http://www.forward.com/issues/2002/02.06.28/news10.html note: not jeff rense LOL LOL LOL JUNE 28, 2002 | current issue | back issues | subscribe | Pressured by U.S., Israel Battles a Burgeoning 'White Slave' Trade By MATTHEW GUTMAN FORWARD STAFF TEL AVIV â A string of cars marks northern Tel Aviv's Tel Baruch Beach, renowned for its posh seafood restaurant, Blue, but also for the dozens of prostitutes who flock here looking for business. Many of them are from the former Soviet Union. Some of them are slaves. About 3,000 women are bought and sold in Israel each year. Amid calls from international organizations and pressure from the United States to curb the sale, trade and barter of women, Israel has begun to crack down on this billion-dollar-a-year industry. Both police and state prosecutors call ending the slave trade one of their top priorities. Until the recent crackdown, Israel â along with Bahrain, Qatar and Sudan â was stuck on a State Department list of countries failing to meet America's minimum standards for the suppression of sex trafficking. In early June, however, the State Department bumped Israel up a category: from a state that does nothing to prevent slavery to one taking action against it. This coming Monday, as a result of one of the biggest stings on slavery in Israel's history, 18 men involved in drug sales and the smuggling, trafficking and prostitution of women will face trial in the Netanya Magistrate's Court and in a Tel Aviv District Court. The maximum sentence they may receive for the trafficking of the three women allegedly caught in their grips is 15 years. The director of the Special Crimes Unit, Deputy Commissioner Menashe Arviv, thinks they will likely receive sentences of between 3 and 10 years. The police apprehended the 18 men and completed the sting when one of the country's biggest slave traders agreed to turn state's witness, said Central District police spokesman Shaul Zionit. What they uncovered, according to Zionit, was horrifying. The women, who were allegedly bought for about $7,500, were traded and bartered for all sorts of goods, including drugs, Zionit said. Their new "owners" most often used them as prostitutes after first sexually abusing the women, according to the spokesman. The three women the police rescued from slavery in this case, Zionit said, were smuggled from Ukraine into Egypt and from there over the Israeli border by Bedouins. They were lured to the region by advertisements promising jobs in Israel as models or nannies. Most often the women were unaware of the life they would be thrust into once in Israel. After their arduous trek through the desert, where the Bedouins raped them, the women were handed over to their new "owners," according to the police spokesman. "It's horrible," Zionit said. "The women we found had been used along the way. After all, their masters had to test their product. They are touched and measured and prodded in heinous ways to 'ensure the quality of the product.' Some also bring friends or family to use the women. Then the women have to work for a period of one or more months free of charge to 'pay for their passage.'" The Israeli police say stopping the crime is one of their top priorities. Yet one of the most worrisome aspects of this type of case, said prosecutor Arviv, is that demand for women from the former Soviet Union is still high. It is also easy to smuggle in the women, given the 70-mile Israel-Egypt border, which is mostly unmarked and unfenced. Bedouin "traders" easily drive over it using dune buggies and all-terrain vehicles. No fence exists along the border. According to a reserve major in the Israeli army's engineer corps posted to the border area, who spoke on condition of anonymity, a physical barrier would be ineffective because shifting sands would bury it within a year or two. The smugglers keep coming and are seldom stopped by Israeli troops, who are more concerned with catching terrorist infiltrators, he said. The demand for the women and the ease with which they can be smuggled into Israel make it one the of the world's hubs of women-trafficking, lamented Esther Hertzog, a social anthropologist at Tel Aviv University and head of the Movement for the Equal Representation of Women. While police crackdowns have nabbed some suspects, the trade largely remains unhindered, she said. Chaim Nardi, a sociologist at Tel Aviv University, links the slave-trafficking to machismo attitudes in Israeli society, which he said "allow men to consider women their toy." Nardi, who compiled a report on the sale of women and prostitution in June 2000 and has since updated it, said most prostitutes suffer from depression, and the overwhelming physical and emotional abuse to which they are subjected drives a huge percentage to abuse narcotics. Even so, he sees hope. "There are certain encouraging signs," he said. "It appears things are getting better. The Israeli prosecutors are working hard against this phenomenon. But prosecutors have said their work will continue to be low-key as long as citizens are not bothered by the phenomenon en masse. This type of thinking legitimizes the trade in women, and I think this should no longer be tolerated."
i am sure rearden is extremely smart, i have never said otherwise. he and i just have extremely different views of morality and what constitutes human suffering. as far as my "chest thumping" it was in response to his insult.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3259333,00.html Israeli-Canadian women trafficking ring busted According to suspicions, ring members placed ads in Russian newspapers in Israel offering escort services in Canada Avi Cohen The police have busted an international women trafficking ring between Israel and Canada. Details of the ring were released by police Tuesday morning, with the arrest of three suspects in the case. The suspects are a couple from Ariel, aged 40 and 26, and a 40-year-old Lod resident. A few months ago, Tel Aviv police detectives noticed ads in Russian newspapers in Israel offering work for women. The ads said that the work was in escort services in Canada, and offered USD 10,000 a month. Police began investigating the individuals behind the ads, and found that women from the former Soviet Union arrived at the offices, often with an Israeli passport. When they arrived, they were met by "initiators," who carried out humiliating tests on them, photographed them naked from every angle, and then sent the pictures to Canada. After a period of time, the Canada-based members of the ring sent answers to the Israeli branch of the network. When a positive answer was received, ring members organized documents, and if needed, passports, and sent the woman to Canada. 'International slave trade' Police Supervisor Stoklov told Ynet Tuesday morning that "this is an international network for selling women. The network was active in Russia, Israel, Canada, and the United States. This is a slave trade. They take the women and check them, their bodies, like they check slaves." "We have made arrests in the early morning and are holding three suspects, one of whom is known to us from the women trafficking field, while the other two are not known to us." The investigation was coordinated with law enforcement agencies in Canada and the US, where arrests are expected shortly.
and let me take a moment to credit the many israeli's that are as disgusted with this crime as i am. they are working tirelessly to stop these horrors and i give them 100% credit, i consider them true heros. these crimes are widespread, not just in israel. the common theme here is russian organized crime that initiates the process. unfortunately, in order to continue with their "business" they rely on cooperation from many in the israeli sex industry and its patrons.
No, no, no. You can't have a 'head' without a 'tail'. You can most certainly have capital movement without people movement or vice versa.
How can you have capital movement without people?? I mean, even not considering that it requires people to move it, which I doubt was what you meant, the whole point of moving capital is to buy people, that is, their labor.
Exactly. So you simply employ the people where they live (ie their own countries). For such a system to operate, there is no requirement that people from that country be able immigrate to the capital-providing country. (And capital doesn't just cross borders to employ people, it crosses borders to own assets, too.)
Nevertheless, in the interest of fairness, if capital is free to employ cheaper labor abroad, then labor should be free to seek higher capital abroad. You see, if we stand for fairness now, we have a hope of expecting it in the future, when the inevitable tide of human migration has put the "shoe on the other foot". If we don't stand for fairness, there is no hope of that. That's why the principles that America was founded on are so important, more than life itself.