This isnt' really related to Iran affairs directly but it is too funny to pass up. Reportedly the officials in a city in Israel* have started a program to "locate and treat" Jewish girls who date Arab guys.
Moria Ben Yossef, Zman Tel-Aviv [Maariv Tel-Aviv Weekly Magazine] February 23 2010 [Hebrew original here]
The municipal finance committee decided three weeks ago to give NIS 250,000 [~$66,000] to what it refers to as “‘an aid program for immigrant girls at risk”. The program will be launched this month in the Shapira, Kiryat Shalom and Nevs Ofer neighborhoods. The committee said some of the project’s aims are ‘locating immigrant girls at risk… case-specific family and community intervention to locate the girls… and locating the appropriate figures in the community to treat the girls.’
The program is aimed to treat up to 120 young women under 22, and is jointly run by the Tel Aviv Municipality, the Absorption Ministry (which will sponsor 75 percent of it), and the World Congress of Bukharan Jews.
The obsession over "ethnic purity" in Israel should not come as a surprise since Zionism was the product of the same sort of European "blood & soil" chauvinistic nationalism (aka racism) that gave rise to Nazism there. I thought the fuss over the genetic study paper by Spanish researcher Antonio Arnaiz-Villena was funny - (it concluded that Jews and Arabs are related and Jews aren't a particularly "special" people at all) - especially when the pro-Israeli lobby was so outraged by that concludion they managed to force the publishers of the scientific journal Human Immunology to not only withdraw the peer-reviewed paper but send a message to libraries asking them to physically rip it out the offending pages. I thought THAT was pretty funny too.
* Occupied Palestine.
And Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, correct?
Posted by: Tom in Canada | March 05, 2010 at 11:23 PM