Israel Matzav

7 Jewish girls abducted by Bedouin in the Negev last month, at least one raped

The girls in this picture have no connection to this story. In fact, it's a sad comment on the state of our people that when I did a Google image search for 'Jewish girls' (no quotation marks), every one that came up before this one was arguably pornographic.

Seven Jewish girls between the ages of 11-18 have been abducted in the past month by Bedouin men in southern Israel. At least one was raped.

Seven victims last month alone are aged 11-18. These are only cases that were reported to police but many others are believed to have taken place without being reported.

Complaints were filed to the police in four cases of such abductions last month in Kiryat Malachi alone, and a fifth case of rape.

Voice of Israel radio said that all four cases of abductions in Kiryat Malachi involved young Bedouin men. The rape took place on the Ashkelon beach last weekend.

In one of the abduction cases, two men from the Bedouin city of Rahat, aged 40 and 24, were arrested, but one has since been released.

In the rape case, the main suspect is a resident of the Palestinian Authority who is illegally staying inside pre-1949 Israel. He has been charged and two other Arabs who were also present at the scene of the crime face lesser charges.

Voice of Israel's reporter in southern Israel, Asaf Kuzailov, said that the phenomenon is on the rise and is a well known one – to residents, to police and welfare authorities. It is confirmed by the Center for Assistance to Women in the Negev.

Some of you may recall that a few years ago, I posted the story of a woman whose rescue by the IDF was arranged by Yad l'Achim during Operation Cast Lead. Yad l'Achim is involved here as well:

Police say that they can only get involved in cases where a specific complaint has been filed, and where there is evidence of abduction and abuse. Police and welfare elements note that the cases do not necessarily start as kidnappings. Often the relationships are consensual at first, with the Arabs plying the girls with money, gifts, attention and warmth that they lack at home. In other cases, the contention is that the girls who were taken to the Arab villages later returned home, and so the men cannot be charged with abduction.

The abuse often begins at a later stage and by then it is hard to determine that the girls are not responsible for their actions, they said.

Voice of Israel reported a specific case of a girl they called Tania from Ashkelon, who fell in love with an Arab from Gaza and moved in with him. After she became pregnant she was tied up at home for days on end and beaten. This happened five years ago, and she is now back in Israel, but still suffers from trauma.

Yad L'Achim says about 1,000 cases of Jewish girls being held against their will by Arabs occur every year.

The Family Lobby, which blames a breakdown in parental -- and particularly paternal -- authority in the Jewish sector for the problem, noted that the Israeli feminist movement is completely under ultra-leftist control and therefore the women's organizations do nothing to raise public awareness of Arab predatory behavior against Jewish girls.

"While separation of buses in the hareidi sector and religious soldiers' requests to be excused from immodest performances receive top headlines for months on end, thanks to militant feminist politicians and journalists, actual rape and abduction of minor girls is swept under the rug by these groups because it is carried out by their Arab darlings," the group's chairman, Gil Ronen, said. "Unfortunately, nationalist and religious women have not made an effort to forge an independent agenda for their groups, and are content to be led by the ultra-leftists, who use them for bashing religious men and Jewish religion in general.

And you wonder why we don't want Jews renting homes to Arabs?

By the way, I believe that Yad l'Achim's annual appeal is in the next couple of weeks. If you're able to do so, you ought to consider making a contribution to them.

Labels: Bedouin, kidnapping, rape, Yad l'Achim

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:12 PM 0 comments

Who saves Jewish women?

This past week, I had occasion to contact Caroline Glick with a suggestion for her Tuesday column in the JPost. Caroline is a very busy woman, and it would not have surprised me at all if I did not hear back from her. But she sent me an email and said that she had been asked to write a column for Tuesday on a women's issue. After all, Tuesday is International Women's Day.

That column was published in Tuesday's JPost and it's an important column. It's about a Haredi organization called Yad l'Achim. Yad l'Achim is known as an anti-missionary organization. But they do something else also: They rescue Jewish women who are married to Arab men and their children. I wrote about them once before here. While I was aware of Yad l'Achim's work, what I didn't know until I read Caroline's column was the extent to which Yad l'Achim is one of the very few players in the field when it comes to rescuing these women (I am aware of someone who maintains a halfway house for them so that they have a place to live that is hidden from their ex-husbands).

In January, Channel 10 presented live footage of one such rescue. Viewers saw relatives of a mother of four named Dana waiting anxiously at the Erez checkpoint as she and her children fled her husband and his family in Gaza and took their first steps of freedom.

During their courtship, Dana’s husband showed her every courtesy. After their marriage, he began regularly beating her and kept her under around the clock surveillance. A visit to Yad L’Achim’s website makes clear that her story is anything but unique.

Yad L’Achim’s work in saving Jewish women from violent Muslim husbands is especially notable given the nature of the organization. It is an anti-missionary haredi organization led by Rabbi Dov Lipshitz. It is not feminism that motivates its members to save these women. It is Jewish law. And specifically, the halachic command of the ransoming of Jewish hostages. According to the organization, it carries out scores of rescue missions like the one that rescued Dana every year.

The question naturally arises, why do haredim dominate what by rights ought to be a field occupied by secular feminists? Why aren’t Israeli and American Jewish feminists at the forefront of efforts to save these women from their violent husbands? Where, for instance, is the New Israel Fund? Its website brags, “The New Israel Fund founded or funded most of Israel’s women’s rights organizations and networks.”

Obviously Yad L’Achim, which defends these women’s right to live without fear is a women’s rights group. So why doesn’t NIF fund it? Yad L’Achim and other religious groups have been pilloried with allegations of racism in recent months for their public calls for Jewish girls and women not to date Arabs. In principle, these attacks seem fair. Blanket denunciations of Jewish- Muslim dating and intermarriage are problematic, even if they are justified from a religious perspective.

But whether one agrees or disagrees with the religious precepts that guide Yad L’Achim’s actions, the fact is they are not saving a principle. They are saving women and children. Shouldn’t that be enough to earn them the respect of the Left that is supposed to be motivated by concern for the weak and downtrodden? IN HER interview with Channel 10, Dana said that in Gaza, “what they do is curse the Jews 24 hours a day.”

The fact is that both misogyny and Jew-hatred are facts of life throughout the Muslim world. This state of affairs renders marriage to Muslim men a particularly dangerous prospect for Jewish women.

Read the whole thing. You won't look at feminism the same way again.

Labels: Caroline Glick, feminism, Muslim men, Yad l'Achim

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:41 PM 3 comments