arab man guilty of rape after saying he was jewish so he could have sex with jewish woman (NOTE: this was misrepresented by the news)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/21/arab-guilty-rape-consensual-sex-jew

amazing decision from the judge.
i wonder where they draw the line.
imagine if you got sentenced for lying to have sex in general.
'he said he earned more than he really does'
'give him 6 months'

I've often thought obtaining sex under false pretences shd have some kind of criminal punishment attached.

There was some discussion of this on the Israel: why are they so bad and hated thread.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ xpost

yeah outside of the israel thing that's sorta an interesting argument

oof

so many icky things going on in this story

it's like a law school hypothetical from hell

Handing down the verdict, Tzvi Segal, one of three judges on the case, acknowledged that sex had been consensual but said that although not "a classical rape by force," the woman would not have consented if she had not believed Kashur was Jewish.

I wonder if the guy knew this for sure before they had sex, or whether he just assumed it might be the case. It's a dick move for sure but I'm not exactly brimming over with sympathy for the "I would never have had sex with you if I'd known you were an Arab" line either.

approx where i'm at one this one, yeah

Fully agree but deception is deception? What about the "I would never have had sex with you if I'd known you were crap" argument?

'wouldn't have consented' is a troubling concept.

besides the whole racist aspect, this decision really trivializes actual rape

see, that's a really gross, and really important, subtext---if this guy had lied about being ~rich~ then this would have never, ever gone to court. but since he lied about being muslim that makes this a prosecutable offense?

wait this jewess had sex out of wedlock? shouldn't the state of israel file a civil suit against her?

yeah I am not sure this should be rape, but it's certainly exploitation - by lying to her he's shown he doesn't respect her or regard her as a person

there is a racial element, of course. OH WORLD

i can understand her feeling violated about it though, even if that feeling is based on her own racism/whatever.

isn't she entitled not to have sex with members of a certain race, if that's her judgement?

tho i suppose the onus should probably be on her to check that shit out first if she's all that into it.

British law makes no sense to me

by lying to her he's shown he doesn't respect her or regard her as a person

yes this is what he did. also- got laid, quickly.

by lying to her he's shown he doesn't respect her or regard her as a person

http://991.com/newGallery/Happy-Mondays-Call-The-Cops-205341.jpg

what else could you lie about to get laid and be considered morally sorta-ok? wealth?

...or be held criminally liable?? HIV status? current criminal obligations (you're going to prison in a week or sth).

xps

"besides the whole racist aspect, this decision really trivializes actual rape"

right. she wasnt forced. just lied to. not nearly the same.

see, that's a really gross, and really important, subtext---if this guy had lied about being ~rich~ then this would have never, ever gone to court. but since he lied about being muslim that makes this a prosecutable offense?

I think the more interesting discussion comes from if he could get in legal trouble for lying about being rich too

current criminal obligations (you're going to prison in a week or sth).

could this be prosecutable? why?

hiv status would definitely get you done for s.thing. maybe not rape?

for "held criminally liable" sub in "a true shitbag"

xps i just mean, what would it be really awful to lie about to get laid, is all.

if "being an arab" is the line for criminal liability...

"Last night was fantastic, but I feel like I should admit that I lied when we were talking at the bar. I absolutely hate Pavement."

"You're going to jail buddy!"

having trouble believing that her decision to have sex with this guy was based entirely on his self-identification as a jew and not first and foremost her physical attraction to him

^ I am in public and just cracked up way too loud xp

where is a serious girl, who really aims sex in nearby building

Rape is not just a matter of "Oh, I wouldn't have done that if I had known." There's obviously a much more horrible, immediate and scarring trauma involved. Maybe there should be some kind of more minor criminal offense or civil cause of action for obtaining sex by fraud, but it's not rape.

I mean yeah it's not exactly cool what this guy did but come on.

hiv status would definitely get you done for s.thing. maybe not rape?

― I’ll put you in a f *ckin Weingarten you c*nt! (history mayne), 21

something to do with communicable diseases, i'm sure. it's illegal to use public transport with some shit, iirc

yeah guys but why is "saying he's jewish" somehow more exploitative then "saying s/he'll call next week" or "saying s/he is genuinely interested in yr feelings or w/e"?

despicable ppl of both sexes manipulate other ppl to have sex with them ~all the time~. it's gross and rape-y but to say that this guy is a rapist who deserves criminal punishment sets some creepy precedent i'm just not comfortable with. and that's before you even get to the racist part!

many xps prob irrelevant now

lying about HIV is 100% illegal as far as i know, but the reasons for its illegality should be fucking ~obvious~

I think everyone here can agree it's not rape?

it's definitely not rape-rape

GBH in UK, a seperate offence in other countries

In many countries, the intentional or reckless infection of a person with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is considered to be a crime. People who do so can be charged with criminal transmission of HIV, murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, or assault. Some states have enacted laws expressly to criminalize HIV transmission, as in the United States, while others charge under the existing laws, as in the United Kingdom.

He also said he was seeking a serious relationship when presumably he wasn't, which is also obtaining sex by false pretences and pretty shitty in its own right. I'd imagine that's something that Israeli men and women do all the time without being locked up for rape. You can't separate this from the racial aspect.

(Feeling slightly weird about the lack of women on this thread right now)

^^^^ditto

lying about HIV is 100% illegal as far as i know, but the reasons for its illegality should be fucking ~obvious~

― be told and get high on coconut (gbx), Wednesday, July 21, 2010 12:11 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

There was a ridiculous clusterfuck about this sometime in the last year or so, btw.

isn't she entitled not to have sex with members of a certain race, if that's her judgement?

On what planet are Muslims and Jews different races?

Holy fucking fuck you've got to be kidding me. Guy's a sleaze, but "rape" shouldn't even enter into this.

Also, what's on his iPod?

Having sex if you are HIV+ iirc

also considered here:

Rolling Metal Thread 2009

isn't she entitled not to have sex with members of a certain race, if that's her judgement?

On what planet are Muslims and Jews different races?

― Phil D., 21 July 2010 16:18 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

on the planet where i'm typing btwn phone calls and stuff, feel absolutely free to ignore that.

xp classy

ugh this story

i wonder how clear she was beforehand that she wouldn't have sex with an arab (or maybe - whether she wouldn't have sex/a relationship with anyone other than a fellow jew). and what her reasons were.

article i read said that dude introduced himself as "daniel" and that that was the extent of the "i'm jewish" deception.

my god

http://locallytoned.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/daniel-s-tiger.jpg

i wonder if there are specific stereotypes in Israel about Palestinian Muslim men being rapacious lascivious degenerates analogous to white American mythology about black men.

daniel day lewis - not a mohican

xpost please don't wonder about that

is that a dumb thing to wonder? i sort of wish i didn't know about this story at all tbh. just free associating itt; maybe i shouldn't.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-10717186

this news item on an old similar case was posted on the other thread too:

A Syrian-born airline pilot tricked a woman into having sex with him by saying intercourse could cure an infection, a court has heard.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/6589249.stm

it's up to her if she doesn't want to have sex with arab men, and kinda weird imo to want to delve into that topic, what her 'reasons' were, etc. don't think it's quite right to charge him w. rape tho.

crazier and crazier: "There is a precedent in Israel for criminal charges being brought in such cases.

One man who told women he slept with he was a neurosurgeon in order to impress them was convicted of fraud."

i wonder if there are specific stereotypes in Israel about Palestinian Muslim men being rapacious lascivious degenerates analogous to white American mythology about black men.

― horseshoe, Wednesday, July 21, 2010 12:31 PM Bookmark

I have heard of some such stereotypes although I think it's complicated by the religious perceptions. Many Israelis seem to imagine that Arab men are repressed and horny and misogynistic or something. I have also heard claims that Arab men think Israeli girls are "easy". The second part, at least, isn't all that implausible. I mean if you actually come from a traditional muslim culture, the girls around you are not going to be "easy", whereas Tel Aviv is full of secular women who don't have problems with pre-marital sex, making them "easy" by that standard.

if that's directed at me, i was wondering how stereotypes might have impacted the verdict, not her desire not to have sex with Arabs.

xxp to history mayne

One man who told women he slept with he was a neurosurgeon in order to impress them was convicted of fraud."

― symsymsym, Wednesday, July 21, 2010 12:35 PM Bookmark

Worse than an Arab man lying about being Jewish by most Jewish girls' standards. (sorry)

having looked at the law earlier after I'd read this article - I'm not sure if this would be rape in britain... it's not clear since the penis cream pilot walked free due to some irregularity in the conduct of the trial

the test seems to be, did the defendant intentionally deceive the complainant as to the nature or purpose of the relevant act? presumably she would argue that the nature of the sex was changed quite significantly by his deceit - given that "a serious relationship" would be pretty much untenable in her eyes.

(as far as I understand the section of the sex offences act is 'meant' to be used to catch, e.g. doctors who have deceived vulnerable patients into thinking that having sex with them is a necessary part of their treatment.)

hs - not dumb. just inevitably you will find really racist people anywhere and they are not the best representatives of anything.

i didn't mean it to identify Israelis as especially racist or anything. i buy Hurting's speculation.

nothing wrong with people having preferences. im sure you can think of lots of analogous examples in other countries where similar cross-faith dealings like this would get people riled up. wondering whether the guy knew the girls feelings about this though. and whether it was simply a case of two people being attracted to each other and the guy hoping religion wouldnt have to enter the equation. or whether it was, as the judge/courts probably suspect, some kind of intentional deceit/religious grudge-revenge sex.

sex w/ someone u barely know- more complicated that buying a used car. if only they had like Carfax for sex. Sexfax.

this is where ID cards/personal readers could come in useful

so like you could have an ID card so no one makes the mistake of having sex with someone of the wrong race or ethnicity, that would be so cool NOT

haha :/

this is like the one story about rape ever that makes me wanna blame the victim

i mean "rape"

kind of hard to make the case that this is rape when theres no indication of an imbalanced power dynamic

but it could be useful to weed people out from the competition
you could see who had a criminal record
who is jewish/muslim/christian/hindu/jehovas witness
who lives in zone 4
who has a driving license
itd be like niche-based speed dating but more hi tech

like, not only is it not a situation involving force or forced impairment, its not even a lie coming from a place of authority like a doctor xp

u cld say this dude raped her innocence like b4 this this women believed everything that dudes she met in bars and later hooked up w/ told her

now shes much more jaded & cynical

t's not clear since the penis cream pilot walked free due to some irregularity in the conduct of the trial

thanking u for new display name

like, not only is it not a situation involving force or forced impairment, its not even a lie coming from a place of authority like a doctor xp

― max, Wednesday, July 21, 2010 11:51 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

right, this. all the hypotheticals i could think of that were "rape by deception" involved some kind of asymmetrical relationship. this is, to me, and more and more, exactly no different than a crepe in a bar willing to lie about ANYTHING to get someone to sleep with him.

Aw man, this guy gets arrested for rape, but the guy who actually rapes me is out & about, free as a freedom fry? Fuck this world.

(Not to make this about me but I am just an angry gal.)

as well u should

but as symsymsym said upthread: this issue trivializes rape!

exactly no different than a crepe in a bar willing to lie about ANYTHING to get someone to sleep with him.

I think it's way less harmful than a creep in a bar. His family nickname – “Dudu” – is regularly used by Jews with the name David, so he just decided to call himself that to this Israeli chick.

the creep in the bar should also be punished - an ASBO (dear Americans, an Anti-Social Behaviour Order) would be ideal in that case and in this

WHO'S WITH ME

then we can get back to the serious issue of smashing rape, one overturned acquittal at a time

i am not with you

the crepe in the bar def needs some form of non-criminal punishment

i don't believe for a second that all this dude did was call himself dudu

why not slap an ASBO on someone who seeks to exploit women through technically consensual methods?

like, i'm ok with people having sex with people they just met, but you shouldn't assume they aren't lying to you. if you think sex is so special, don't have sex with strangers

i don't know what an ASBO is, sounds dumb

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Social_Behaviour_Order

It's what they give you in Britain if you haven't broken the law but nobody likes you anyway.

That or a peerage.

It's like a real life suggest ban.

like, i'm ok with people having sex with people they just met, but you shouldn't assume they aren't lying to you.

this doesn't make crepey lying any more ok

asbo sounds really dumm

Sometimes you get one for asking the police to do their job

http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/news/78-year-old-grandmother-breached-Asbo-pestering-police-just-24-hours/article-2400346-detail/article.html

i don't get why everyone's all "oh EVERYONE lies to get sex" either. i mean...really?

when did i say it was ok xxxp

Wait, wiait, there was actually a TV show called ASBO Teen to Beauty Queen? They're given to people who are then...made into reality TV stars? I don't get your country.

some people do lie, it's not ok, no one should get to send anyone to jail for this type of shit.

or give them an irl suggest ban

well, you seemed to place more blame on the people getting taken in by the liars, rather than the liars themselves

someone lying to you, in any context, regardless of whether you're jaded enough to know that you "should" expect it, is shitty behaviour, and getting offended by it is not

xps to harbl

Abbott, wait until you discover "The Scheme", reality TV at its best.

i didn't say they should get sent to jail, though if they do they can find sympathy elsewhere

harbl, the trouble with adopting a completely liberal approach to this is that when there ARE consensuality grey-areas, the law would increasingly be compelled to side with the defendant, surely? and this is the one area of law where I am inclined to be, shall we say, non-liberal.

if you think sex is so special, don't have sex with strangers

this is a massive truthbomb regardless of where you stand on the lying issue

if we're going to start using the word "rape" in a highly figurative sense then i see no reason to suggest that it was the guy who was raped by the israeli judicial system

Linky for "The Scheme": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scheme_(TV_series)

Back on topic, Lex, do you go out on the pull with a lie detector to hand?

And, yes, if his faith and your future relationship are so important, don't put out in a nearby building five minutes after you meet the dude.

Hey, "nearby building" sounds bad but it could've been a really nice motel or something.

this 'don't have sex so readily if you're unsure' point is also very true, but it doesn't stop him from being a scumbag

If we're gonna make "being a scumbag" a jail-time offence I've got a big list tbh

it's just patronizing, imo, lj. yes, i DO have sympathy for people jailed over things like this. scumbag or not. a lot of people are scumbags of this magnitude but the law does not protect their "victims" to this extent

xp, yes

Back on topic, Lex, do you go out on the pull with a lie detector to hand?

oh i don't mind about lies, you can't lie your way out of the things i'm interested in, but i'm not going to criticise anyone who gets upset after being lied to

Well, I'm not saying he should be jailed! I'm saying that slapping a non-criminal court-order on him might be prudent. I don't think he should be jailed, but given a condition, that condition being 'if this happens again, you're going to be given a criminal record and possibly jailed'.

There's a palpable, non-negligible difference between "I am upset because I wouldn't have done that if I had known the whole story" and "I have been raped because I wouldn't have done that if I had known the whole story". You cannot retroactively rescind consent.

i'm not going to criticise anyone who gets upset after being lied to

are people doing that?

i'm not saying he should be jailed either, i wasn't really arguing about this story. w/ref to it, it seems o_0 but i pretty much assume that we're not in full possession of the facts. that or the israeli justice system is completely fucked up.

or a combination of the two

why not slap an ASBO on someone who seeks to exploit women through technically consensual methods?

― RIP la petite mort (acoleuthic), Wednesday, July 21, 2010 6:17 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark

not rly sure what this means

it means, "Marc Loi, look out"

someone who pesters women in a situation of alcohol, with self-aggrandisation, PUA tactics or false claims, until they relent - although as harbl says, this is possibly patronising to women who actively seek sex themselves, so there's gotta have been a plausible complaint, or evidence that someone's a serial womaniser/letch

o god I'm about to get rinsed again :(

i think making behavior we find disreputable illegal is a terrific solution to creating the society we want to live ine

people annoying you? write more laws!

especially sexual behavior

ABSO thing sounds like some bullshit in general.

are americans just a little more libertarian on average than brits? the idea of criminalizing every last shitty thing you can do someone seems really dangerous and gross to me

lol xps

Cops are on their way to your location, max. That'll teach you.

false claims

"omg i totally loved "up". SO moving."

an ASBO isn't a statement of illegality! it's just a 'don't be a dick' slap on the wrist

haha nrq iatee made that joke abt pavement earlier

can't remember the thing with asbos. they're pretty stupid yeah and we do have a micromanagerial government. on the other hand your murder rate is insane.

How could finding "Up" touching be a lie? Who wasn't moved?

can't remember the thing with asbos. they're pretty stupid yeah and we do have a micromanagerial government. on the other hand your murder rate is insane.

― I’ll put you in a f *ckin Weingarten you c*nt! (history mayne), Wednesday, July 21, 2010 1:49 PM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

to be fair, murder is already illegal, so i dont know how an asbo would help that

an ASBO isn't a statement of illegality!

what the fuck, that's even worse! what's the point??

imaginary creepy guy

xp

in all honesty, I can think of several people I met in high school and college who could have benefited from getting an ASBO (most specifically the dudes who thought kidnapping a girl would be a great way to get her and her friends to come hang out in their dorm room and couldn't understand why tying her to a chair and not letting her leave was causing her to go into hysterics)

like, let's punish people for shit like that, and not shit like "ooh I'm a doctor, wanna fuck me? lol actually I sell Ginsu knives, thanks for the skins"

false claims

"I can't understand how someone could hate small dogs"

wwmld

like, let's punish people for shit like that

im p sure there are already laws against kidnapping

in all honesty, I can think of several people I met in high school and college who could have benefited from getting an ASBO (most specifically the dudes who thought kidnapping a girl would be a great way to get her and her friends to come hang out in their dorm room and couldn't understand why tying her to a chair and not letting her leave was causing her to go into hysterics)

like, let's punish people for shit like that, and not shit like "ooh I'm a doctor, wanna fuck me? lol actually I sell Ginsu knives, thanks for the skins"

― he does NOT have the training (HI DERE), Wednesday, July 21, 2010 1:51 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that is an actually illegal thing to do, though. we already have a law for it.

xp

Man if the US had this law in my early 20s i'd be doing life sentences for pretending to like this one chick's favorite books by looking them up on Wikipedia and passing off some critics opinion as my own thought

except it didn't work

Yeah I think my entire married life has been an amusing series of "Wait, wait, you told me when we were first dating you'd actually seen and liked X movie, and you haven't?" It's just a running joke now. TBH that's kind of different than what's going on in this case, though.

"you don't have to read a book to have an opinion."

Well there isn't some at-home "Jew test" kit she could really run so.....how was she really sure?

if young men and women are to be barred from misrepresenting themselves in order to procure sexual partners, then the species is doomed

you heard it here first

back to topic though this is o_O. I've never been about legislating morality, so in typical form I give this ruling a big DUD. Just because I don't think it's cool to lie about yourself to get your rocks off, doesn't mean I think you should spend years in jail or get tagged with some "ASBO".

Since when is sex conditional, anyway? Sometimes I think Dave Chappelle's idea for the 'sex contract' should be implemented worldwide.

xpost lol

"You're in breach of contract, sir -- you lied about your weight on the original application, and your ethnicity, and in addition, you failed to last the prerequisite 10 minutes as set forth in paragraph B, line item 3.5."

"I hold you in contempt for failing to 'beat the pussy up'."

I keep reading the thread title as "area man guilty of rape after saying he was jewish so he could have sex with jewish woman" and thinking it's gonna be about an onion article

loool peter

"Wait, so your friends don't] think you're a really cool guy? They actually think you're needy and clinging? I hereby revoke that blowjob, sir"

"my friends think I'm a really cool guy" being just the line to throw out on a first date

"my mother always kissed me when she tucked me in!"

:O

That is not a winning line

to be fair, that last one has a certain self-knowing kitsch appeal, but "I always high-five the bus-driver!" just ain't AGL

Damn is that ASBO thing the stupidest thing Ive ever heard. What a joke.

"The orders restrict behaviour in some way, by prohibiting a return to a certain area or shop, or by restricting public behaviour such as swearing or drinking. As the ASBO is a civil order, the defendant has no right to evidence that might disprove the assertions of the plaintiff, though violating an ASBO can incur up to five years imprisonment."

REALLY??

sorry mr land of the free but sometimes a person has to be told not to be a dick

by the state

how would you get YOUR ASBO?

The law needs to allow at least 15% embellishment. You wouldn't get many romantic partners saying that you were "most of that, and a side of stale cashews".

by the state?

xps loool

so ASBO is state-sanctioned dick-calling-out?

http://witnessthis.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/aibo.jpg

~poops~

Agree with max above, just because something annoys you or ticks you off, doesnt mean that has to become illegal, or the government has to get involved. I'm glad my forbears moved away from the Auld Sod, i'd probably be forced to get an ABSO tattoo on my forearm.

I also disagree with state-sanctioned math. Just because the government has brainwashed you into thinking "2+2=4" doesn't mean I have to follow the lie.

I put what this guy did as up there with windmilling, not quite as bad as dog fouling or fly tipping. Thus ABSO, not CRABSO.

ASBO is kind of like a restraining order for noisy neighbours/public drunks/stalkers but it is issued by the local authority and not the police. If you violate the terms of an ASBO, then the police can get involved and criminal charges could happen. However it is something I see as another way to deprive poor people of their civil liberties because the whole ASBO culture is tied into social housing and benefits - you're more likely to face ASBO situations when the local authority wants compliance and most middle-class people have probably never been faced with having to initial a pre-ASBO in exchange for social services.

:/

am beginning to feel a bit stupid...again

I have a sort of emotional sympathy to the ruling here I gotta say

still though I mean

"ma'am, you laughed at this man's jokes, even though you did not find him funny, and you did so because, as you admit, you liked him otherwise and were up for a roll in the hay with him even if it meant pretending that his jokes were good. When you revealed, three days later, irritated after many more such jokes, that you found him, quoting here from the transcript, 'less funny than botulism,' his feelings were hurt. You are hereby branded anti-social by the state. No more laughing at jokes you don't find funny. Have a nice day"

:D

I roll w/ aero's attitude and respect the fact he's got my anti-exploitation interests at heart while knowing more of the world than I but I do think there should be SOME mechanism to dispel sleazeballs - even if it is just a name-and-shame on the local noticeboard

mechanism for dispeling sleazeballs = brain, hands, feet, lips, larynx, mouth

I don't need the government telling my neighbor to quit calling me names

marc loi-y jagger rides again

― Big Fate (as Alvin 'Xzibit' Joiner) (history mayne), Friday, April 16, 2010 9:19 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark

x-post and for the benefit of LJ:

Example: since 2008, if you're lucky enough to win a council flat from your local authority, you don't get a secure, rent-controlled tenancy until you've shown responsible, good behaviour for 18 months - and the pre-ASBO undertaking you sign to get the keys in the first place prohibits you from any bad neighbour behaviour for that time period, and you can't go into arrears of any kind, or no secure tenancy. Before, a person who'd been waiting for a council flat for sometimes years would go straight into a secure, inexpensive tenancy.

" but I do think there should be SOME mechanism to dispel sleazeballs"

There is. Avoid them.

here you go, LJ: http://www.wowhead.com/spell=32375/mass-dispel

I think we should incept their dreams

This is such a wtf story. There is no way that this is rape.

Also, ASBOs are shitty, and as suzy says, almost always directed at the poor. Just in case anyone was thinking LJ was the representative of British opinion on the matter.

mechanism for gargling sleazeballs

man I am not finishing that joke, I have my dignity

ok well no I don't but you get the idea

What they're really doing is jailing a muslim man for having sex with a jewish woman, right? If it were a jewish man/muslim woman it'd be cool, but you can't have those crafty muslims stealing our women, amirite

psychiatrists will be required to report patient conversations that border on "Sleazeball"-y to the authorities.

so an ASBO is part of a contract that EXPECTS poor people to behave badly? fuck the labour government (and this one if it's persisted with it)

I meant ASBO in a far more innocent 'don't be a dick' sense but I guess that one can be enforced - I just wish it was culturally acceptable for women to say 'this guy exploited me' and not get shouted down or ignored, and the man lauded for his derring-do

Also, ASBOs are shitty, and as suzy says, almost always directed at the poor. Just in case anyone was thinking LJ was the representative of British opinion on the matter.

I didn't know this - I was being idealistic. No need to paint me as a right-wing cunt when you know full well I'm far from being one

I see where yr coming from acoleuthic but what you are proposing sounds eerily similar to calling 911 for Burger King screwing up your order

What they're really doing is jailing a muslim man for having sex with a jewish woman, right?

that's a bit, what's the word?, stupidly simplistic

I just wish it was culturally acceptable for women to say 'this guy exploited me' and not get shouted down or ignored, and the man lauded for his derring-do

idk what the hell you're talking abt / who you're rolling with where men are applauded for their derring-do

who you're rolling with where men are applauded for their derring-do

undergrads up and down the land regale one another with stories of chutzpah-laden conquest in which someone has behaved naughtily if lawfully - usually over a few pints and a general air of mutual backslapping

No need to paint me as a right-wing cunt when you know full well I'm far from being one

Hey, I didn't mean to imply this - just saying that a lot of Brits find the ASBO concept as foolish as the Americans on this thread seem to. Trying to ward off the 'lol Britishers' contingent.

I really hate how any guy now trying to bring feminist discourse near a discussion - right or wrong - is now automatically marc loi

fuck that shit imo

I now return to jokes about ball-gargling

Well, suzy's been very useful in putting me right on the topic of ASBOs and showing me why increased reliance upon them wouldn't work, so consider me corrected xxp

louis's feminism is kinda marc loi level tho

xpost

"dog fouling" "fly tipping" "derring do" "regaling each other with chutzpah laden conquest"

goddamn, I am glad this is a trans-Atlantic board.

I was thinking his feminism was more along the along the lines of Feminist Hulk, but that is mostly bcz he used the word "smash."

Yeah, I live in a rather nice council block with mostly lovely neighbours (apart from one Citizen Smith-style newsletter nutter and someone who lets Christian canvassers in) and every so often the estate manager will send around a mass mailing complaining about dog shit, noise and/or people's kids loitering, with 'this could lead to an ASBO if SOMEBODY doesn't cut this shit out' manifest in some part of the letter. It sucks when every last bit of communication coming from the office is pre-emptively admonishing in tone.

I was being blunt, but I really don't think it's simplistic. It has everything to do with the fact that it was someone who's "the other" who passed as "one of us" in order to have sex with one of "our women." There are so many discriminatory, patriarchal, wrong-headed things about this whole situation that it's hard to tell where to start.

The only "sex under false pretenses" thing I can think of that has any criminal consequences in the US would be statutory rape, and in that case if anyone is guilty of deception about the relevant fact it'd be the younger party, not the party at "fault." Strike that, states with laws about HIV status disclosure might fall under the same umbrella, but that is a life and death thing.

It has everything to do with the fact that it was someone who's "the other" who passed as "one of us" in order to have sex with one of "our women."

if it were this simplistic, then all arab men would always be convicted for rape for having sex with jewish women in israel

it isn't that simplistic

No, it just means that it isn't a statutory condition for rape, but it's a sufficient condition for rape. In other words, it is not against the law for that to happen, but for it to happen under false pretenses means it's sufficient for criminal charges.

If this was the US circa a certain time period, one of her family members would have probably killed him and then received a manslaughter sentence after citing "arab panic" as a defense.

the brief education we've had via this thread is that there's a precedent in israeli law that having sex with a woman under false pretenses is a criminal offense, if not "classical rape" (wonderful phrasing there, judge) then tantamount to it.

"saying you are a jew when you are an arab" is a) clearly lying, b) a really silly thing to be thrown in the clink for, AND c) guaranteed to get you coverage from the media, when other lying-for-sex "crimes" aren't on anyone's radar.

I really hate how any guy now trying to bring feminist discourse near a discussion - right or wrong - is now automatically marc loi

When was the last time someone called you Marc Loi? Do you think maybe it hasn't happened because of the way you bring up issues and the battles you choose to fight?

arguing that the medical profession should treat abortion like a clinical procedure and not a moral decision = universal feminist position, sensible for either a man or a woman to espouse

arguing that the government should serve citations to guys who misrepresent themselves in order to have sex because they are taking advantage of women = you are lucky if "lol Marc Loi" is the meanest thing someone says about you

ASBOs are bullshit yes and almost only used against poor people yes but in the interests of full disclosure they are as often as not used on people whose nuisance is mainly being perpetrated on other poor people, so you could just as easily see them as a boneheaded useless attempt at cleaning up the ghetto rather than the Man trying to keep a brother down.

What if somebody has sex with a prostitute but lies about having the means to pay?

arguing that the government should serve citations to guys who misrepresent themselves in order to have sex because they are taking advantage of women = you are lucky if "lol Marc Loi" is the meanest thing someone says about you

Fair point, but you also discount the fact that a LOT of the time my ILX argument style is 'well, I have opinions, and ILX is an erudite and sensible community, so if I throw something out there and argue blithely in its favour, regardless of how sensible it is, people will speak sense and put me right/validate at least part of what I've said/point me in the right direction', which happens almost unerringly.

What if somebody has sex with a prostitute but lies about having the means to pay?

― Zuckerzeit Abrahams Zuckerzeit (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, July 21, 2010 4:20 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

She is usually associated with people who make sure that's not an issue.

^knows

;)

what if Charles Barkley lies to have sex with a woman dressed as Gumby...is it a crime then

arguing that the government should serve citations to guys who misrepresent themselves in order to have sex because they are taking advantage of women = you are lucky if "lol Marc Loi" is the meanest thing someone says about you

I know but I'm an old-ass man with years of practice, when I see aspiring feminists getting marc loi'd I wanna defend him - I was an insufferable young feminist too once y'know before I matured into the insufferable mature feminist you see before you

also sorry bill you may now lazy-zing me back and all will be well

this sickens me.

also sorry bill you may now lazy-zing me back and all will be well

― Anti-Suggest Ban Order (acoleuthic), Wednesday, July 21, 2010 4:46 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

No, i thought it was kind of funny.

Example: since 2008, if you're lucky enough to win a council flat from your local authority, you don't get a secure, rent-controlled tenancy until you've shown responsible, good behaviour for 18 months - and the pre-ASBO undertaking you sign to get the keys in the first place prohibits you from any bad neighbour behaviour for that time period, and you can't go into arrears of any kind, or no secure tenancy. Before, a person who'd been waiting for a council flat for sometimes years would go straight into a secure, inexpensive tenancy.

― the phantom flâneur flinger (suzy), Wednesday, 21 July 2010 19:33 (3 hours ago) Bookmark

As someone who pretends to do an honest 35 hours work in this exact line of work, may I point out just how reasonable this situation actually is? It's tough enough to get the worst of them out even with a signed legal document stating that they clearly understand the types of behaviour that will lead to sanction.

also, lj <3 and all that, but dare i say you wear this new-found feminism guise in much the same manner as a wolf wears a little red riding accoutrement. lay in on a little shallower for a while, listen to yr good friend aerosmith if in doubt.

cos as far as i can see there's nobody in this entire thread who's clapping this guy on the back or anything

I feel bad for finding this whole thread really funny...

I mean the case itself is fucking ridiculous and the ruling is obviously wrong but folks are bringing teh lolz A+

some people do lie, it's not ok, no one should get to send anyone to jail for this type of shit.

I think 98% of the population would be in jail if this were prosecuted in all cases.

selective representation isn't lies

so like come on

97%

selective representation is lying in spirit, get back in there 1%

I don't really have anything to add to this discussion except this link

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=30&art_id=92635&sid=26592327&con_type=1

o_O

judge's statement was p fukn harsh on her, maybe rightly so but sheesh still

I thought it was kind of funny until I read she had to get an abortion.

did not get that far, am now a little ;_;

If I can wade in, putting aside this particular case first because it probably has more to do with precedence than with ethics/morality (tho a case could be made that finding very leniently here had to do with racism) as Kagan reminded us recently precedence overcomes personal fidelity in most judicial systems, etc. But I think there's an interesting question here about lying and rape. We all agree (I assume) that the fundamental requirement for consensual sex is consent (tautologically, even, lol). This is a legal idea that goes back at least as far as the Talmud (and probably ever farther but I can't trace it beyond there) that a person requires 'da'at' (the ability to give consent) to engage in a sexual relationship. That's why it's illegal to have sex with a minor or an animal -- because legally those people/animals are unable to give consent to their partner. Looked at through speech-act theory, consent is this unspoken illocutionary action -- we don't expect people to say outright, "I give consent," because of stuff like, "killing the mood" and whatever, but we do expect people to read others actions and mannerisms to find implicit consent. In this case the question is: If I made this illocutionary consent under false pretenses, does my illocutionary consent stand-up, or is it what J.L. Austin would call failed, or bad -- ie: That consent was never given and therefore it was an act of rape. And I think what makes this really complicated is that most of us would agree that there are cases where false pretenses should invalid the illocutionary speech-act (or do SOMETHING with it -- ie: even if lying about being able to help you with welfare checks doesn't make it *actual* rape, I think we intuit that something happened wrt to the consent). Ultimately the case that "we can't enforce this or everyone will be in jail" is bullshit because either it invalidates the consent or it doesn't.

I think one of the lines that needs to be sorted through is what kinds of deviations make the speech-act "unhappy" and which ones don't. Ie: If you lie about liking "Up," you could say that people generally expect there to be a little social lubrication about taste manufacturing and so the consent doesn't really depend on that lie. If you lie, however, about being able to help a woman's husband get out of jail (such as in a certain episode of My Name is Earl), we are much more careful about whether it invalidates the consent or not. Maybe we'll say that it doesn't totally invalidate it (so it isn't actually rape) but it invalidates it somewhat (so it's not totally consensual). Some of this might have to do with our intuitions about time and retroactivity -- if you gave consent 2 hours ago, and the only thing that changed since then is the set of information you're aware of (ie: He didn't like "Up" 2 hours ago either, you're only just finding out about it now) how can you retroactively remove your consent? But I think we want some freedom to arbitrate this case by case because despite these considerations it does seem like some lies are worse than other lies and some may remove more consent than others. (This is a novelty, btw -- I don't think JL Austin allows for illocutionary statements to fail a little or fail a lot, but this makes sense to me here.)

So then the real question of this case is, to what extent does lying about your ethnicity matter? Is it a lie like "I like Up," which we think doesn't really matter at all or is it a lie like, "I can help you feed your family," which I think matters a whole lot. So one of the reasons why I think "Up" matters less than "feed your family" is the stakes involved -- it doesn't matter if you like "Up." It matters a lot about feeding your family. So in this case it would come down to whether you think it matters if someone only wants to have sex with someone of the same ethnicity. Most of ILX, I imagine, believes it doesn't matter and it's more like "Up." There's a second, trickier, issue tho. What if what matters is the stake that the "victim" puts in the lie? There's actually a good reason to think that this is the right underpinning. What if someone lied that he was holding the woman's family hostage and would only let them go if she slept with him, but he wasn't really holding them hostage? Obviously we'd feel like there was rape involved there, even tho the actual stakes are actual non-existent (the family isn't being held hostage). The real stakes were what she felt -- she felt like there were real stakes. Similarly, if an Israeli woman believed that she'd be damned if she slept with an Arab (nb, I have no idea if that is what this woman felt) even if we felt her belief was totally wrong and morally abhorrent, it would be hard to say that these aren't also real stakes. What is at issue might be how violated the person feels, not how violated we think the person should feel. Obv hard to quantify but...

In summation, cause this is ridiculously long, I think it's a really complicated issue, and also I think like almost every law the correct balance is something that doesn't really stand up under heavy logical scrutiny but that allows for us to go with our gut when a case comes up, so that with something like this maybe precedence doesn't bind us to call it rape (maybe we should be calling it something else), but that still lets us call something similar rape if we felt it actually fulfilled that criteria.

I'm not even sure that positing an 'i can help you feed your family' scenario allows you to call the consent thus given compromised, tbh- it's still informed consent in that situation imo. it's an abuse of power and all manner of other pretty disgusting things, but it's a considered decision on the behalf of the person giving the consent in that situation.

in a scenario such as the one in question, where information has knowingly been given that falsely represents an issue that would have an affect on the consent, then that's more clearly what you're talking about, I think? it's still not rape, nor anything like it imo.

Well, I'm not sure. It seems to me that consent does have something to do with stuff besides just the sex + consent, like we acknowledge that sex exists within this social context and paradigm where it is never just sex. So presumably the conversation before the consent has SOMETHING to do with the consent. Like if you lived in a country where women didn't have an implicit cultural right to refuse sex, and you had sex with a woman even though she didn't protest at the time, you'd agree that the broader context has something to do with whether consent was given or not. (I read a book review or article recently that had a discussion about this very thing, but I can't remember where I read it. Maybe it'll come back to me.) So saying that "rape" is just this one particular physical action makes one question easier (okay this isn't rape, this is rape, etc) but makes another question harder (what are these other compulsive sexual encounters that are socially mediated and problematic?). I don't really see the value is making a semantic difference if what you're left with is something we all agree is problematic but now have no term to discuss it.

Like, if consent is predicated on an equal footing between both parties (maybe something that's never actually achievable for real, so "mostly" equal footing) then isn't an abuse of power actually reducing the meaning of the consent? Where do you draw the line between a guard and a prisoner, or a teacher and a student, and other inequalities and more minor inequalities (like someone who is able to help you feed your family). I think we all believe consent has to do with your ability to give it, which has to do with the power you have in the relationship. It's meaningless to give consent if you have no consent to give. The only question is when does this occur (and does something like lying then play into it).

(xp)

I think there's much more than a semantic difference in agreeing to not call all of those things 'rape', so I'd differ from you there. I'm not sure I see the clear link between an example of a transactional sexual encounter and the example you give of a culture where there is no right to refuse consent, really. But then it's late and you could spend hours nitpicking through a maze of this stuff, so rly can we all agree that he's a dick but so's almost everyone, she has a right to be distressed, and a halfarsedly linked precedent doesn't justify this sentence?

on the one hand, it's scummy to misrepresent yourself to get laid

on the other hand, if we're actually going down this road, we're eventually going to get to questions of how well one person ever really knows another, whether people actually know themselves, whether identity is fixed or fluid, etc etc

we run the risk of momus weighing in

for God's sake people let's get back to wondering whether it's ok to tell your prospective date that your doctor told you you will die if you don't get a handjob before sunup

darraghmac, not to wade into this ground (cause so unnecessary), I just meant 'rape' as some kind of word signifying certain things. I'm not saying X is like Y where X is actual action here and Y is the platonic 'rape' that you have in mind. Just that if you feel it's valuable here to distinguish between the two than go right ahead, but I don't see the utilitarian value in defending the word per se. Like, the horror of rape isn't that something happened to you that people call 'rape.' It's what actually happened. The word is just a semiotic device we use. I totally agree both cases are clearly very different but what my post is trying to do above is ask: What are the meaningful differences?

There's a whole sliding scale of relative power balances in any relationship- which is why most (all?) of the positions above would probably have strictly regulated procedures in place to prevent ie sexual relations between students/teachers. Consent certainly relates to you rpower to give it, yes, but I'd still draw the line a long way short of 'you scratch my back I'll scratch yours' before equating it to a sexual assault- however abhorrent that behaviour may be.

(Of course maybe some philosophers would say that it actually is the semiotic horror of the word, so lol, maybe I shouldn't have even brought it up.) xp

i can't keep up with you mordy, tbh, so if it seems like i'm lagging behind it's probably because i am btw.

darraghmac, I totally agree. I just don't think we should give up our agency in deciding cases like these just because maybe it isn't as clear cut. We intuit that some things are more abhorrent than others and rules against teacher/student guard/prisoner relationships arose because we flexed those intuitions. Those rules didn't come into being with the relationship.

And like, intuition sucks btw. But as far I can tell it's better than going in one direction and saying that all sexual relationships are rape (which was a historical feminist case), or going in the opposite direction (like Paglia) and saying all sexual relationships are "rape" (ie: rape/uneven power is what makes sex awesome basically acc. to Paglia). We gotta go case by case, so my big post above was just trying to think through some of the issues of this case. I don't think it's so simple. It might even be that there was a huge violation and we shouldn't prosecute it (which seems to be the consensus in the thread).

well yeah, there's an established protocol in place because it was clearly seen to be necessary over, presumably, a long period of human interactions.

but guys didn't start lying on first dates yesterday, or with this case, or since obama took office. surely there's pretty convincing reasons why this type of prosecution isn't commonplace enough to have been legislated for before now?

It might even be that there was a huge violation and we shouldn't prosecute it (which seems to be the consensus in the thread).

well, nicely summed up, yeah. although the 'huge' part of the violation may well be mainly in the victim's head, in this case- though as you said in your long 1st post that in itself is part of what makes it complex.

I think we should reserve the right to change the law if we decide it needs changing. That it hasn't been changed before now is kinda reactionary -- maybe we didn't notice a huge imbalance before now? Or maybe things have changed so that the imbalance has gotten larger? Like obviously we shouldn't go in without thinking, but Israel didn't lynch-mob this guy. They're sorting this out through a judicial system. I actually kinda sympathize with their finding in the precedent. I think when a government official lies to a disadvantaged woman to get sexual favors, there's something (call it rape or something else) that needs to be handled by the law. Recently a Rabbi in charge of conversions to Judaism forced potential converts to act as sex workers for him. I'm not sure what he's being charged with (if anything, I'm not following the case closely), but there's definitely a violation occurring. The precedent shook out ridiculously in this case, but ideally it'll be appealed and the law will be amended. It might not be (lol, I reserve the right to be cynical about state power in any form), but it was designed precisely to deal with these issues.

ok this is gonna seem a little weird but: medical consent is located in "informed consent". the consenting party bases their decision on, in theory, all of the information available that may or may not influence their decision. in a medical setting, whether or not the patient ~asks~ for pertinent info is irrelevant---it must be given. in theory. not necessarily in practice, but that's a different issue, for a different thread

as the law (US, at least afaik) stands w/r/t sexual encounters, however, this is not the case. a party is not required (again, afaik) to divulge personal information to gain consent, unless that information is immediately ~dangerous~ to the consenting partner (eg HIV status, if known). consent is given based on known/available information, and even if that information proves false, it stands because that's all that was given, and understood, at the time. (lawyers, plz weigh in here, because i'm spitballing).

while i totally agree that investigating what makes given consent actually consensual is a worthwhile pursuit, i'm still not convinced that whatever you turn up will alter the situation, legally, for US spectators. here (as you know!) this kind of defense would be porous and ineffective. but, as you point out, it's a precedent in Israel.

what i'd be interested to know is, whether or not when this precedent was set, did anyone have the foresight to see this as a possible result? i have literally zero idea how the israeli court system works, so i have to ask: did the judge have any latitude w/r/t keeping or ditching the case? could he have thought "nah this seems bullshitty" and tossed it? or is the precedent that deeply entrenched that, per israeli jurisprudence, this is the unfortunate, but inevitable, result?

XPS oh god so many well this is probably detritus at this point

we run the risk of momus weighing in

oh god where is my talisman lord preserve us

i would really be interested in what kind of precedent there is in israel!

I think we should reserve the right to change the law if we decide it needs changing.

I think, ideally, that three or four judges sitting together in consideration of a case such as this shouldn't have considered the precedent we're presuming was applied as binding in this case.

That it hasn't been changed before now is kinda reactionary -- maybe we didn't notice a huge imbalance before now? Or maybe things have changed so that the imbalance has gotten larger?

No, I think you've got the cart before the horse here- I'm not sure that anyone would agree that the power imbalance between men/women is getting larger in these matters? Maybe I'm wrong there, but I'd be surprised if so. This is really, imo, a case of judges applying a fairly specific legal precedent in an unsuitable manner.

Nobody could disagree that a body of laws needs to be an evolving set, but I'm not sure you've not been trying to argue this one from the point of view that a set law is automatically correct or inarguable. Prob not, as I've said I'm playing catchup here with you.

eh basically what evan said in the meantime, at the end of his post actually

I'm not sure about the precedence, but I did read:

He specifically referred to a ruling by the Israeli High Court of Justice that stated that a person is in violation of the law if they, “do not tell the truth regarding critical matters…and as a result of misrepresentation (a person) has sexual relations with them.”

"Critical matters" sounds like a huge political bombshell in Israel where a huge percentage of the country is charedi and probably believes that the man being a gentile is more critical than that he lied about being a married father of two. And those dudes riot when they don't like a court ruling (see the recent desegregation ruckus).

darraghmac: I'm not saying that in fact this ruling was noticing an imbalance that they never noticed before. Like I wrote before, I actually think the precedent was applied poorly here (and may have been because of the charedi issue, who knows? I'm not really keeping up with Israel legal politics). But I think that we should reserve the right to make laws when we notice something. Like I think the precedent case actually pointed to something real and maybe it wasn't decided perfectly, but there was definitely an abuse and violation between the government official and the woman. I'd be wary of saying that we shouldn't address that imbalance just because no one noticed it before, after all men lie to women all the time, etc. After all, there was a time when teachers could sleep with students with impunity, but when we noticed how fucked up that was, we tried to address it.

I don't think anyone's disagreeing with you on any of that, FWIW, and any further clarification from me seems to actually muddy that message so I'll leave it at that :)

ok that's sort of in line with what i expected

well what i was wondering about, i mean, was not the fact that someone lied but the "critical matters" thing

There's like a whole broader question of how we use law to address ethics + stuff like that which like every philosopher in history has tried to deal with. Like it seems self-evident to me that the precedent case of course led to this case (if the metric is, "if the consent is predicated upon a lie, it isn't consent"), but similarly self-evident that this case shouldn't be judged like the precedent case. So how does law deal with these intuitions and stuff that doesn't really shake out well in code. (One popular way is using juries and appeal systems and whatever you can throw in there to try to sort it out.) Also it goes back to this really historical confusion over what is right and what is legal (that still constantly gets jumbled today), and whether you can ever really align the two, etc.

Also it goes back to this really historical confusion over what is right and what is legal (that still constantly gets jumbled today), and whether you can ever really align the two, etc.

of course! which is why it's interesting, etc., but given that this ruling seems to rankle most of us (ilxors), is it reasonable/ok to pass judgement on it? because, to me, it just seems wrong in the rongest way, even though i understand and appreciate both the precedent and the underpinnings thereof.

yeah I'm a little hesitant to pass judgment on this whole thing because it is, after all, a case in a different country with a different legal culture and culture altogether.

how is a dude to know that the farmer's wife is ~actually~ the farmer's wife

kind of lol but mostly sad

no wait, mostly lol

btw abbot yr dn seems like words to live life by

xp I mean, people can pass judgement on whatever imo. I just feel like any judgement should try not to be broad. Like it seems like a much more useful critique to do what the defense attorneys are doing, which is claiming that this case sets a really bad precedence and appeal the case. I can't imagine it won't be overturned, it really is insane. And if it is overturned, then the system actually worked the way it was supposed to -- the lower court applied the precedence and the higher court overturned it. (And you could say that the media's horrified response plays its part in the way the judicial system pans out too, and so do us in some super limited way maybe, so maybe we should be outraged assuming it's productive*.) But it seems to me like there's a decent impulse here, to protect human beings from being exploited, and the problem might be finding out the best way to do it. I'm not convinced on whether there is or isn't a racist element here (it could be that there is -- if not from the court then maybe from broader political issues, and it depends on whether you think a Jew only wanting to sleep with other Jews is racist, or something else entirely and that's a whole other can of worms, like if he converted presumably this wouldn't have been an issue). But a shitty impulse could coexist with a good one, and I'd want to point out the good one and the bad one and figure out how we can maximize the good, etc.

* k3v HATES when I use this formulation, but I'm so unsure about so much that I'm actually always returning to this politically. It seems to me that a lot of political questions come down to whether they're productive or not, so I'm always wary of saying whether it's worth doing or not doing something when it often seems like there's an answer out there somewhere independent of my opinion. If ILX really does have no effect on this case, who cares what we say here? I don't even know how I'd quantify our impact.

I don't think you can offer this up as a case of the system 'working'. I think, assuming an appeal is heard and the conviction set aside etc, you can say that the appeals process is working, but this really is a good example of a precedence system not working.

Yeah, I agree with that. I was reading the pieces as apart of a bigger system. Times like these I wish I had spent some time studying more jurisprudence history so I could read the history of appellate courts against the history of precedence, but I haven't read anything serious about law in like a year. :(

jeez, hard to get into the mindset of someone who wishes they'd spent more time reading about that stuff, tbh- interesting and all as it is.

I don't really wish I was reading it, just that I had read it. I like having the ideas in my brain, even if something that's really boring to read at the time.

analysing information.....

you are....

http://wololo.net/wagic/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/the_matrix_movie_image_keanu_reeves_as_neo__1_.jpg

how is a dude to know that the farmer's wife is ~actually~ the farmer's wife

you are en fuego, i didn't think i could ever laugh again after reading the last half of this thread.

Mordy,

I think when a government official lies to a disadvantaged woman to get sexual favors, there's something (call it rape or something else) that needs to be handled by the law.

Well, I don't know if you can instantly jump to rape. It's a misuse of governmental powers, but claiming it's rape is off because giving consent under false circumstances isn't what we think of when we think of rape. Really, that seems like a shady government deal, so you're viewing a sexual transaction as a value transaction, so it's more of a prostitution. Are you really prostituting yourself if there's a false offer of payment?

But yeah, this all comes down to the "sex under false pretenses is illegal in Israel" thing, which is pretty much the opposite of our evil western sex ethic. I think a world where everyone is enthusiastic about their actual selves and people are honest in their seduction is... an interesting prospect.. but, you know, probably not going to happen.

going in one direction and saying that all sexual relationships are rape (which was a historical feminist case)

if this refers to Dworkin's work on power imbalances in sexual relationships, she neither said nor meant that all sexual relationships are rape; which other writers/thinkers tread near any such position?

isn't the trope 'all penetration is rape' anyway? (NB i have no idea if this is in any way a stated position from any major writer/thinker)

I don't believe that either position has ever had any serious footing within the movement; I think the issue is that as long as all relationships between men and women occur in a patriarchal field, no sex act between a man and a woman is the act of a free woman, which muddies "consent" considerably

Yes, smithy, that's what I was evoking. Not that anyone was seriously saying, "THIS IS LITERALLY RAPE," (neither Dworkin or Paglia on either side), but that they are both willing to push these imbalanced consent issues in that direction.

sometimes a headache is just, y'know, a headache

when u start to chip away at the enlightenment notion of subjecthood u are deeply undermining concepts like consent anyway

Smithy; just to clarify, I'm more pointing to that impulse to compare these imbalances to rape, as if to say: There is definitely something there that people are grasping at, even if the language is still a bit muddled. Like obviously I would never say that every sexual interaction is rape, but I think the distinction/consideration comes from an honest impulse worth thinking about.

yeah Mordy I agree strongly with your last statement there - I only bristled because willful misrepresentation of what A.D. actually said was used throughout her life (and continues to be used) to discredit & caricature her, and it makes me sad, her work strikes me as pretty fuckin' fearless - I think she basically got punished for going ahead & posing the really a few of the really hard questions that naturally arise & usually don't get asked out loud once one sort of confronts/accepts the existence of the patriarchy

max if you think I'm takin that continental bait "you" got another thing comin my friend

o my friends, there is no friend

srry, Levinas, there is only a friend

ready for me 2 blow ur mind

~~all sex is rape~~
~~all interaction is sex~~
~~all interaction is rape~~
~~the world that is is the violent movement of the will to power and naught else~~

the thread is all that is the case

stay off the schopenhauer imo

idk dyao the brief period between me discovering some schopenhauer in high school & learning he was a nazi who we totally couldn't like was a pretty bracing week-and-a-half

it is our conclusion that women will not be free from patriarchy until they are made biologically freed from reproduction, and when reproduction is itself is freed from being a strictly biological process and the distinction between sexes made irrelevant.

down with child birth, childhood and children!

that's shulamith firestone isn't it?

firestone is a major influence on our project, certainly

but i was not quoting, i was agreeing!

ok

for more info on our project consult this thread:

mechanifesto

schopenhauer wasnt a nazi he was an emo

hannah arendt's boyfriend was a nazi

well sure

banaka if you wanna advertise your thread on other more successful threads you gotta pay the standard ILX ad-cents rate, send me your CC info through ilx & I'll set you up

what are these rates, and how can we eliminate them

Heidegger was a Nazi
He liked to play SS
Kept a picture of Adolph,
Tucked in his cowboy vest

ilx ad-cents rates are the only philosophical constant that's consistent throughout all systems iirc

if we were inclined to humour we would be saying "lol"

I mean, people can pass judgement on whatever imo. I just feel like any judgement should try not to be broad. Like it seems like a much more useful critique to do what the defense attorneys are doing, which is claiming that this case sets a really bad precedence and appeal the case.

well we can do both! the whole situation is both legally and morally problematic, so we can address both. it's easy in this case

but back to the larger point about ideological disputes vs ~gettin shyt done~ - the whole point of having principles is to be able to be at ease with yourself at the end of the day, man. if something violates principles you hold, you should be upset about it - the media obviously is a better vehicle for effecting more immediate change, but that doesn't mean all of us blowing steam over here is a waste of time, either. at the very least, we all get smarter (look at LJ!). as a result of that, we can write smarter and more righteous pissed-off letters to our elected officials, bring these ideas into conversations with outside ppl, and vote better.

in general, declining to follow one's gut because you don't think it'll matter doesn't sit well w/ me - to me it's a way of abdicating responsibility, and is passive and submissive. (compare with the judge's decision, who clearly fucked up here. his deference to precedent, if this is indeed what happened, is also a way of abdicating responsibility for the outcome. it's an obviously BS 'balls and strikes' judicial philosophy.) effectively looking the other way while bad shit goes on doesn't help anyone - the only way shit "gets done" (in an actually meaningful way) is by the persistence of principle, either by necessity in practical terms or by controlling the dialog so the principles become more mainstream and accepted

one of my favorite things zinn wrote before he died:

Some people might say, “Well, what do you expect?”

And the answer is that we expect a lot.

People say, “What, are you a dreamer?”

And the answer is, yes, we’re dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don’t want war. We don’t want capitalism. We want a decent society.

We better hold on to that dream—because if we don’t, we’ll sink closer and closer to this reality that we have, and that we don’t want.

mordy your point about this woman feeling violated, even if it's due to her prejudices, is actually really interesting. i still think this is not a punishable offense, but as someone who has never had to experience what being raped or "raped" is like, i feel weird about assailing her gut feelings. but i do feel, legally, that they don't require charges.

dude's kind of an asshole tho yeah

require warrant

I understand your position, k3v. It's a position I have held (and occasionally still wander into). But I have to ask what you give up in terms of understanding the world when you take that position. When you refuse to examine mechanisms of power (or mechanisms of anthropology) because you can envision a better world, you are abdicating something too. Retreating into idealism can be a way of not compromising yourself and becoming just as submissive and passive. This is not some critique like: "Compromise is good, idealism is bad," but more like, sometimes we need to understand why things work the way they work before we can change them. The problem is not that people aren't inspired enough to action -- you can't coax people into your dreams through powerful rhetoric (and a glance at what you can coax people to do with powerful rhetoric should put a stop to that idea). I also find a vision of some ahistorical rupture in history where everything becomes great really moving, and even worth striving towards. But I think you've lost sight of how things work, which is really where the important work is done. One of our major points of contention is that I always want to take the pieces apart on these things and figure out why they work that way (why do people feel this way? what does this thing mean?) and you always want to draw attention back to this utopian grace. But I strongly believe (and I think Zinn would agree too) that you can't get to the Utopian moment (maybe ever, but certainly not) without understanding the moment you live in.

Anyway, going to sleep. Peace out.

you can't coax people into your dreams through powerful rhetoric

dude what have you seen inception?

I think a world where everyone is enthusiastic about their actual selves and people are honest in their seduction is... an interesting prospect.. but, you know, probably not going to happen

this world sounds really great tbh

that world is called sweden, but i mean look at them they don't have any problems attracting suitors.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/07/21/israel.rape.by.deception/index.html?hpt=T2#fbid=uk52TQTtCit

As for this particular case, it is not the fact that he was an Arab and claimed to be Jewish. The court emphasized the fact that he claimed to be single while he was married, which would be relevant in the context of a romantic relationship.

Oh FFS.

Are they planning to lock up everyone who does that for 18 months?

The report claims the woman initially claimed it was an actual rape by force, which makes me think that maybe that did happen but they couldn't prove that and sought a loophole. But this sort of conjecture isn't very useful really.

the whole report seems to bear out what i said at first, which is that the original scenario seemed so wtf that i assumed there were lots of other facts that we didn't know (but the THREE judges did). based on the little we know it still doesn't seem like a jailable offense but i don't see the point of turning this lying, cheating dude into some cause célèbre.

i for one fully support judges finding ways to punish dudes for what they suspect but can't prove.

i don't see the point of turning this lying, cheating dude into some cause célèbre.

Uh, because being lying and cheating is not the same as being a rapist?

"This dude is a lying cheating scumbag therefore I don't see why he should be defended for being fucked over by the justice system" is a dodgy as hell line to take, Lex. You see the right-wing press saying similar things about eg. people who arrested for drug smuggling under dubious circumstances.

then why didn't the THREE judges in charge of this case, in full possession of the facts, make that decision, if it's that obvious a judgment to a bunch of messageboard posters who've read a couple of short news articles on it

Because for one thing the Israeli establishment doesn't always have a pristine track record when it comes to treating Arab dudes fairly?

no no no matt--THREE judges

i mean i don't automatically trust any justice system but i don't really trust news sources to be thorough in providing relevant information either, or to navigate the minefields of unfamiliar judiciaries or cultures with any tact, or to shy away from outraged sensationalism when those opportunities provides itself

What sort of circumstances we don't know about are you implying here?

Dude entered a plea bargain admitting rape by deception- sorry, judges, the moron in this case is quite clearly the defending lawyer.

I think the fact that people brought up AIDS so quickly is kindof illustrative of how strange it is to me that people are trying to parcel out the racial aspect of this from the "rape" part. I don't think that is possible. The fact that the initial deception, which is the only thing that changes the case from "f seeks m 4 good times" is wrt race is the only reason the case is not abt whether the guy has a car or liked Up(?) or whatever other lies ppl use to get other ppl into bed (really? Up?). So when you talk about degrees of violation of consent its impossible to separate that from the fact that what is considered such a transgression is this racial condition that apparently polices this woman's strict moral code.

The reason I think the AIDS thing is particularly interesting is this: Lying about your HIV status to sleep with somebody is bad. If somebody asks you if you have a disease that is potentially life threatening and fucking expensive to maintain and you lie to get laid, that is bad. But I don't think its rape. Because sex is structural to rape, rape makes sex about power and domination. I'm uncomfortable in connecting sex and rape too much here, but "sex" is the site of rape and in both of these cases. The reason race and AIDS are easy cards are because both are weirdly sexualised (horseshoe otm and the difference b/w arab and jewish women's gender roles is crucial). This is why the food for your family thing falls so flat. It would be just as gross to extort sex out of somebody even if you did give her family food afterwards, because it wouldnt really be consensual. But this was.

the difference b/w "what lies will FORCE this woman to have sex w/ me" and "what lies will make this woman WANT to have sex with me"

The fact that the initial deception, which is the only thing that changes the case from "f seeks m 4 good times" is wrt race

Religion as well.

well yeah im kindof using race as shorthand for both which is wrong but i mean i think everyone here "gets" that enough to know what i mean

plax ur otm and race is what made it so hard for me to wrap my head around this. and wish i did not read about it :(

yeah, someone else has angrily pointed out that there's no real "racial" difference. i think in common parlance there is, but as ever it's a slippery term w/r/t jewishness.

i think the precedent this case used did not involve race/religion/cultural difference? at any rate, i think the verdict is weird, the case fucked up, etc. do kinda agree w. lex that we don't know too much. at face value it sounds wrong. at the same time, i think people itt are edging towards the very tender idea that you shouldn't not want to have sex with someone because of their race/gender/age/etc.

you can not want to i just don't wanna live in a world where the law will help you enforce it, with jail

^^^

its kindof an analogue to rape itself. If i dont want to have sex w/ someone for a partic reason and they FORCE me to: rape. If they say "hey its all cool, thats just because of this play i'm in" and i'm like "lemme get my coat": not rape.

Would like to see anyone who honestly wants to grapple with race in this case first grapple with race and Jewishness first. I don't think it's something you can wave away as "we all understand."

rape by inception

Grappling with race and Jewishness isn't as difficult as it appears, IMO.

Judaism is a religion. It was practiced by a particular group of people and, through historical events, became intrinsically tied to their ethnic identity. That is the context under which the Jewish people are operating; there are a bunch of different perspectives being brought to the table by, for lack of a better word, "outsiders", but those are the parameters that define the Jewish race, and handwaving the religious component is essentially an imperialist reading of the situation.

kinda feel like this is one of the situs where we don't know enough abt the case to get into that kind of specificity since race/religion/class are all tied up and we don't know enough abt the parties involved to try and read it that way so to half-attempt it is being dishonest, but it is possible to view it in a more abstract and simplistic way in which dismissal of the racial component is outright dishonest.

well the intended takeaway from my post is really "the Jewish race is defined by what the Jews say it is" more than anything else

Plax opinion simply summed is: don't let complexity get in the way of making knee-jerk condemnations of shit you don't understand.

ur right i dont understand banging ppl in prison for pretending their name is daniel

ur right i dont understand banging ppl

tbh I stopped reading here

That's a more honest statement from you than pretending you do understand because it's obv racism.

Case kinda shows there's not that much obv. difference between these two "races"

um bc it is obv racism?

Plz explain the racism involved, k?

arab man guilty of rape after saying he was jewish so he could have sex with jewish woman

Point out race in that sentence please, and stop acting like a disingenuous asshole.

Do you even know what race the women is? I don't.

arab man guilty of rape after saying he was jewish so he could have sex with jewish woman

Is your argument that Jews in Israel do not consider themselves to be a race separate from Palestinians and other Muslim/Christian subcultures living in their country?

(to Mordy obv)

There are white Jews, black Jews, Arab Jews, etc. Calling this racist is dumbassery.

Well, "religionist" isn't a word

But she was upset that this guy was an Arab.

No, she was upset he wasn't Jewish. He claimed it was racist.

She still wasn't raped, is the point.

There's a world of difference between "I don't sleep with Arabs and I wouldn't have slept with you had I known you were an Arab" and "I don't sleep with people outside my religion and I wouldn't have slept with you had I known you weren't Jewish", but since neither of them formed the basis of the prosecution then the way this has been reported is kind of dodgy.

Not the guy should be going down either way, unless they intend to imprison every married man who sleeps with an unmarried woman under false pretences from now on.

She was probably most upset that he was a two-pump chump.

Also decrying a jewish prerogative to procreate with other Jews is a really old really tiring anti-Semitic tactic. "why cant they just assimilate and be like everyone else??"

mordy weren't you just admitting yesterday that there was racism involved? does your brain reset when you sleep? quit dodging the issue because of dumb semantics - it's an "ism" of some kind if it's not actual "race"ism

xp oh god

nobody is fucking saying that mordy

Fuck you, Mordy.

I think they were just shacking up, not making babies.

they were like, two strangers fucking in a "nearby building" iirc

Which probably disrespects some kind of religious prerogative.

There's also a difference between assuming racism on the part of the woman and assuming racism on the part of the judicial system. "Would this prosecution had gone ahead had the guy been a Christian/random atheist dude?" is a valid question.

Hard to type on phone but bullshit that plax isn't saying that. A. Dude shouldn't go to jail but B. Claiming her not wanting to sleep with him is super bullshit. Try to unpack why without me having to give a fucking Jewish history lesson.

Also decrying a jewish prerogative to procreate with other Jews is a really old really tiring anti-Semitic tactic. "why cant they just assimilate and be like everyone else??"

Ridiculous

Not wanting =ing racism or something self-evidently terrible

No one is claiming that her not wanting to sleep with him is bullshit. People are saying that deciding retroactively that you didn't want to sleep with someone after all is not the same thing as being raped, and that regardless the sentencing is wholly out of proportion with the offense.

This is not about HER. This is about the foundation of the case and the precedent used to argue it. Shut the fuck up if you can't actually read.

mordy would you be happier if they swapped racism for sectarianism?

But yeah,'k3v, let's do that, instead of think through why this might be complex and have to do with more than just the bullshit thought you had today let's throw a fit that someone used the word anti-semitism in a sentence. Maybe later you can decry me for mentioning the holocaust. Srsly on this u need to check yourself

And yes Kerr, I would. Btw so fucked people feel comfortable throwing the word racism around but I get jumped for mentioning anti-semitism

no, you got jumped for strawmanning ppls arguments

^^^^^^

Plax: do you believe this chick is racist? Yes/no?

she might not be bigoted, but shes drawing the line at whether or not this guy raped her on whether or not he's an arab so yes.

Ok, so I wasn't fucking strawmanning you. Rereading what I wrote and try to understand it. Thx

Mordy your incessant quest to defend all Jews and Israel from even the slightest tarnishment gets really tiresome even to me sometimes.

mordy, do you know what the word racist means?

Yes, it means discrimination predicated on race.

There's a world of difference between "I don't sleep with Arabs and I wouldn't have slept with you had I known you were an Arab" and "I don't sleep with people outside my religion and I wouldn't have slept with you had I known you weren't Jewish", but since neither of them formed the basis of the prosecution then the way this has been reported is kind of dodgy.

Not the guy should be going down either way, unless they intend to imprison every married man who sleeps with an unmarried woman under false pretences from now on.

― Matt DC, Thursday, July 22, 2010 10:46 AM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

Also fuck anyone who feels I don't have a right to defend Jews.

(I agree with everything Matt wrote btw)

race =/ color you freaking goof, god damnit

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/race

Who is denying you your rights, you idiot

I just reposted it cuz I think it gets to the crux of the two noncomplementary readings going on here - one that she is claiming it was rape because he's an arab, the other she is claiming it was rape because he's not Jewish

K3v I'm about to blow your mind: did you know there are Arab Jews?

Yes Mordy, and you also have a right to be tiresome. Carry on.

Also fuck anyone who feels I don't have a right to defend Jews.

― Mordy, Thursday, July 22, 2010 11:05 AM (1 minute ago)

mordy again with this well-worn trope (cf whoa man freedom of speech cmon!). you can defend jews, but that doesn't make you always right or immune to criticism

Also fuck anyone who feels I don't have a right to defend Jews.

What, all of them?

Do you think "you constantly defending Jews tires me" is a good critique, k3v?

Mordy your incessant quest to defend all Jews and Israel from even the slightest tarnishment gets really tiresome even to me sometimes.

― uNi-tArDs (Hurting 2), Thursday, July 22, 2010 11:03 AM Bookmark

Read it again.

K3v I'm about to blow your mind: did you know there are Arab Jews?

― Mordy, Thursday, July 22, 2010 11:08 AM (1 minute ago)

mind blown mordy, do you think they might have different "shared interests, habits, or characteristics"?

Yeah, it doesn't become substantive on second read either

...from non-arab jews xp

K3v wtf u talking about? Lots of Jews lots of different customs beliefs values etc

I didn't say "you constantly defending Jews", and what I meant to say is that you can't seem to take the idea of anyone or anything associated with Judaism being even slightly criticized. Sometimes there's a Jew who is racist dude. Sometimes there's a bad Israeli court decision. The flawed nature of humanity is not antisemitic.

Now who is strawmanning?

Should I post an image of the Worm Ouroboros now?

K3v wtf u talking about? Lots of Jews lots of different customs beliefs values etc

― Mordy, Thursday, July 22, 2010 11:12 AM (1 minute ago)

whoa so ~what is race n e way~

http://www.foodbev.com/writeable/uploads/images/resized/452w_2257_worlds-first-butterkist-lorry-coming-to-a-road-nea.jpg

:D

we're gonna need a bigger popcorn truck

maybe i should clarify at this point. The court decision basically posits that lying abt race/religion is adequate deception to be tantamount to rape. When race or religion are a factor in anything that thing becomes racist, that is, it is makind distinctions based on those lines. thats not exactly a controversial thing to say i would have thought but w/e

Do you think "you constantly defending Jews tires me" is a good critique, k3v?

― Mordy, Thursday, July 22, 2010 11:10 AM (6 minutes ago)

not sure why you're asking me when the person who you're referring to is right here. but no it's not a good critique. then again, that's not even close to what was said and you know it

whoa so ~what is race n e way~

― terry squad (k3vin k.), Thursday, July 22, 2010 11:15 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is actually a very complicated question

There's actually a hell of a lot of goalpost-shifting to unpack here. Going on that CNN article upthread, the initial claim was that it was a rape by force, there is another claim from the defence that she went to the police only after she discovered he was an Arab, he was prosecuted for pretending to be unmarried. Did she report him upon finding out he was married or upon finding out he wasn't Jewish?

Given that married men are not usually imprisoned for pretending to be unmarried when they have sex with random pick-ups, they're obviously making an example out of him here. But if you're going to make an example of someone you need a rock solid case and it doesn't feel like there is one here, just shifting sands. I'm also extremely sceptical that they would have made an example of him had he not been Palestinian.

On another note, doesn't it seem a little strange to claim that you only sleep with guys YOU JUST MET when you're considering a serious romantic relationship with them? I mean people can go about dating how they please, but that sounds like a life of disappointment.

Plax that has nothing to do with what the court said. It said lying about critical info is rape. If you disagree that being Jewish is critical we are actually talking about the woman.

yeah, but what is critical is key there

Yes, but that is what I was addressing before people decided to undermine what I was saying instead of dealing with it

According to the court the critical info he witheld is THAT HE WAS MARRIED, not that he wasn't Jewish, or was an Arab, or whatever.

You can't have it both ways. If it is a question of whether lying about being Jewish is critical then you to discuss whether Jews have a right to consider it critical

To plax

yeah well you jumped on me for saying that "you cant think abt one w/o the other" and "race is charged in way that makes it difficult to deal w/ things that intersect w/ it"

xps

The answer to complexity is discussion, not reducing it to make it easier to be judgy

The right to consider it critical for marriage? Sure. The right to consider it critical for a hook up with a virtual stranger? Maybe, but hardly a right worth court enforcement.

Of course not, but I wrote a million words about that last nite

um i compared the guy who lied about being jewish to somebody intentionally withholding being poz and you say that i am denying the woman her right to consider her sleeping partners jewishness as critical? like w/e, invent your own adversaries.

You can't have it both ways. If it is a question of whether lying about being Jewish is critical then you to discuss whether Jews have a right to consider it critical

― Mordy, Thursday, July 22, 2010 11:23 AM (1 minute ago)

yeah but it's not a "right" to the extent that she can have criminal charges filed against someone if the "right" is violated. that's what the case is about. people have a "right" to be prejudiced about anything they like, and those prejudices may very well stem from very real emotions or needs that aren't for us to judge. but that doesn't make them legally vaild

Look, a woman has the right to only sleep with guys with red, bulbous noses if she wants. But if it was plain to see that it was a clown nose...wait, what's my point again?

Omg you are being so freaking disingenuous. I'm clearly responding to people judging her decision of sexual partner as racist. I've said a thousand times that it's legally fucked up.

Of course not, but I wrote a million words about that last nite

― Mordy, Thursday, July 22, 2010 3:27 PM (3 minutes ago)

yep- most of them with me & gbx and harbl iirc and tbh i wouldn't recognise you as the same poster this past 45 mins.

but then i rly don't get what u and plax are fighting over. you're not even close to addressing same issues imo so why the shouting i dunno

I'm responding to attempts to bring an unthought thru racial critique into this story. It seems clear to me that's what plax was trying to do, but if that wasn't his motives I apologize. His posts certainly read as trying to sneak a racial criique in without wanting to deal with what it implies

I think the fact that people brought up AIDS so quickly is kindof illustrative of how strange it is to me that people are trying to parcel out the racial aspect of this from the "rape" part. I don't think that is possible. The fact that the initial deception, which is the only thing that changes the case from "f seeks m 4 good times" is wrt race is the only reason the case is not abt whether the guy has a car or liked Up(?) or whatever other lies ppl use to get other ppl into bed (really? Up?). So when you talk about degrees of violation of consent its impossible to separate that from the fact that what is considered such a transgression is this racial condition that apparently polices this woman's strict moral code.

The reason I think the AIDS thing is particularly interesting is this: Lying about your HIV status to sleep with somebody is bad. If somebody asks you if you have a disease that is potentially life threatening and fucking expensive to maintain and you lie to get laid, that is bad. But I don't think its rape. Because sex is structural to rape, rape makes sex about power and domination. I'm uncomfortable in connecting sex and rape too much here, but "sex" is the site of rape and in both of these cases. The reason race and AIDS are easy cards are because both are weirdly sexualised (horseshoe otm and the difference b/w arab and jewish women's gender roles is crucial). This is why the food for your family thing falls so flat. It would be just as gross to extort sex out of somebody even if you did give her family food afterwards, because it wouldnt really be consensual. But this was.

― plax (ico), Thursday, July 22, 2010 12:24 PM (3 hours ago)

should dudes lie about stuff to get laid- no

if it matters so much to you shouldn't you maybe do more of a background check than getting a first name before proceeding to the happy mattress dance- yes

if you find out information about mattress dance partner after the fact that would have affected your opinion should you get anywhere when pressing charges through the legal system- no

can we have a side discussion abt race/gender/anti semitism- sure why not

You really don't see why your use of the word race in that first paragraph is totally open to my critique? Xp

good morning everyone

You really don't see why the entire second paragraph is more important than the first and contains the actual argument plax is attempting to make?

TBH, I thought Plax did a great job of defusing this argument before it started with:

well yeah im kindof using race as shorthand for both (race and religion) which is wrong but i mean i think everyone here "gets" that enough to know what i mean

― plax (ico), Thursday, July 22, 2010 7:30 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

if you find out information about mattress dance partner after the fact that would have affected your opinion should you get anywhere when pressing charges through the legal system- no

except if you find out information that would have affected your consent e.g. if the deceit is about the identity of the complainant or the nature or purpose of the sex, which is how it's dealt w/in the uk

~context~ being p.important obv

I contest and contested that you can't handwave away how wrong it is tho

if the deceit is about the identity of the complainant or the nature or purpose of the sex, which is how it's dealt w/in the uk

Could you elaborate on "nature or purpose" a little please?

^

So it wasn't wrong because they had sex when not married, it was wrong because they could not be married because he lied about being jewish and unmarried.

So the moral here is that the new moral code is that you can have pre-marital sex with someone, as long as they are someone you could theoretically marry?

Could you elaborate on "nature or purpose" a little please?

the classic case is where a doctor persuades a woman to have sex claiming it would be a part of the medical treatment

tbf that is the prescribed treatment for "not getting boned by your doctor."

which goes back to the penis cream pilot rape by deception case
http://www.westerntelegraph.co.uk/news/1367301.penis_cream_pilot_walks_free/

http://www.optimiced.com/wp-uploads/2008/02/the-cia-wants-to-steal-my-penis-by-reodorant.gif

can't believe y'all are still arguing about this

YES YOU CAN

what's the legal position re: dracula nailing mina harker that one time?

Bloody Eastern Europeans, where are they flocking from?

darraghmac and tom d.- available for hire at reasonable rates to kill any clusterfuck dead in two posts.

Entirely unintentional double pun in my last post

Hm I go away and return to find Mordy reacting like he is pro bono attorney of Judaism

That's racist.

ILX's Jewish problem

oh good grief

C'mon hurting, this thread was doing a pretty good job of making its way down Site New Answers.

the classic case is where a doctor persuades a woman to have sex claiming it would be a part of the medical treatment
http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTHZ0r0qQAEeyfhI5iprcjbc8ANsJ3eLeQwlxEPxmtFVaOQg0U&t=1&usg=__6pDX0V8LSOzkgXmdKL5J4RZKQv4=

I still don't get this concept. Like if the guy lied about his religion or race top have sex...what if he married the girl, stayed with her for 20 years, and then she found out. Would he be guilty of rape for TWENTY YEARS? Wouldn't that be like 7,000 years in jail?

sorry guys

us arabs always fuckin shit up

us arabs always fuckin shit up

Fixed for you, surmounter.

ew

Sorry dude. Horribly formed joke.

Arab on Rapedar

once again, sorry guys

us arabs always fuckin shit up

― janice (surm), Thursday, July 22, 2010 3:40 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

<3

I skimmed a whole lot of this thread looking for jokes about a temporary conversion and found nothing

ha i actually put my glasses back on before clicking this in anticipation of a classic nabisco essay putting this issue to bed.

i think literally everyone agreed about the actual matter at hand like 24 hours ago and we've been arguing about progressively more retarded shit since

progressively
more
retarded

shit since

nah, been here the whole time mayne

I skimmed a whole lot of this thread looking for jokes about a temporary conversion and found nothing

"Uh, could you put that on ice and save it for me, they can sew it back on tomorrow."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/saber-kushour-rape-deception-charge

from an andrew sullivan reader

A point which is rarely mentioned in the coverage of the "rape by deception" case - either by Israeli or foreign media - is that the case started out as a regular rape case. The woman claimed she was forcibly raped by Kashour. Once on the stand, however, the defense demolished her story and she admitted she lied and that they had consensual sex. She admitted that after learning Kashour lied to her, she felt humiliated and went to the police. It was at that point the prosecution came up with the plea bargain. A normal court would have just acquitted Kashour, but this court decided to convict.

Several further points:

1. If the woman had told the true story to the police in the first place, there would have been no trial, not to mention any conviction.

2. Kashour has no earlier convictions. In another "rape by deception"" case, which involved a lesbian masquerading as a man in order to have sex with women, she received only six months of suspended sentence. Kashour got 18 months of incarceration.

3. One of the three judges is Moshe Drori, who was embroiled in a scandal last year, when he refused to convict a very well connected yeshiva boy who admitted - and was filmed - running over a security guard with his vehicle. The security guard was an Ethiopian woman. Drori, a Jewish Orthodox, forced the guard to accept the apology of the yeshiva boy, and then invoked a judgment by 12th century scholar Maimonides (I shit you not), which says once an apology is accepted by the victim, the case is closed. And he closed the case. He is apparently a Maimonidas affectionado. The case was overturned in the Supreme Court, and this schtick cost Drori his chance at becoming a Supreme Court justice. Let's say that a non-Jew masquerading as a Jew won't stand much of a chance in the court of Judge Drori.

well no more asbos anyway so

wow wow wow

isn't making a false accusation an imprisonable crime? was boys dont cry also a rape case? how useless are kashour's lawyers?

yeah, have to figure this will be overturned one way or the other

last I heard it was going to the supreme court (where i imagine it'll be overturned)

Interesting thread. I assume people contributing to it are from several different nations. In the US this wouldn't be an issue, the guy's a prat, the woman was naive....not the place for the courts. That's when roving biker gangs go vigilante on the scums ass.

I've been thinking a bit more about this case. I am trying to imagine a realistic conversation where the woman established that she would only shag Jews and the bloke claimed to be Jewish. The Guardian mentions that Mr Kashur supposedly introduced himself as a Jewish bachelor... do people actually say things like "Hello, I am a Jewish bachelor" in real life?

Or maybe there is a Hebrew word for bachelor that you only use if you are Jewish, and another one for bachelors who are non-Jewish, and no word for bachelors who might or might not be Jewish.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/believe-in-each-other-1.312429

Indeed, the original indictment was for forcible rape and the accused was the one to initiate the plea bargain, in which he confessed "only" to rape by deception.

O_o a court accepted this? this story just got crazier.

jesus christ

I apologize for everything I wrote upthread

quite frankly, this is why I hate the news

Most irresponsible media bullshit ever. Seriously fuck every news agency that reported on this and didn't bother to actually find out what happened.

a fuller account here: http://972mag.com/a-rapist-who-dodged-jail-or-a-man-unjustly-accused-because-he-was-palestinian/

the plaintiff, identified in the article as “B*,” was an emotionally traumatized woman in her 20s who had been raped by her father from the age of six. On the day she met Kashur, she was living in a women’s shelter. Before that, she had worked briefly as a prostitute and spent some time living on the streets. Kashur lured her into the building on Hillel Street with the claim that he worked there and wanted to show her his office; he then assaulted her and raped her, leaving her naked and bleeding – which is how the police discovered her.

B. was later hospitalized in a psychiatric institution, where the police questioned her about the rape, which led them to Kashur. During the trial, after it became apparent that B’s past, combined with her emotional state, made her a vulnerable witness, the prosecution came up with a plea bargain of rape by deception.

ugh

holy motherfucking christ

Yup, I pretty much feel horrible for reacting the way I did, but it was to the way the story was presented. The facts do not support that original story.

I can't begin to express how badly I feel for this lady

im pretty puzzled why this wasn't cleared up at the time -- seems to be s.thing to do with reporting restrictions, but the case itself (or an aspect of it) *was* reported so.

yes, this is a completely different story than what was presented. but christ what an awful story.

im pretty puzzled why this wasn't cleared up at the time -- seems to be s.thing to do with reporting restrictions, but the case itself (or an aspect of it) *was* reported so.

― The sulky expression from the hilarious "Aubrey Plaza" persona (history mayne), Tuesday, 7 September 2010 16:21 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

seems to be basically down to plea bargains being inherently shady in keeping evidence out of court, and no one being alert enough to apply for the victim's testimony to be published before now (and the lie would have been round the world anyway before they had got it.)

wow. so miserable.

Could a mod please change the title of the thread to "horrible man guilty of rape uses victim's vulnerability to cruelly manipulate his way out of a more deserving sentence"?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"horrible man guilty of rape uses victim's vulnerability to cruelly manipulate his way out of a more deserving sentence; also don't fucking trust the news"

um... no

unless you are cool with making the previous conversation look like everyone knew the facts from the beginning and just felt like being abusive towards a rape victim

I just feel like letting the title of this thread pop up over and over again on New Answers now that we know what we know does further injustice to victim and something more reasonable should take its place. Maybe some CONTROVERSIAL MOD EDIT to the end so people who are too weary of the subject to read the thread don't go on continuing belief in the original bullshit story.

how about "itt louis defends asbos"

I just feel like letting the title of this thread pop up over and over again on New Answers now that we know what we know does further injustice to victim and something more reasonable should take its place.

Yeah but editing the title to something completely prejudicial to the original conversation isn't exactly right or fair, either.

I've amended the title, but honestly if you are THAT CONCERNED about the title popping up, the most sensible solution would be to start a new thread, link it here and lock this one.

shoulda gone with my suggestion

looking at this again, i think the court deserves far more criticism than the media: the judges said "she would not have cooperated" if she'd known he wasn't jewish - ie, that she did consent, completely contrary to her own testimony. the last couple of lines i quoted upthread made it sound like a justice system that is particularly badly equipped to deal with rape cases, even by the low standards of other justice systems, and she effectively found the prosecution and judge conspiring to make her look like a capricious racist just to make the case go away.

well, it's a feminist issue, isn't it - it's incredibly awful that rape and assault cases are so often judgments on the victim's "character", but hardly common to israel; it's sad that the fact that she was vulnerable and damaged would have so predictably harmed the "credibility" of her testimony that her lawyers felt they had to take a more convoluted route. ugh, i hate people sometimes. i knew there was something suspicious in the way we got to hear his side of the story after the case came to light, because he blabbed to the media so much, but not a peep from her.

have to say i am totally unsurprised that we didn't know all the facts after all.

it's sad that the fact that she was vulnerable and damaged would have so predictably harmed the "credibility" of her testimony that her lawyers felt they had to take a more convoluted route

absolutely

Not wanting to be cap'n save-a-rapist here (if that's what he is) but we're just going to assume she's telling the truth just as we accepted the first load of media reports?

Her testimony and his statements never made it in front of a trial. It's clear that "arab man guilty of rape after saying he was jewish so he could have sex with jewish woman" is now bullshit but "arab man guilty of rape" doesn't necessarily follow.

i knew there was something suspicious in the way we got to hear his side of the story after the case came to light, because he blabbed to the media so much

I'd have thought if he'd have kept his mouth shut rather than stir up the media interest that led to her statements being made public.

have to say i am totally unsurprised that we didn't know all the facts after all.

I am not surprised per se. I am massively disappointed. I would cherish my intermittent bouts of naivety if they didn't tend to surface around cases like these.

Is reporting all of the impartial facts not among ANY media outlet's core values anymore? (Not that I'm saying this was ever the case, just that it seems like no one actually seems to care AT ALL anymore if anything they're reporting on is true; people only care about grabbing attention.)

they reported all the facts that were available. they should have been more attentive that the victim's point of view had been excised, but most news organisations think that with the courts, you worry about accuracy and let the court worry about truth.

High Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein said a conviction of rape should be imposed any time a "person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him."

Rubinstein said the question was also whether an ordinary person would expect such a woman to have sex with a man without the false identity he created.

In the past, men who misrepresented themselves in this way were convicted of fraud.

One such case was that of Eran Ben-Avraham, who told a woman he was a neurosurgeon after which she had sex with him, and was convicted of three counts of fraud.

Elkana Laist of the Public Defender's Office yesterday said the Jerusalem District Court had gone too far in its application of the approach of the High Court, "opening the door to a rape conviction every time a person lies regarding details of his identity. Every time the court thinks a reasonable woman would not have had sex with a man based on that representation, the man will be charged with rape. That approach is not accepted around the world either."

This case is was obviously poorly handled and reported but the statute still seems dubious.

Elkana Laist of the Public Defender's Office yesterday said the Jerusalem District Court had gone too far in its application of the approach of the High Court, "opening the door to a rape conviction every time a person lies regarding details of his identity. Every time the court thinks a reasonable woman would not have had sex with a man based on that representation, the man will be charged with rape. That approach is not accepted around the world either."

Laist also said the court's verdict was paternalistic toward women. "The test the court adopted is problematic, because it means that every time a man tells a woman he loves her, based on which she sleeps with him, he could be convicted of rape."

The last contention is surely impossible though, unless articles of mind are taken as identical to worldly qualities.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/jurists-say-arab-s-rape-conviction-sets-dangerous-precedent-1.303109

i guess. feel like maybe there are a few dubious statutes in most countries' book o' laws, really

as with

a justice system that is particularly badly equipped to deal with rape cases, even by the low standards of other justice systems

hmm, maybe, but then again, maybe not? particularly badly? not sure how many convictions there have been for the institutionalized rape of children in the catholic church in ireland. fer example like.

The priests all claim that they wouldn't have fucked the kids if they had known they weren't good Catholics. Since the kids were knowlingly engaging in premarital sex, they could not have been good Catholics and ergo had obtained sex by deception.

Also, it wasn't legal for them to do so - just not enforced. And other countries having 'dubious statutes' is meaningless really.

Also, it wasn't legal for them to do so - just not enforced.

oh, well, if you put it like that

And other countries having 'dubious statutes' is meaningless really.

eh? i don't know, i don't take a deep interest in the statutes relating to rape in other countries, but i suppose i would be surprised if israel were really 'particularly badly equipped to deal with rape cases' by comparison.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiaNFcMSbmA
^^^^^^rape by deception propaganda

ha

eh? i don't know, i don't take a deep interest in the statutes relating to rape in other countries, but i suppose i would be surprised if israel were really 'particularly badly equipped to deal with rape cases' by comparison.

I get that. But obviously the right or wrong, desirability or otherwise, of a given statute has no relation to the number of other states with equally flawed laws.

a justice system that is particularly badly equipped to deal with rape cases, even by the low standards of other justice systems

hmm, maybe, but then again, maybe not? particularly badly? not sure how many convictions there have been for the institutionalized rape of children in the catholic church in ireland. fer example like.

― The sulky expression from the hilarious "Aubrey Plaza" persona (history mayne), Tuesday, September 7, 2010 6:53 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

not really sure what your point is - that sexual assault cases are generally dealt with badly? well, i said as much. but if you look at this case, you've got a situation where a woman's testimony alleging rape-rape was not heard because she was thought to be a "vulnerable" witness, since she had been abused as a child, been homeless and worked as a prostitute. this either means that the justice system thought this made her less credible or that she needed to be protected. if she's not credible, there's no case. if she needs protection from unfair cross-examination, plenty of countries have special provisions for this - which is the reason I said they seemed particularly badly prepared. but the solution is not to refuse to use her testimony and instead cook up a deal that makes her look racist and says she consented to something which she says she did not.

http://www.mideastyouth.com/2010/09/05/israel-rape-by-deception-turns-out-to-be-brutal-rape-of-a-vulnerable-and-abused-woman/

To me the bizarre part is ... if you're going to completely compromise an instance of rape, totally shove the victim aside, and reframe facts for a shitty pleabargain, SURELY there are charges you could use other than one that (a) claims consent, and (b) is internationally newsworthy and likely to be followed up on in a way that exposes the cowardice of what you're doing. The only good thing about their choice is how inevitably it leads to people -- like, say, women in Israel -- getting evidence of roughly how seriously parts of the justice system feel like taking rape claims.

lol oops

to mitigate (ever so slightly) there probably aren't many jurisdictions that have successful prosecution rates for rapes commmitted against young women with a history of prostitution and mental illness. even if its reframed as sexual assault or something else, too easy for the sociopaths to hold their nerve and claim consent.

as for the international newsworthiness, i doubt this was considered. they didn't seem to follow any of the completely fucked implications of this prosecution.

thing is, I would venture that lots of people would prefer the world to make difficult prosecutions successful, rather than constantly throwing hands in the air and going "what can you do, I guess there are just certain rape victims where we don't give as much of a shit, it's just the way of the world and you can't expect the judicial system, of all things, to actually do anything about it"

I mean, it's a pretty incredible thing to be complacent about

but yeah, I'm really trying to view their not following any of the implications as a positive thing, because at least it brought a bunch of light to one instance of that complacency

nabisco, you do realize that what you're calling for is stuff like more prosecutorial power and sentence discretion and stuff like that? like this is the consequence of trying to strike a balance between a defendant's rights and justice for a victim. people get off all the time because of mishandled evidence, unreliable witnesses, etc, and that's a sign that we're enforcing our legal code -- not a good argument for why we should start to fuck around with the process to get the results we want.

think epic sexism in the police is a part of the picture, certainly in the UK

actually mordy what I was calling for was prosecuting rape

there are a lot of complexities involved but in the end it's a pretty straightforward proposition

yeah i think the prosecutio side are allowed go in with a verdict in mind

i think it's really terrible (and i feel really pointless and impotent for only being able to say "i think it's really terrible") that a case that was going to fail based on the institutional contempt for women was salvaged by relying on the institutional contempt for palestinians.

"what can you do, I guess there are just certain rape victims where we don't give as much of a shit, it's just the way of the world and you can't expect the judicial system, of all things, to actually do anything about it"

that's sententious shit really. there are instances where hateful sentiments towards prosititutes/immigrants/outcasts etc cause prosecutorial complacency. a lot of the other failings - inability to manage testimony from a vulnerable complainant, character assaults from the defendant, jury prejudice - are not directly related to this. there can certainly be improvements in these areas but if the legal framework is inadequate there's not a lot an individual prosecutor or judge can do, as this case shows a misguided attempt to get ~some~ conviction just fucks things up further.

the prosecutors accepted a grotesquely fucked-up compromise, one that seems to indict the victim and all but forgive the rapist, but the fact that they accepted some kind of plea bargain isn't all that surprising in itself, right? if we accept the "vulnerability" of the victim (however we interpret that word) and leave open the possibility that conviction might not have seemed guaranteed for other reasons, then their willingness to accept his pleading guilty to a lesser charge seems like the sort of thing that happens every day all over the world, even in countries with model justice systems.

a case that was going to fail based on the institutional contempt for women

not inclined to make this assumption, myself

shaky witnesses & victims tends to be a much bigger and fatal problem to prosecuting rapes than with other crimes. like, as soon as that starts to rear its head, they won't even go forward. and yeah, i think that rests on generalized misogyny.

as this case shows a misguided attempt to get ~some~ conviction just fucks things up further.

depend on what you mean by "fucks things up further." he was convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison. she was spared a trial she might not have been able to endure (i dunno that of course, just going on the claims of vulnerability). seems a better result that pursuing an unwinnable case and perhaps further traumatizing the case. if, of course, the case really was unwinnable to begin with. can't say...

yeah, i think that rests on generalized misogyny.

in general, yeah, i'd accept that. but not knowing the actual details of what went on in the prosecutor's office here, i'm refraining from assumption.

tbf i'm not sure there's any disagreement as such, but saying 'this is how it is, it's shit' isn't necessarily fatalism or lack of concern. just that more politically stable countries than israel are failing to convict rapists in cases less open to prejudice than this one.

i think it's really terrible (and i feel really pointless and impotent for only being able to say "i think it's really terrible") that a case that was going to fail based on the institutional contempt for women was salvaged by relying on the institutional contempt for palestinians.

this is totally bogus btw. it was a plea bargain. it wasn't "salvaged" by relying on contempt for palestinians. the prosecution said, "do you want to plea to rape by misrepresentation posing as a [Jewish] bachelor?" (mind u, he claims the Jewish/Arab part was important. we have no idea what prosecution actually offered) and he said, "sure beats going to trial for rape. absolutely."

it does seem quite imperfect tho, mords, come on.

im abt as cap'n save-a-israel as it gets, and i think this story blew up partly because people want to think the worst of it. and i doubt israel is worse than most other developed countries on this -- in the UK rape-in-marriage was p much legal within living memory iirc -- but, duh, everyone could do better.

mordy i dunno how that contradicts me -- very few countries have this other option of a racialized 'rape by deception' to go for in a shaky case like this! if he wasn't palestinian, it would not have been applicable, right?

you're a moron, goole.

depend on what you mean by "fucks things up further." he was convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison. she was spared a trial she might not have been able to endure (i dunno that of course, just going on the claims of vulnerability). seems a better result that pursuing an unwinnable case and perhaps further traumatizing the case. if, of course, the case really was unwinnable to begin with. can't say...

― having taken an actual journalism class (contenderizer), Tuesday, 7 September 2010 22:56 (47 seconds ago)

that's what i was suggesting to nabisco. we can't say, but if the prosecutors thought there was no chance of properly convicting this person, it's understandable why they would have tried for this charge. they fucked up because (neglecting the political element entirely) it's now recorded in law that a victim of rape consented to sex (while misinformed) when there was no consent at all.

sorry, that was unfair -- maybe you're just not really following the case at all. the precedence for this 'rape by deception' is two JEWISH men who were previously convicted with it.

and to hm: if the guy raped her, perfect would be his conviction for rape. if he's innocent, perfect would be his being totally acquitted. in a world where we either don't know for sure, or can't prove for sure in a place of law, we make compromises to try and do our best. i don't see how this has to do with israel. this is every legal system in the world (and we've discussed that lots of legal systems actually have deception laws)

the racial element is a bit of a nonsequitur wrt the plea bargain, though doubtless there is racism in the israeli legal system. read the case i copied above about the 'neurosurgeon'. you can of course argue that lying about being a neurosurgeon is different to lying about being jewish.

the prosecution never mentioned it was about lying about being jewish. they said it was lying about being a bachelor. he said it was about being jewish

many many xposts, but -- we're not talking people getting acquitted in fair trials, as Mordy implied upthread. We're talking about prosecutors going "fine, let's just say she consented." (Literally, in this case.) And a pretty widespread pattern of prosecutors making decisions that basically say, you know, "oh, but she was a prostitute/homeless/mentally ill, so let's not even push this, it's too hard" -- based in part on expecting the same mentality from jurors, witnesses, etc. -- all of which eventually adds up to a failure to protect the exact people who are most vulnerable to rape in the first place.

Now obviously there are a lot of legal and cultural complexities and blame to go around for why this happens. Does anyone here seriously think anyone else here isn't aware of that? The standards of the legal system, its resources, the culture and mentality of jurors, a billion factors involved. But let's not get so jaded, cynical, or "practical" that we can't admit the results are pretty shitty and jacked up! Just because you can offer a complex explanation for why something is jacked up doesn't mean it's not jacked up.

And I'm working on the assumption that everyone here agrees that this "special difficulty" of prosecuting someone who rapes a woman in a vulnerable position is a really bad thing.

all right, well, moron that i am, based on what i've read, his race was part of the verdict:

http://972mag.com/a-rapist-who-dodged-jail-or-a-man-unjustly-accused-because-he-was-palestinian/

according to the verdict, he presented himself as a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious relationship, when he was in fact a married Muslim Arab looking for a quickie.

very few countries have this other option of a racialized 'rape by deception' to go for in a shaky case like this! if he wasn't palestinian, it would not have been applicable, right?

the precedence for this 'rape by deception' is two JEWISH men who were previously convicted with it.

ok, sure, what was the nature of the deception in those cases? in the case of sabbar kashur, it was race. unless it really is being wholly mischaracterized, and it was entirely about marital status, the "believable story" the prosecution came up with was racial in nature.

mordy I think by "racialized" he means the deception in this case was, umm, racial -- I'm assuming the Jewish men were not convicted of lying about being Jewish, because they were already Jewish

Did the prosecution ever say this was about race or was that the defendant's claim? From what I read it was entirely about misrepresenting himself as a bachelor.

I'm sorry, I should say "the evidently fictional deception in this case," which fictional deception we are now unpacking in the spirit of Foucauldian literary criticism

And I'm working on the assumption that everyone here agrees that this "special difficulty" of prosecuting someone who rapes a woman in a vulnerable position is a really bad thing.

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Tuesday, September 7, 2010 3:12 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, agreed entirely. in general. i'm just tend to believe that when it comes to any given specific case, the crucial factors are less the big, general, demographic truths, and more the particulars at hand. i.e., yes there is a general and institutionally sexist/misogynist "failure to protect the exact people who are most vulnerable to rape in the first place," but a decent plea bargain might nevertheless be a prosecutor's best option even in the best of all possible worlds.

not that this was a "decent plea bargain" by any stretch of the imagination...

uh, "i'm just tend to believe..." = I just tend to beleive...

jayzis

except fucking spelled right

i need an assistant. pls submit resumes to fuckingbraindama✧✧✧@a✧✧.c✧✧

well yeah then my whole line of thinking hinges on whether lying about being married was the plea bargain, and lying about being palestinian was given to the press later, or whether both were part of the bargain to begin with.

it's not a problem that there are 'rape by deception' laws (note: no, i'm not saying these laws are as-written about race). fooling someone into consenting ought to be a crime. it is akin to drugging someone, morally.

it's not even a problem that prosecutors go for lesser crimes if conviction for the real ones is unlikely, that's life (even though rape has its own serious prosecutorial problems in legal systems, everywhere)

but it is a problem, it seems to me, that this particular story of racial deception was deemed a good possibility, and ended up being possible, as a legal avenue. it seems as though that is an example of unequal justice.

were the other two rape-by-deception cases about being (un)married?

Considering that this is a dude who was accused of actual rape, got a plea bargain for 'rape by deception,' and then had the chutzpah to go to the press and complain that this was about race and not about the fact that they felt strongly he had actually raped her and just couldn't convict because the victim was too traumatized to testify... I wouldn't trust him about anything.

well of course, my assumption is that press accounts are working from publicly available court documents, and not what this guy has said. but, who knows. they did get the whole thing wrong.

did something recently get unsealed? why is this a story again, now, totally different?

(sorry i'm reading halfway thru these articles as the thread goes on...)

yeah, C, I think we can acknowledge that lots of prosecutors are doing the best they can with the tools available, and still say that 18 months on a "consensual sex by deception" plea might demonstrate some level of general complacency, you know? not that I know a ton about what other sentencing is like in Israel, or the likelihood of getting convictions, but I don't think it's unreasonable to view that as an awfully compromised result. and whether you get that kind of result in an individual case has a lot to do with people's feelings "in general" -- i.e., if you happened to live in a culture that viewed the rape of homeless prostitutes as an unremarkable fact of life, that would bear quite heavily on the dynamics of every individual case thereof, you know? and a lot of our various cultures have big old strains of that mentality.

here's the pertinent bit from the original article:

In the new indictment filed to the court on July 14, 2009, the charges where changed to: “The defendant, who is married, falsely presented himself as a Jewish bachelor to the plaintiff, and presented himself as interested in a meaningful romantic relationship (hitherto: the misrepresentation) and offered her to escort him to the building. Due to this misrepresentation, the plaintiff agreed to accompany the defendant.” Thus, B.’s version was narrowed down to the almost-innocent affair of impersonating. “Plea bargains never match the original narrative of the plaintiff, because the two sides have to bridge the gap between them and reach an agreement,” explains Wittman, “in this case we gave up on the ‘forcible’ element and agreed to a rewriting of the indictment, according to which the defendant had sex with the woman with her consent that was obtained with deception. This formulation fully corresponds with the demands of the article in the law [Israel’s Criminal Code- E] that defines the alternative ‘rape by deception’”.

is there a full translation somewhere, mordy?

Original: http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1187907.html
Translation: http://www.mideastyouth.com/2010/09/05/israel-rape-by-deception-turns-out-to-be-brutal-rape-of-a-vulnerable-and-abused-woman/

Can't vouch for the quality of the translation -- too tired to try and read the original it atm.

thanks.

Do you still think there is no racial element Mordy?

And a pretty widespread pattern of prosecutors making decisions that basically say, you know, "oh, but she was a prostitute/homeless/mentally ill, so let's not even push this, it's too hard" -- based in part on expecting the same mentality from jurors, witnesses

If a prosecutor thinks 'it's too hard' to get a conviction then that's more likely to be a candid assessment of their own limitations than mere laziness. The only respect in which a jury will think 'it's too hard' is in passing the threshold of reasonable doubt. Their faults lie in their biases.

The insinuation that prosecutors are swayed by the same shitty prejudices as jurors seems wrong. They may share them but surely their desire to get a conviction is more significant. They may think the rape of vulnerable women is a fact of life but they will think this of other crimes too.

That said prosecutors/judges ought to fully appraise themselves of their own unthinking misogynist tendencies and whether they are contributing to a lack of general will. I'd like to think that many already do. This whole area would be more helped by legislative reform, particularly in relation to the procedures of court, the intimidation and defamation of complainants etc.

Do you still think there is no racial element Mordy?

Yeah, gotta say, I definitely don't think there's any racial element in this case.

You notice it says, "The defendant, who is married..." not "The defendant, who is an arab..." or "The defendant, who is a Palestinian..." or even "The defendant, who is a gentile..." (which the last of which is probably the only reason why the Jewish note is relevant). It's all about his presentation of marital availability. If you think that "Jewish bachelor" is a racial category -- I'm not rehashing this argument again.

NB you may be right. I only have english synopses to go on. The impersonation of a bachelor would seem to cover grounds for deception from reading that Ha'aretz article, though it didn't cite any cases of that nature.

I think we can acknowledge that lots of prosecutors are doing the best they can with the tools available, and still say that 18 months on a "consensual sex by deception" plea might demonstrate some level of general complacency, you know?

i'm probably working too hard, in the spirit of open-mindedness, to defend the indefensible. nevertheless, i feel that there just isn't enough hard info here for me to feel comfortable accusing the prosecutors of complacency. reading the translation mordy posted suggests instead that they were legitimately worried about both the welfare and the credibility of the victim, and not without reason. agree entirely that the plea bargain seems unjust and the sentence absurdly lenient, given the severity and nature of the apparent crime.

I don't remember both of the other cases, but one of them was someone claiming to have governmental power that he didn't have, I believe. xp

that last was in response to nabiscothingy, btw

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/16/mark-kennedy-undercover-cop-jemima-kahn

Carole Cadwalladr in the Observer continuing to misrepresent this case, all in the pursuit of glib sneers:

Try that for violated. Or the Israeli woman who had sex with an Israeli man, then got him jailed for rape, after she discovered that he was an Arab Israeli. Hmm. Well, no, not that one obviously. That's just racism. Or, as they call it in Israel, "the law".