Patrick Welch marvels at the audacity of the THC (Talking
Heads Chorus), who tell us with a straight face that it's our own damn fault if
the fake "recovery" sputters – for not spending the money we don't have!.Israel's fear of Jewish girls dating Arabs
Team of psychologists to “rescue” women
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
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 organizations 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 familiarized 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 recognized on the couple’s return.
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 collapse of the former Soviet Union – 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.
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.” A police representative also warns that the Bedouin men’s “goal is to take advantage of the girls. There is no element of love or an innocent friendly relationship here.”
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 organization called Yad L’achim, which runs an anti-assimilation team publicly dedicated to “saving” Jewish women.
According to its website, the organization 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 coordination 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.
Yad L’achim’s founder, Rabbi Shlomo Dov Lifschitz, is quoted on the site saying:
People must understand that Jewish-Arab marriages are part of the larger Israeli-Arab conflict… They [Arab men] see it as their goal to marry them [Jewish women] and ensure that their childen aren’t raised as Jews. This is their revenge against the Jewish people. They feel that if they can’t defeat us in war, they can wipe us out this way.
The degree of general opposition in Israel to interracial marriage was suggested by a government-backed television advertising campaign earlier this month that urged Israeli Jews to inform on relatives abroad who were in danger of marrying a non-Jew. The advertisements were hastily withdrawn by surprised Israeli officials after many US Jews took offence.
In her book Birthing the Nation, Rhoda Kanaaneh, a Middle East scholar at New York University, points out that “politicians frequently attack ‘peace’ or ‘dialogue’ programmes for promoting miscegenation” in fear that it will lead to Jewish assimilation.
She also notes that Israel’s adoption and surrogacy laws require that adoptive parents be of the same ethnic group as the biological mother.
The recession is over! (Now get off your lazy asses and spend some money, dammit!)
By Daniel Patrick Welch
Daniel Patrick Welch marvels at the audacity of the THC (Talking Heads Chorus), who tell us with a straight face that it's our own damn fault if the fake "recovery" sputters – for not spending the money we don't have!
These recessions are getting shorter and shorter. If you delay admitting it's happening until the shit really hits the fan, then claim it's all better while the shit is still spraying all over you, eventually it will become a complete non-event, like the ho-hum “discouraged workers” who keep pushing those jobless claims down. Good going, guys! Way to take one for the statistical team!
The other intriguing development about the "modern" recovery is that it miraculously continues to be a "recovery" without some previously indispensable component. Under Clinton and Bush, we were introduced to the "jobless" recovery. Now, with foreclosures yet to peak and record upside down mortgages still to blow, we are apparently being fed the "homeless recovery." See? With each recovery, we can begin to see past those boring necessities that clouded our vision in the past. With joblessness and homelessness becoming old hat, I can't wait for what's next – maybe a foodless recovery or an airless recover – for future administrations to bestow on us.
All hilarious sarcasm aside (and I am a hoot, aren't I? Isn't misery funny?!) it is a terribly disheartening time. I can't remember a time where the chirping of the Talking Heads Chorus or the Powers That Be (PTB) was more completely in synch, while at the same time being so completely out of touch with the experience the rest of us are living.
Not that journalists and cheerleaders have had separate job descriptions for quite awhile now; still it boggles the mind to hear people meekly “report” as fact the data that spews forth like clockwork from government and industry mouthpieces. The THC and PTB are still chirping over the so-called 3.6 per cent housing "jump" when the sample included an 11 per cent margin of error. No one needs a degree in statistics to see through such a load of crap. Yet the spewing is allowed to continue.
The only recession concession the THC-PTB team will make is that the non-existent recovery is “fragile” until consumers start loosening up their spending habits again. Duh. A whopping 70 per cent of GDP is from consumer spending – there simply is no economy without us buying as much crap as we can get our hands on. Now, people may finally be catching on to the fact that working 80 hours a week at a job they hate to finance the overvalued glorified cottage in the suburbs, which is mortgaged for more than it is worth to finance the never-stop-spending lifestyle that keeps them on the treadmill – that it all kind of sucks! Shhhhhh! The system will simply collapse if the people actually figure this one out.
Well, guess what, THC-PTB? They're onto it. And the whiff of panic is growing stronger in both quarters, among the Talking Heads whose job it is to convince people to keep spending, and the people who have no money left to spend. THERE IS NO MORE MONEY for folks to spend and, therefore, there can be no sustained return to the way things were. Those who think economics can't really be that simple have forgotten the old joke about the economist stranded on the island with the chemist and the physicist: they have one can of beans, and will starve if they can't figure out how to open it. After the chemist and physicist trade long and improbable solutions about boiling it or throwing it up in the air (the longer-winded and more boring the better for the joke, unfortunately) the economist smoothly steps in and says, "okay, ASSUME a can opener…" Why would they know what they are talking about when the whole game has been one step above reading tea leaves and flipping a coin? Of course, that's not fair to the coin flippers – they're right half the time!
Only such a fantasy world could yield a phrase like "the real economy" as if it is something that has to be actually described. In "the real economy", people are frantically going about the business of trying to do more with less, getting used to a new and grim future in which their dwindling incomes are expected to pay for more goods and services as government abandons them in a thoroughly bipartisan orgy of throwing money at the banksters and criminals who are already obscenely rich to begin with.
People look around them, talk to each other, work next to each other, fight with each other, and they know. They stop listening to the THC-induced buzz and live their lives. And on a recent trip to the mall to see how all these new green shoots were doing, it all comes into focus. It was raining, so the parking lots were packed as people flocked to the modern cathedral that is the suburban shopping mall. But inside people were more or less wandering around like zombies, buying one or two things from the anchor stores or shops blasting sales, two-for-one, and discounts of 110 per cent (okay, I made that one up). But I couldn't make up the fact that one store had a huge orange sticker screaming that it had been SEIZED – damn, that's a sobering shot of reality shoppers really didn't need. Or the overheard conversations: "I'm tired – let's find a couch and sit and stare…" Or the fact that there was a line, but only at one store: the Dunkin Donuts! Green shoots my ass. There may be hope in the plain fact that the people aren't as stupid as those in power think they are.
And take housing, for instance. No one knows what they are talking about, as the aforementioned statistical white lies, big lies and plain old whoppers attest. The only real measure of what something is "worth" is what people have recently been paying – actually paying – for similar things. This is easier than it sounds to bypass the THC and Bernanke's Banksters, at least on a small scale. I was curious about the local market, so I started keeping track of a simple trend, recent sale prices as a function of assessed value. Of course, real estate agents will claw their eyes out and everyone in the business will scream that assessed value shouldn't be confused with market value. It needn't be. As the only constant applied by a local taxing authority to all properties, all it needs to do is serve as a backdrop for price fluctuation.
In June, a sampling of one- and two-family homes yielded an average sale price of around 88.8 per cent of assessed value –a very grim picture indeed, as assessed values are already considered to be low. In July, the much vaunted "jump" did indeed yield a local blip – up to about 92.8 per cent, though but for a frantic flurry in the last two days of the month the average would actually have gone down. The brutal news is, when trying to do the same analysis for August, there was almost no data to analyse once throwing out highs and lows for statistical balance. Of the slim pickings in sales (less than half the volume of the two prior months), the average had dropped to around 80 per cent of assessed value. Yikes. And this trend was visible, with a little digging, weeks before the recent "surprising" drop in August sales that is just now making news. A small picture, admittedly, but what else can we trust when we are being blamed for not stoking the recovery by spending money we dont' have?
And in this traditionally crowded college town, where lack of sufficient housing is always an issue, ubiquitous "for rent" signs persist into October, long after the crush of returning students has settled into the new semester. Meanwhile, billions of our dollars are being spent on endless wars – another bipartisan boondoggle. And trillions – yes, trillions – can be pulled out of thin air to prop the whole thing up. Remember that the next time you need a bake sale to fund extracurricular activities at your kid's school. People know that there is something terribly wrong. And the only good news is that they may, finally, have stopped listening to the THC.
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