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Occupation magazine - Commentary

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Red Rag column - sex offenders, thought police, fashion police
By: Gideon Spiro

13 December 2016 (English translation 26 December 2016)

Sex offenders

Recently we have been witness to intense publicity about sex offenders. A grandfather in his 70s, serving as a cantor in a synagogue, has been accused of raping his daughter and his granddaughters. A settler rabbi has been accused of raping a 14 year old female student. A former Shas Knesset Member has been accused of receiving bribes in the form of sexual favours. A sitting Knesset Member from the Jewish Home party is suspected of having committed serial sexual offences for many years. The head of a Regional Council in the Occupied Territories resigned due to sexual assault. Senior officers in the IDF, with the rank of brigadier general, coincidentally also kippa-wearers, are accused of rape and covering up sexual assaults by their soldiers. Sexual crime is not the inheritance only of those who follow the Torah and the mitzvoth. Seculars also have a considerable share. For example, real-estate mogul and bon vivant Alon Kastiel was arrested on suspicion of rape, as was a senior lawyer in the State Prosecution Service.

The question that is hammering at my brain is, how can such grave crimes take place in 2016, in a supposedly feminist era? It seems that the right of a woman to her body has not penetrated into the consciousness of many men, who remain stuck in the past.

One way to overcome this grave phenomenon is a law that requires 50% representation of women in all public and business institutions. The Knesset, the government, municipal and regional councils, the civil service, the courts, managerial boards, religious councils, academic staff in the universities, and more. Experience teaches us that in a state in which this principle is realized, if not fully, at least partially, like in the Scandinavian countries, sexual crimes decline substantially.


Thought police

Education Minister Naftali Bennett has been wasting no time. He appointed Prof. Asa Kasher to create an ethical code that will determine what is permitted and what is forbidden regarding the expression of political opinions within the academic staff in universities.

The Right is playing the innocent, and asking, what’s the Left getting so excited about? After all, Asa Kasher is not a man of the Right. I have news: Prof. Asa Kasher, who was a supporter of “Yesh Gvul” in the First Lebanon War, has undergone a “rightening” process. Otherwise he would not have been chosen to draft the army’s ethical code – an ethical code that does not reject the Occupation. There are grounds to fear that someone who acted as matchmaker between ethics and the Occupation will want to satisfy his employers and choose an ethical-academic code that will hinder freedom of expression for people of the Left.


Fashion police

Two women who work as parliamentary counsellors in the Knesset were prevented from entering the building because the length of their skirts was a few centimetres above the knee. This is another stage on the way to the Iranization of Israel.


Translated from Hebrew for Occupation Magazine by George Malent

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