26 thoughts on “Jerusalem Police Commander Placed on Leave, Suspected of Raping Woman – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
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  1. The case, if proven, makes him a despicable human being although it speaks to your sense of the world that you lump the “alleged, charged or convicted” together as one group. I’m pretty sure you don’t do that when it isn’t Israeli Jews. If we stand for justice for wrongly accused Palestinians and demand that they be given a fair trial when accused of crimes without being sentenced ahead of time in the court of public opinion, we must surely do the same here rather than use journalistic hyperbole to transform some undoubtedly disgusting behavior into “perquisites of office”.

    I’m pretty sure you’ll reject this comment and claim that I’m defending an alleged rapist, but I assure you I am not. I just expect a little integrity from someone who demands so much of others.

    Also I think you lost your train of thought somewhere in this. You started the paragraph “There are two ways of looking at this…” but then you only presented the first. Was this a sly metaphor for your entire blogging system?

    1. That’s nonsense. I lump together convicted, charged and accused when I’m talking about RAPISTS. Since I write about Israel (or did you forget that?) I don’t often write about other rapists. The reason I used those terms was that the Israeli judicial system often cannot or will not prosecute crimes of violence against women just as it’s likely it will not prosecute Shaham in this instance. There is an overwhelming presumption of innocence regarding male rape suspects (cf. Yoav Even).

      I don’t like the smell of your accusation at all & find it offensive. If you want to accuse me of Israel bashing or anti Semitism you’re going to do it elsewhere.

      BTW you clearly know little about the Israeli justice system & how it treats female victims & male accused. Shaham doesn’t need my help or restraint. He has an entire police & judicial hierarchy to protect him (and they will).

  2. Mr. Silverstein.
    Thanks for this post.

    Just a small remark: you said that there are two ways of looking at this case: first is that the Israeli police is totally corrupted.
    But you didn’t wrote hat us the second?

    I’ll tell you what: The Israeli police and government is the most clean and honest in the world.
    The fact that the highest ranks up to the PM, the presidents and higher ranks in the army and police were brought to justice and lose their jobs is the strongest message for everyone. A women in Israel is a proud citizen with legal rights. no one can rape a women in Israel or sexually abused her without paying a heavy price.

    This case is the best approval that the democracy in Israel and human rights works.
    In US, on the contrary, a president was sexually abused one of his workers, in the Oval office , he lied about it – and now he is one of your heroes.

    No other country in the world treat higher ranks like Israel. If you were a women – you want to be an Israeli woman.

    1. Actually, when Hillary Clinton voiced her worry about the diminished rights of women in Israel, the right-wing reaction was predictable.

      I guess they don’t think it’s the hand that feeds them. Hmm, wonder why…

  3. Kuku is joking, right? “A women in Israel is a proud citizen with legal rights. no one can rape a women in Israel or sexually abused her without paying a heavy price.” An Israeli soldier is free to be raped with almost no one paying the price – how do you think these guys get the chutzpah to start raping later in life? They learn it in the army where it’s standard. In any case, Kuku, why don’t we ask an Israeli woman instead of speculating?

    1. I know a number of female Israeli bloggers who would howl with rage at this idiot’s nonsense. The entire premise of their blogs is that Israeli women are treated like shit much of the time by men like Shaham. Only an Israeli man like this numbskull, who quite aptly calls himself “Rooster” in Hebrew, could actually believe this shit.

  4. Abuse and other forms or sadism are not neatly compartmentalized psychologically – no matter how much Israelis try to deny it, their racist and Apartheid intolerant culture with it’s outlets of abuse towards the Palestinians as inferiors/subhumans takes it’s own toll and warps the collective Israeli psyche/culture as well as the individual whom is a blind or even fanatic member of it

    The long culture (and IDF-stint whipped up indoctrination) of abusing Palestinians is just one color of the spectrum of the sadistic personality – and that that naturally sloshes over and extends to one’s own children and co-religionists is simply the way the human mind works.

    You will never hear this in the Israeli press – it is too painful a truth.

    Israel has a 64yr backlog of PTSD – it’s a culture of PTSD that shows no sign of recovery. Israel cannot just be sick and abusive towards Palestinians and pretend they can keep that all compartamentalized. Just doesn’t work that way and scratch the surface and a lot of Israelis problem have a slightly subconscious sense of that.

    Not only is the Israeli Apartheid over Palestine psychologically traumatized generations of Palestinian children and physically harming them as well with stunted development – the Israeli ethnic cleansing takes a psychological toll on Israelis as well.

    This is something you will almost never heard openly discussed for a several levels of reasons – one of which it kinda of ‘takes the charm out of occupation’.

    (Apologies to Humphrey Bogart and Paris)

  5. @bluto – while not necessarily agreeing with all your specific wording, yes – Israel has ‘arranged’ for itself a significant karmic debt of PTSD borne out of the collective behaviour of its army, security forces, political institutions and – alas – the general citizenry.

    It seems to me (as a citizen) that the route to healing from the said PTSD is long and, even worse, quite discouraging and discouraged by the authorities, educators and the ever pervasive IDF and security apparatus.

    M

  6. “Another police commander was accused of raping the director of an Israeli NGO in 2009 “.
    Rubbish! Orly Innes accused Uri Barlev of grabbing hjer hand and trying to pull her down on the lawn -IN A PUBLIC PLACE – and later in the evening, of calling her repeatedly on the hotel phone and trying to extract from her an invitaion to her room (which he didn’t get). Under what definition does that count as rape? You’re only saying that to make it seem as if Israeli police officers go around raping women.
    “we scooped Israel’s leading liberal daily once again (and of course they made no reference to, or credited this blog) in their mown reporting.” How do you figure that out?

    1. Once again I find myself amazed that a woman would take the side of an alleged male rapist against his female victims. I guess if you’ve been indoctrinated enough in the ways of Israeli male superiority even women can drink the Kool Aid. If you can read this Haaretz article and tell me Bar Lev wasn’t accused by more than one woman of raping her, then you’ve taken leave of your senses.

    2. well, simone, i read the article. apparently there is more than one accuser, including a victim who alleges that she was drugged by a ‘friend’ to facilitate being raped by bar-lev. presumably this conduct didn’t take place in public. would you like to apologize to richard and the readers for your ‘mistaken’ summation of the allegations? no? pffft.

        1. @”she hasn’t presented anything but her own claim that Iness didn’t say she was raped.”

          YOU claim Orly Innes said she was raped. How is a person supposed to prove she didn’t make that claim? That’s like telling someone to prove they never had a sister, as we say in Hebrew. In law, one is not obliged to prove a negative fact. You show me where Innes claimed to have been raped by Bar Lev. You can’t – because she didn’t. Explain to me how it is possible to prove that she made no such claim. It should however, be possible to prove that she made the claim, if she indeed did so – so why don’t you go ahead and show us where she claimed to have been raped by Bar Lev.
          However, I know you won’t do this, so here is a link in English showing us what she did claim:

          http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/143419#.UBQtdGEe5vJ

          Marc B. – I have no intention of apologizing for anything. Richard claimed that ORLY INNES (not someone else) claimed to have been raped by Bar Lev. (“Another police commander was accused of raping THE DIRECTOR OF AN ISRAELI NGO in 2009”). That was the statement to which I replied. Richard has a habit of making statements and then, when challenged, he pretends his challenger was answering a completely different statement. If Richard had stated that Bar Lev was accused by a woman OTHER THAN ORLY INNES of having sex with her when she was drugged, I would not have challenged the statement.

          1. I told you to offer a CREDIBLE source. Arutz 7, the settler media outlet, is NOT a credible media source. It ALWAYS takes the side of the police as it does here as well. Sorry. Try again.

  7. [comment deleted for being off-topic, violating comment rules–read comment rules before posting again here.]

  8. @Richard Silverstein:
    “Once again I find myself amazed that a woman would take the side of an alleged male rapist against his female victims.”
    Kindly show me, with accurate quotations, where I “took the side” of an alleged rapist.

    “If you can read this Haaretz article and tell me Bar Lev wasn’t accused by more than one woman of raping her, then you’ve taken leave of your senses.”

    Not for the first time, you have taken my response to a statement made by you and tried to make it seem that I was replying to another (later) statement. The statement you made, to which I responded, was :”Another police commander was accused of raping the director of an Israeli NGO in 2009″ with a link that lead to the story about Orly Innes. I responded that he was NOT accused of raping Orly Innes – as indeed, he was not, not even by Orly Innes herself. And on that basis you accuse me of taking the side of “an alleged male rapist against his female victims”? I did no such thing. All I did was point out that the particular alleged victim to which you referred did not make the particular allegation that you claimed.

    I still don’t understand your claim to have “scooped Israel’s leading liberal daily once again” since you chose not to answer that part of my comment. You reported the story on July 26. That’s the same day the gag order was removed (at about 11.30 a.m. Israel time, after a hearing lasting about an hour). So how, exactly, do you think that you were able to help break the gag?

    1. So you do concede Bar Lev has been accused of raping Israeli women? As for Inness, she too accused him of rape. In this Globes article:

      http://www.globes.co.il/news/article.aspx?did=1000603562

      she calls herself a “korban,” which means ” victim” in the sense of rape. Globes also wrote this about the incident:

      גם לא’, עובדת במשרד לביטחון הפנים הטוענת כי הניצב תקף אותה מינית לפני כשנתיים וחצי באילת”.

      “The commander attacked her sexually…”

      When women accuse an Israeli male official of rape and you minimize the extent of the crime saying falsely it was at most harassment, as you have Bar Lev here…I call that taking the side of the oppressor.

      You will acknowledge I am correct and your claims about me were wrong in this matter or you will be banned.

  9. Richard, don’t threaten me. I don’t care two hoots if you ban me or not, the fact remains that Orly Innes did NOT accuse Bar Lev of rape, but of sexual assault, and the sexual assault of which she speaks, was, to grab her by the hand and pull her down on the grass next to him in a public place and try to embrace her and later, to call her over and over again in her hotel room. This certainly fits the definition of sexual assault but she did not accuse him of rape – or even of attempted rape. FYO, I have over 2 decades of experience in dealing with sexual assault cases. I personally find it outrageous that apparently, only actual rape counts in your eyes as sexual assault.
    “When women accuse an Israeli male official of rape and you minimize the extent of the crime saying falsely it was at most harassment…”
    I did NOT say that it was “at most harassment”.That is a lie. Show me a quotation where I said that.This is not the first time that you have falsely and deliberately attributed to me a statement which I never made.

    As for your attempts at translation – “korban”does mean a victim, in Hebrew, but not necessarily of rape and if you read your linked article carefully, you will see that Dr. Innes actually used the word in the sense of declaring that she wished to champion the victims of crime in general (or possibly of sex crimes in general):
    ”אני מתכוונת לפעול לשיפור היכולת של המערכת להגן על קורבנות עבירה”.

    1. Any reasonable reader of this comment and your previous ones on this subject will simply not find anything you’ve written credible. First, I provided credible proof that she was a victim of a sexual attack, which I and any other reasonable person would call rape or at least attempted rape. Second, I confirmed with an Israeli journalist that Bar Lev indeed was accused of raping her. I told you to provide credible proof that supports your claim that there was no rape. You did not do so in this comment. You merely recounted once again your claim of what happened.

      You are banned.

  10. As of today, the commander is being investigated for sexual harassment and sexual molestation of subordinates. While this just may be the ‘tip of the iceberg’, I still don’t see where the rape claims comes from.

    Richard said to Simone:

    “You will acknowledge I am correct and your claims about me were wrong in this matter or you will be banned.”

    Richard. Your directive to Simone sounds tyrannical.

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