Speaking of Mariyah's ill-advised comment towards me with respect to reading comprehension I'll try to enlighten the both of you regarding nmy wife and her family.

Edited by Gibbs - 29 September 2009 at 6:26pm

Gibbs wrote: As mentioned previously I found out I had Jewish heritage that wasn't told to me in +30 years, and as to why I was never told is beyond me. My wife being happy that I had some knowledge of my heritage shared this with her immediate family who haphazardly told the extended family and this and that was said and as they say "everything else is history." So because I'm of Jewish heritage (not practicing) I can never visit her family's town of Abu Kishk because I am of Jewish heritage.

Maybe it could be because you are non-Muslim and she is no longer Muslim and then on top of that you are of Jewish desent.Do you know if her parents think that you had anything to do with there daughter no longer being Muslim?

Who is racist here?

Israeli drive to prevent Jewish girls dating Arabs

Jonathan Cook, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: September 25. 2009 1:57PM UAE / September 25. 2009 9:57AM GMT

NAZARETH // A local authority in Israel has announced that it is establishing a special team of youth counsellors and psychologists whose job it will be to identify young Jewish women who are dating Arab men and �rescue� them.

The move by the municipality of Petah Tikva, a city close to Tel Aviv, is the latest in a series of separate � and little discussed � initiatives from official bodies, rabbis, private organisations and groups of Israeli residents to try to prevent interracial dating and marriage.

In a related development, the Israeli media reported this month that residents of Pisgat Zeev, a large Jewish settlement in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, had formed a vigilante-style patrol to stop Arab men from mixing with local Jewish girls.

Hostility to intimate relationships developing across Israel�s ethnic divide is shared by many Israeli Jews, who regard such behaviour as a threat to the state�s Jewishness. One of the few polls on the subject, in 2007, found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage should be equated with �national treason�.

Since the state�s founding in 1948, analysts have noted, a series of legal and administrative measures have been taken by Israel to limit the possibilities of close links developing between Jewish and Arab citizens, the latter comprising a fifth of the population.

Largely segregated communities and separate education systems mean that there are few opportunities for young Arabs and Jews to become familiarised with each other. Even in the handful of �mixed cities�, Arab residents are usually confined to separate neighbourhoods.

In addition, civil marriage is banned in Israel, meaning that in the small number of cases where Jews and Arabs want to wed, they can do so only by leaving the country for a ceremony abroad. The marriage is recognised on the couple�s return.

Dr Yuval Yonay, a sociologist at Haifa University, said the number of interracial marriages was �too small to be studied�. �Separation between Jews and Arabs is so ingrained in Israeli society, it is surprising that anyone manages to escape these central controls.�

The team in Petah Tikva, a Jewish city of 200,000 residents, was created in direct response to news that two Jewish girls, aged 17 and 19, were accompanying a group of young Arab men when they allegedly beat a Jewish man, Leonard Karp, to death last month on a Tel Aviv beach. The older girl was from Petah Tikva.

The girls� involvement with the Arab youths has revived general concern that a once-firm taboo against interracial dating is beginning to erode among some young people.

In sentiments widely shared, Mr Hakak, a spokesman for Petah Tikva municipality, said �Russian girls�, young Jewish women whose parents arrived in Israel over the past two decades, since the former Soviet Union collapsed, were particularly vulnerable to the attention of Arab men.

Dr Yonay said Russian women were less closed to the idea of relationships with Arab men because they �did not undergo the religious and Zionist education� to which more established Israeli Jews were subject.

Mr Hakak said the municipality had created a hotline that parents and friends of the Jewish women could use to inform on them.

�We can�t tell the girls what to do but we can send a psychologist to their home to offer them and their parents advice,� he said.

Motti Zaft, the deputy mayor, told the Ynet website that the municipality was also cracking down on city homeowners who illegally subdivide apartments to rent them cheaply to single Arab men looking for work in the Tel Aviv area. He estimated that several hundred Arab men had moved into the city as a result.

Petah Tikva�s hostility to Arab men mixing with local Jewish women is shared by other communities.

In Pisgat Zeev, a settlement of 40,000 Jews, some 35 Jewish men are reported to belong to a patrol known as �Fire for Judaism� that tries to stop interracial dating.

Unusually for a settlement, Pisgat Zeev has attracted a tiny but growing population of Arab families, both from East Jerusalem and from inside Israel. Because Pisgat Zeev sits within Jerusalem�s municipal borders, Arabs with Israeli residency rights can live there as long as Jewish settlers are willing to rent to them.

One member, who identified himself as Moshe to the Jerusalem Post newspaper, said: �Our goal is to be in contact with these girls and try to explain to them the dangers of what they�re getting themselves into. In the last 10 years, 60 girls from Pisgat Zeev have gone into [Palestinian] villages [in the West Bank]. And most of them aren�t heard from after that.�

He denied that violence or threats were used against Arab men.
Last year, the municipality of Kiryat Gat, a town of 50,000 Jews in southern Israel, launched a programme in schools to warn Jewish girls of the dangers of dating local Bedouin men. The girls were shown a video titled Sleeping with the Enemy, which describes mixed couples as an �unnatural phenomenon�.

Haim Shalom, head of the municipality�s welfare department, is filmed saying: �The girls, in their innocence, go with the exploitative Arab.�

In 2004, posters sprang up all over the northern town of Safed warning Jewish women that dating Arab men would lead to �beatings, hard drugs, prostitution and crime�.
Safed�s chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, told a local newspaper that the �seducing� of Jewish girls was �another form of war� by Arab men.

Both Kiryat Gat and Safed�s campaigns were supported by a religious organisation called Yad L�achim, which runs an anti-assimilation team publicly dedicated to �saving� Jewish women.

According to its website, the organisation receives more than 100 calls a month about Jewish women living with Arab men, both in Israel and the West Bank. It launches �military-like rescues [of the women] from hostile Arab villages� in co-ordination with the police and army.

�The Jewish soul is a precious, all-too-rare resource, and we are not prepared to give up on even a single one,� says the website.

Couple of questions popped up

How can the race of the Jews and Arabs be different?

Aren't both Semitic people with different beliefs

Edited by Sign*Reader - 29 September 2009 at 3:49pm

Gibbs wrote: Again, as you say the inhabitants of Islam aren't no different than the fanatics of Christianity, so again, my question beckons, how can I separate the behaviors of Muslim fanatics from the religion if all I have are the actions of the people?

Why do I get a feeling that you are a clone of another IC's long lost member "Israfil"?
BTW he was suspended for his behavior for the following reasons...
After everything is said and done you tend to direct the discussion to your personal issues then you spew your tirade against things Islamic.

What do mean by "the inhabitants of Islam"?
Islam is not named after a land mass, if you had stated inhabitant of Saudi one could stomach that line of thinking... but this indicates quite bit of ignorance coming from someone who married a Palestinian refugee somewhere on this planet earth...She married you being not well versed of her own identity...How is it possible that a person of Palestinian descent, from a Muslim background with a medical education would not be able to discern your race /ethnicity?
 I can tell a Jew by looks, names and way they talk, though it is politically incorrect to say that in US particularly ...You have not stated your domicile..
How long has your wife been away from her folks? These are the questions popping up...
The question should not be how do you separate the fanatics from the religion! Same question goes for the Zionist first who created the Palestinian problem..
Now from the religion's(Islamic and Judaic) POV Is your marriage valid? It is not fanatics or no fanatics! The secularism and Liberalism has no rules about this so enjoy yourself and leave the poor folks alone who were left behind in the miserable lost land of Palestine...
 
When you made the decision of having a relationship with a lost woman of Palestine deep down in  your soul you knew she was different from your roots Jewish or not ...even then a Muslim can't accept a Christian or atheist son in law...So what is your next question?