Posted on 06/29/2002 11:43:51 AM PDT by LarryLied
TEL AVIV — A string of cars marks northern Tel Aviv's Tel Baruch Beach, renowned for its posh seafood restaurant, Blue, but also for the dozens of prostitutes who flock here looking for business.
Many of them are from the former Soviet Union. Some of them are slaves.
About 3,000 women are bought and sold in Israel each year. Amid calls from international organizations and pressure from the United States to curb the sale, trade and barter of women, Israel has begun to crack down on this billion-dollar-a-year industry. Both police and state prosecutors call ending the slave trade one of their top priorities.
Until the recent crackdown, Israel — along with Bahrain, Qatar and Sudan — was stuck on a State Department list of countries failing to meet America's minimum standards for the suppression of sex trafficking. In early June, however, the State Department bumped Israel up a category: from a state that does nothing to prevent slavery to one taking action against it.
This coming Monday, as a result of one of the biggest stings on slavery in Israel's history, 18 men involved in drug sales and the smuggling, trafficking and prostitution of women will face trial in the Netanya Magistrate's Court and in a Tel Aviv District Court. The maximum sentence they may receive for the trafficking of the three women allegedly caught in their grips is 15 years. The director of the Special Crimes Unit, Deputy Commissioner Menashe Arviv, thinks they will likely receive sentences of between 3 and 10 years.
The police apprehended the 18 men and completed the sting when one of the country's biggest slave traders agreed to turn state's witness, said Central District police spokesman Shaul Zionit. What they uncovered, according to Zionit, was horrifying.
The women, who were allegedly bought for about $7,500, were traded and bartered for all sorts of goods, including drugs, Zionit said. Their new "owners" most often used them as prostitutes after first sexually abusing the women, according to the spokesman.
The three women the police rescued from slavery in this case, Zionit said, were smuggled from Ukraine into Egypt and from there over the Israeli border by Bedouins. They were lured to the region by advertisements promising jobs in Israel as models or nannies. Most often the women were unaware of the life they would be thrust into once in Israel. After their arduous trek through the desert, where the Bedouins raped them, the women were handed over to their new "owners," according to the police spokesman.
"It's horrible," Zionit said. "The women we found had been used along the way. After all, their masters had to test their product. They are touched and measured and prodded in heinous ways to 'ensure the quality of the product.' Some also bring friends or family to use the women. Then the women have to work for a period of one or more months free of charge to 'pay for their passage.'"
The Israeli police say stopping the crime is one of their top priorities.
Yet one of the most worrisome aspects of this type of case, said prosecutor Arviv, is that demand for women from the former Soviet Union is still high. It is also easy to smuggle in the women, given the 70-mile Israel-Egypt border, which is mostly unmarked and unfenced. Bedouin "traders" easily drive over it using dune buggies and all-terrain vehicles.
No fence exists along the border. According to a reserve major in the Israeli army's engineer corps posted to the border area, who spoke on condition of anonymity, a physical barrier would be ineffective because shifting sands would bury it within a year or two. The smugglers keep coming and are seldom stopped by Israeli troops, who are more concerned with catching terrorist infiltrators, he said.
The demand for the women and the ease with which they can be smuggled into Israel make it one the of the world's hubs of women-trafficking, lamented Esther Hertzog, a social anthropologist at Tel Aviv University and head of the Movement for the Equal Representation of Women. While police crackdowns have nabbed some suspects, the trade largely remains unhindered, she said.
Chaim Nardi, a sociologist at Tel Aviv University, links the slave-trafficking to machismo attitudes in Israeli society, which he said "allow men to consider women their toy."
Nardi, who compiled a report on the sale of women and prostitution in June 2000 and has since updated it, said most prostitutes suffer from depression, and the overwhelming physical and emotional abuse to which they are subjected drives a huge percentage to abuse narcotics.
Even so, he sees hope. "There are certain encouraging signs," he said. "It appears things are getting better. The Israeli prosecutors are working hard against this phenomenon. But prosecutors have said their work will continue to be low-key as long as citizens are not bothered by the phenomenon en masse. This type of thinking legitimizes the trade in women, and I think this should no longer be tolerated."
Being born in Odessa, I have never heard of any Jews doing the "mail order bride" thing.
Are you pulling my leg? Proven? Masonic lodges are all over the places. Been to any parades? Those goofy looking guys in the little cars wearing the funny hats looking like the genie from the bottle? Those guys? The children's Masonic Hospitals? George Washington along with a huge segment of the American Founding Fathers were Freemasons.
They get a bad rap along with Jews in the Protocols of Zionism from ignorant people.
Of all the daft ideas promoted by Tony Blair's Labour government in Britain, its recent pursuit of Masons among the police and in the nation's judiciary may be the most bizarre. Labour believes that Masonry may be corrupting justice: It fears that during judicial proceedings, judges, solicitors, and police are exchanging secret signals identifying themselves as lodge members. Because Masons take an oath to help one another, the theory goes, justice is trumped by furtive Brotherhood.
Although Britain's Masons deny that their activities are anything more than charitable fellowship, and although there are no known cases of Masonic judicial corruption, Labour is intent on its purge. It has set up a registry whereby policemen and others may voluntarily (for now) identify their lodge affiliation. That registry was supposed to become public in April. But at the last minute, the government decided to block public access to it.
Why? Ministers suddenly realized they had created an assumption of impropriety. Lord Millett, Britain's most senior Masonic judge, complained that defendants were now demanding to know if the police or judges in their cases were Masons. A government official agreed that "It will not help if police are deterred from being open about their [Masonic] membership because they think it would be raised in trials."
The origin of this strange controversy lies in a pair of sensational "expose" books published in the 1980s. The Brotherhood (1985), by Stephen Knight, portrayed Britain's Masons as pursuing a common--if never identified--secret agenda. Knight is otherwise best known for Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976), which "revealed" the famous Victorian murder spree as--yes--a plot hatched by Masons.
Knight died shortly after The Brotherhood was published (hmm"). The sequel, Inside the Brotherhood (1989), was written by Martin Short. Both books address the judiciary, suggesting that Masons help each other with their careers. Because the authors also run through the 200-year-old charges that Freemasonry may be a religion hostile to Christianity, they suggest that such lodge-related career networking is worrisome. Short's book is heavy on the religious angle, and sometimes reads as if it were written by the determinedly anti-Masonic Pope Leo XIII.
As Short admits, the importance of career networks is not otherwise unknown. In Britain, it takes the form of school, religious, class, and other ties that benefit Labourites as well as Tories. Meanwhile, a government spokesman promises that Blair's government is "not backing away from the need to establish just how widespread Masonic activity is within" the police.
LOL...I would love to see your source for "all of them have relatives in the US and/or Israel." What you really meant to say is that no Jew would inflict this kind of degradation on another Jew...that's why you knew that none of the "sex slaves" were Jewish.
Uh no. Don't put words in my mouth. After the first wave of immigration from USSR to USA in the early 1970's, all Jews who stayes in USSR had relatives (either brothers/sisters, to cousins or aunts/uncles). If they wanted to leave USSR they wouldn't have to via the mail order bride route, etc. They would only need to write a letter to their family and obtain a permission from the soviet authorities to leave.
Those are Shriners, not Freemasons. Shriners raise money for children's burn hospitals. They are fine folks.
Freemasonry has been around as a male-bonding society for several hundred years. It's kind of lost its appeal since the Victorian era. They have accepted Jews as members.
Thanks. I had no idea who to pose as if I decided to get into the sex slave business.
Standard agitprop.I hear it all the time. Check out the articles I've posted and my profile. You'll see where my major interest is.
Then go check out those who smear me on these threads.All Israel all the time.
Aside from that, what difference does it make? Is one supposed to only post positive things about Israel? I have serious policy disagreements with both the state of Israel and the 80% of Jews who voted for Al Gore.
About the only thing I agree with Israel on is the need to take out Muslim terrorists. The rest of their foreign policy is, I believe, determental to the interests of the United States. I do not believe Israel should allow arms to be sold to Mugabe. The Israeli involvement in the assassination of Jonas Savimbi this winter was not in our interest (Reagan called Savimbi a "freedom fighter." Tamar Golan, the former Israeli ambassador, call him "an evil man"). I am concerned about Israeli engineers we financed to build their Lavi fighter jet helping the Communist Chinese to build their -10. That plane will be a copy of our F-16 thanks to Israel.
I'm supposed to shut up and say nothing? I have no problem with Israel being an ally. But I'm not about to idolize the place. Israel should be treated just as any other ally aside from the Brits: with great suspicion.
That's no small thing.
the assassination of Jonas Savimbi this winter was not in our interest
Actually, it very well could have been. Angola has some huge undeveloped oil and gas fields. The government, professing Marxism, is quite happy to deal with the likes of Chevron, and the oil companies with the government. Savimbi had become the fly in the ointment.
He kept his army after the elections and continued a brutal, desultory war. His elimination has caused the remnants of UNITA to demobilise and peace is breaking out. Another triumph to defray our dependence on ME oil; which is something in our high national interest. Witness the increased oil production from Russia.
should be treated just as any other ally aside from the Brits: with great suspicion
Oh, perfidious albion, you quite sure about this? Some pretty devious Britishers throughtout the years - Especially the two ministers at the height of the Victorian era - Disraeli and Gladstone.
IMPORTANT POINT:
All Shriners are Freemasons.
But not all Freemasons are Shriners.
First you become a Freemason and then, should you choose to progress(as my son has done) you may becone a Shriner.
And, yes, I was refering to the Shriner's Children's Hospitals. Thanks for the correction.
For all you men here defending Israel in it's actions in this regard, imagine yourselves being carried away by Bedouins who like men and having them savage your backside over and over again, and beating the s--- out of you if you complain, before even bringing you to your final destination. It's despicable no matter who is doing it or where it's happening.
Recommendation: Get off of your high horse.
HMMMmmmmmmm..........
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