A normal country

Yesterday the son, wife and daughter of the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel
Shlomo Amar were arrested for having kidnapped a young man who had started
a relationship with the daughter. The Rabbi's estranged son and two of his
Arab friends apparently took him to an Arab village and held him there. The
boy's haredi sidecurls were cut off and he was badly beaten. Then he was
taken to the Amar family home in Jerusalem where he was kept overnight and
beaten again. This was done in order to stop him from seeing the daughter,
whom he had met thru a chat room. But when he was released he went to the
police. The Rabbi is abroad in Thailand (even Rabbis have vacations) but he
also may be arrested upon his return because he may have had prior knowledge
of the incident and not reported it.
Of course, the reason for this incident was to protect the "family honor."
In the Palestinian areas the results tend to be more extreme, and the victim
is usually the woman. Last week three sisters were beaten and two of them
strangled to death in a case involving "family honor," and in another case a
young woman was killed. This woman had been put under the protection of the
Mayor of Ramallah, but nevertheless the father, after having given his word
of honor that he would not harm her, killed her anyway. This rarely happens
in Israel.
If that isn't weird enough, an IDF soldier was arrested in Ariel after
coming under suspicion of drug use after exhibiting erratic behavior. When
interrogated it was found that he had a swastika tattooed on his arm and
told the police that he was a Nazi. Further investigation showed that in
his home in Ariel he had swastika flags and other paraphernalia, and from
his computer the police were able to find that he had been in touch with
neo-Nazi groups in Russia. His mother first denied any knowledge of this,
but on interrogation confessed that she too was a pro-Nazi sympathizer. How
did they get into Israel and how did he manage to join the IDF? Good
questions.
Following a series of anti-Sharon slogans painted on various tombs and other
places, two more comparing Sharon with Hitler were found on Yom Hashoah
(Holocaust Day), one on an overpass into Jerusalem and the other at the
cemetery at Mt. Herzl. Since this has been going on for some time and since
it is most likely a right wing youth group is doing this, you would think
that the police would have taken some action to find them by now.
We are all concerned about terrorism, but since the threat has receded
somewhat with the current calm or ceasefire, the true horror of the loss of
life due to traffic accidents is hitting home. Four people were killed in a
head-on collision on the road to Eilat yesterday when one of them was
overtaking a truck on a single lane highway. The number of people killed in
the past week is 12, what a terrible toll for a small country.
Israel it turns out has become a center for the trafficking in prostitutes,
mainly because it is a much more open country than the surrounding
dictatorships. Women (not necessarily Jewish) are brought in from mainly
Moldavia, Ukraine and other former Soviet countries. Most of them are as
usual promised good jobs and then pimped to traffickers who smuggle them
mainly thru Egypt across the Sinai desert, where it is very difficult to
find them. From Israel some of them are then sold to other countries.
One of the early Zionist leaders said that we would know the Jewish State
was a success when we became a normal country, with Jewish policemen, Jewish
prostitutes and everything else other countries have. Well, if that's the
case it looks like we have made it.