Honestly, i wear this distinction with great honor. i am so glad i have been written off by ET's biggest drug user. as far as logic goes my grad school entrance exam scores put me in the top ten percent of college grads, in the analytic section. so i think i will sleep well tonight in spite of your stinging insult. nice try though.
The Toronto Story could Be Huge (Up Mahrams Ass)
- Thread starter Pabst
- Start date
Honestly, i wear this distinction with great honor. i am so glad i have been written off by ET's biggest drug user. as far as logic goes my grad school entrance exam scores put me in the top ten percent of college grads, in the analytic section. so i think i will sleep well tonight in spite of your stinging insult. nice try though.
More like ET's most honest & open drug user. You'd be shocked who has privately and secretly told me of their active IV heroin habit. (Note to my friends here: Please don't even ask who this is- I'll never tell.)
Ratboy, keep making blind assumptions and sticking to them despite all evidence to the contrary. I suggest you up your trading size as well. The more stubborn dumb money, the better.
http://www.brama.com/issues/nytart.html
She was 21, self-assured and glad to be out of Ukraine. Israel offered a new world, and for a week or two everything seemed possible. Then, one morning, she was driven to a brothel, where her boss burned her passport before her eyes.
"I own you," she recalled his saying. "You are my property, and you will work until you earn your way out. Don't try to leave. You have no papers and you don't speak Hebrew. You will be arrested and deported. Then we will get you and bring you back."
It happens every single day. Not just in Israel, which has deported nearly 1,500 Russian and Ukrainian women like Irina in the past three years. But throughout the world, where selling naive and desperate young women into sexual bondage has become one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises in the robust global economy.
------------------------------
Many end up like Irina. Stunned and outraged by the sudden order to prostitute herself, she simply refused. She was beaten and raped before she succumbed. Finally she got a break. The brothel was raided, and she was brought here to Neve Tirtsa in Ramle, the only women's prison in Israel. Now, like hundreds of Ukrainian and Russian women with no documents or obvious forgeries, she is waiting to be sent home.
------------------------------------------
Israel is a fairly typical destination. Prostitution is not illegal here, although brothels are, and with 250,000 foreign male workers -- most of whom are single or here without their wives -- the demand is great. Police officials estimate that there are 25,000 paid sexual transactions every day. Brothels are ubiquitous.
None of the women seem to realize the risks they run until it is too late. Once they cross the border their passports will be confiscated, their freedoms curtailed and what little money they have taken from them at once.
-------------------------------------------------------
The women are smuggled by car, bus, boat and plane. Handed off in the dead of night, many are told they will pick oranges, work as dancers or as waitresses. Others have decided to try their luck at prostitution, usually for what they assume will be a few lucrative months. They have no idea of the violence that awaits them.
The efficient, economically brutal routine -- whether here in Israel, or in one of a dozen other countries -- rarely varies. Women are held in apartments, bars and makeshift brothels; there they service, by their own count, as many as 15 clients a day. Often they sleep in shifts, four to a bed. The best that most hope for is to be deported after the police finally catch up with their captors.
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In some countries, Israel among them, there is not even a specific law against the sale of human beings.
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cont.
Yitzhak Tyler, the chief of undercover activities for the Haifa police, is a big, open-faced man who doesn't mince words.
"We got a hell of a problem on our hands," he said. The port city of 200,000 has become the easiest entryway for women brought to Israel to work as prostitutes -- though by no means the only one. Sometimes they walk off tour boats, but increasingly they come with forged documents that enable them to live and work in Israel. These have often been bought or stolen from elderly Jewish women in Russia or Ukraine.
"This is a sophisticated, global operation," Tyler said. "It's evil, and it's successful because the money is so good. These men pay $500 to $1,000 for a Ukrainian or Russian woman. Do you understand what I am telling you? They will buy these women and make a fortune out of them."
To illustrate his point, Tyler grabbed a black calculator and started calling out the sums as he punched them in.
"Take a small place," he said, "with 10 girls. Each has 15 to 20 clients a day. Multiply that by say 200 shekels. So say 30,000 shekels a day comes in to each place. Each girl works 25 days a month. Minimum."
Tyler was busy doing math as he spoke. "So we are talking about 750,000 shekels a month, or about $215,000. A man often owns five of these places. That's a million dollars. No taxes, no real overhead. It's a factory with slave labor. And we've got them all over Israel."
The Tropicana, in Tel Aviv's bustling business district, is one of the busiest bordellos. The women who work there, like nearly all prostitutes in Israel today, are Russian. Their boss, however, is not.
"Israelis love Russian girls," said Jacob Golan, who owns this and two other clubs, and spoke willingly about the business he finds so "successful." "They are blonde and good-looking and different from us," he said, chuckling as he drew his hand over his black hair. "And they are desperate. They are ready to do anything for money."
Always filled with half-naked Russian women, the club is open around the clock. There is a schedule on the wall next to the receptionist -- with each woman's hours listed in a different color, and the days and shifts rotating, as at a restaurant or a bar. Next to the schedule a sign reads, "We don't accept checks." Next to that there is a poster for a missing Israeli woman.
There are 12 cubicles at the Tropicana where 20 women work in shifts, eight during the daytime, 12 at night. Business is always booming, and not just with foreign workers. Israeli soldiers, with rifles on their shoulders, frequent the place, as do business executives and tourists.
Golan was asked if most women who work at the club do so voluntarily. He laughed heartily.
"I don't get into that," he said, staring vacantly across his club at four Russian women sitting on a low couch. "They are brought here and told to work. I don't force them. I pay them. What goes on between them and the men they are with, how could that be my problem?"
Every once in a while, usually with great fanfare and plenty of advance notice, Golan gets raided. He pays a fine, and the women without good false documents are taken to prison.
If they are deported, the charges against them are dropped. But if a woman wants to file a complaint, then she must remain in prison until a trial is held. "In the past four years," Betty Lahan, prison director of Neve Tirtsa here, said, "I don't know of a single case where a woman chose to testify."
"We got a hell of a problem on our hands," he said. The port city of 200,000 has become the easiest entryway for women brought to Israel to work as prostitutes -- though by no means the only one. Sometimes they walk off tour boats, but increasingly they come with forged documents that enable them to live and work in Israel. These have often been bought or stolen from elderly Jewish women in Russia or Ukraine.
"This is a sophisticated, global operation," Tyler said. "It's evil, and it's successful because the money is so good. These men pay $500 to $1,000 for a Ukrainian or Russian woman. Do you understand what I am telling you? They will buy these women and make a fortune out of them."
To illustrate his point, Tyler grabbed a black calculator and started calling out the sums as he punched them in.
"Take a small place," he said, "with 10 girls. Each has 15 to 20 clients a day. Multiply that by say 200 shekels. So say 30,000 shekels a day comes in to each place. Each girl works 25 days a month. Minimum."
Tyler was busy doing math as he spoke. "So we are talking about 750,000 shekels a month, or about $215,000. A man often owns five of these places. That's a million dollars. No taxes, no real overhead. It's a factory with slave labor. And we've got them all over Israel."
The Tropicana, in Tel Aviv's bustling business district, is one of the busiest bordellos. The women who work there, like nearly all prostitutes in Israel today, are Russian. Their boss, however, is not.
"Israelis love Russian girls," said Jacob Golan, who owns this and two other clubs, and spoke willingly about the business he finds so "successful." "They are blonde and good-looking and different from us," he said, chuckling as he drew his hand over his black hair. "And they are desperate. They are ready to do anything for money."
Always filled with half-naked Russian women, the club is open around the clock. There is a schedule on the wall next to the receptionist -- with each woman's hours listed in a different color, and the days and shifts rotating, as at a restaurant or a bar. Next to the schedule a sign reads, "We don't accept checks." Next to that there is a poster for a missing Israeli woman.
There are 12 cubicles at the Tropicana where 20 women work in shifts, eight during the daytime, 12 at night. Business is always booming, and not just with foreign workers. Israeli soldiers, with rifles on their shoulders, frequent the place, as do business executives and tourists.
Golan was asked if most women who work at the club do so voluntarily. He laughed heartily.
"I don't get into that," he said, staring vacantly across his club at four Russian women sitting on a low couch. "They are brought here and told to work. I don't force them. I pay them. What goes on between them and the men they are with, how could that be my problem?"
Every once in a while, usually with great fanfare and plenty of advance notice, Golan gets raided. He pays a fine, and the women without good false documents are taken to prison.
If they are deported, the charges against them are dropped. But if a woman wants to file a complaint, then she must remain in prison until a trial is held. "In the past four years," Betty Lahan, prison director of Neve Tirtsa here, said, "I don't know of a single case where a woman chose to testify."
These horror stories bother me far more than they could ever touch you.
http://www.themodernreligion.com/jihad/victoria.html
Victoria's, and Israel's, Ugly Secret
by Ina Friedman
Of the thousands of women brought to Israel each year to work as prostitutes, many are enslaved, beaten and raped by their pimps. Now, one of them is fighting back...
... it was a similar impetus that led Victoria (who asks that her last name not be published) into the nightmare she has been living for the past 16 months. In mid-1999, when she ran out of funds to continue her studies and found that her family would not help her, she was lured by the offer of a job in Israel as a masseuse. The promised monthly salary was $1,000 (astronomical compared to the $30 a month she was earning in Moldova), and she was assured that she could return there whenever she chose.
... it was only after she arrived in Israel, in August 1999, that she learned the truth about her new "job" from the man who met her at the airport, took the passport from her, and drove her to a town in the Negev. And the truth was harrowing: The "recruiter," she was told, had sold her into prostitution and debt bondage - meaning that she would have to work off her purchase price ($6,500) before she could be released or even start earning a wage. She would also be required to have sex with her "owner" and his friends for free. The best she could expect for herself was tips from satisfied clients, which she soon discovered averaged $4 to $8 per john.
"We were locked in an apartment or under guard every time we moved from place to place," Victoria explains when asked why she didn't flee. "And even if I could get away, I had no passport, I had no money for a ticket to go back." She also had reason to suspect that local policemen were in cahoots with her "owners," because they were among the clients being "serviced" in one of the places in which she worked. ("They showed up in uniform," she relates, "with a squad car parked outside waiting for them.") But most of all she feared reprisal by her pimps. "They threatened that if I ran away, their people would track me down in Moldova and make sure I was punished."
AND SO, OVER THE COURSE OF 11 months, Victoria worked in various brothels, apartments and hotels in Beersheba and Tel Aviv from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week, "servicing" between 10 and 20 clients a day. Five times she was sold by one pimp to another, each new "owner" requiring her to work off her purchase price. Along the way, she was raped and sodomized by three of her "owners" and one's son, as well.
"Israelis have simply grown used to the idea that women can be bought," concurs Leah Gruenpeter-Gold, co-director of the Awareness Center in Tel Aviv, which specializes in research on trafficking in women and prostitution.
The influx of 1 million immigrants from the CIS over the past decade has also made it easier for the crime syndicates operating there - whose tentacles reach deep into Israel - to traffic women with forged documents. "Some prostitutes come in under the forged identities of Jewish women in Russia and the Ukraine," explains Hagay Herzl, an advisor to the internal security minister on foreign-workers issues.
"... the discussion of Israel's struggle crops up from time to time, the press gives it a blast of coverage - like when the four Russian prostitutes were burned to death in a locked brothel, with bars on the windows, in Tel Aviv last August - and then it goes back to sleep again," says Gruenpeter-Gold.
One reason for the lack of sustained attention by the government and media is that prostitution, per se, is not illegal in Israel. In short, it is pimps who stand to spend up to five years in prison (seven under aggravated circumstances) for their actions. Yet in the case of trafficked women, it is the prostitutes who have been consistently punished by Israel's law-enforcement agencies - as illegal aliens - by being arrested, detained for weeks, and deported, while the owners of brothels have gotten off scot-free.
Another reason for the lack of vigor in attacking the problem is that Israeli officials, to this day, seem somewhat ambivalent.
Probably made it easier to turn a blind eye to the egregious violations of human rights often entailed in the sex trafficking business. And typically, perhaps, it took an outside party to rub Israel's nose in this problem.
That service was provided last May by Amnesty International, which issued a blistering 23-page report on trafficking in women in Israel that slammed the government for "[failing] to take adequate measures to prevent, investigate, prosecute and punish human rights abuses against trafficked women" from the former Soviet Union. The report included a list of specific recommendations, among them: making slavery and trafficking unlawful.
"Just two months ago, we had a hard time getting the police interested in even hearing Victoria's testimony," reports the Hotline's Rozen. "They said it would be her word against that of her pimps, and they couldn't build a case on that. It was only after I had testified before the Knesset inquiry commission that the police called back to say they would like to see her. They were shamed into it. And we should all be ashamed that things like this exist in our 'enlightened,' democratic society and we still prefer to turn the other way."
Victoria's, and Israel's, Ugly Secret
by Ina Friedman
Of the thousands of women brought to Israel each year to work as prostitutes, many are enslaved, beaten and raped by their pimps. Now, one of them is fighting back...
... it was a similar impetus that led Victoria (who asks that her last name not be published) into the nightmare she has been living for the past 16 months. In mid-1999, when she ran out of funds to continue her studies and found that her family would not help her, she was lured by the offer of a job in Israel as a masseuse. The promised monthly salary was $1,000 (astronomical compared to the $30 a month she was earning in Moldova), and she was assured that she could return there whenever she chose.
... it was only after she arrived in Israel, in August 1999, that she learned the truth about her new "job" from the man who met her at the airport, took the passport from her, and drove her to a town in the Negev. And the truth was harrowing: The "recruiter," she was told, had sold her into prostitution and debt bondage - meaning that she would have to work off her purchase price ($6,500) before she could be released or even start earning a wage. She would also be required to have sex with her "owner" and his friends for free. The best she could expect for herself was tips from satisfied clients, which she soon discovered averaged $4 to $8 per john.
"We were locked in an apartment or under guard every time we moved from place to place," Victoria explains when asked why she didn't flee. "And even if I could get away, I had no passport, I had no money for a ticket to go back." She also had reason to suspect that local policemen were in cahoots with her "owners," because they were among the clients being "serviced" in one of the places in which she worked. ("They showed up in uniform," she relates, "with a squad car parked outside waiting for them.") But most of all she feared reprisal by her pimps. "They threatened that if I ran away, their people would track me down in Moldova and make sure I was punished."
AND SO, OVER THE COURSE OF 11 months, Victoria worked in various brothels, apartments and hotels in Beersheba and Tel Aviv from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week, "servicing" between 10 and 20 clients a day. Five times she was sold by one pimp to another, each new "owner" requiring her to work off her purchase price. Along the way, she was raped and sodomized by three of her "owners" and one's son, as well.
"Israelis have simply grown used to the idea that women can be bought," concurs Leah Gruenpeter-Gold, co-director of the Awareness Center in Tel Aviv, which specializes in research on trafficking in women and prostitution.
The influx of 1 million immigrants from the CIS over the past decade has also made it easier for the crime syndicates operating there - whose tentacles reach deep into Israel - to traffic women with forged documents. "Some prostitutes come in under the forged identities of Jewish women in Russia and the Ukraine," explains Hagay Herzl, an advisor to the internal security minister on foreign-workers issues.
"... the discussion of Israel's struggle crops up from time to time, the press gives it a blast of coverage - like when the four Russian prostitutes were burned to death in a locked brothel, with bars on the windows, in Tel Aviv last August - and then it goes back to sleep again," says Gruenpeter-Gold.
One reason for the lack of sustained attention by the government and media is that prostitution, per se, is not illegal in Israel. In short, it is pimps who stand to spend up to five years in prison (seven under aggravated circumstances) for their actions. Yet in the case of trafficked women, it is the prostitutes who have been consistently punished by Israel's law-enforcement agencies - as illegal aliens - by being arrested, detained for weeks, and deported, while the owners of brothels have gotten off scot-free.
Another reason for the lack of vigor in attacking the problem is that Israeli officials, to this day, seem somewhat ambivalent.
Probably made it easier to turn a blind eye to the egregious violations of human rights often entailed in the sex trafficking business. And typically, perhaps, it took an outside party to rub Israel's nose in this problem.
That service was provided last May by Amnesty International, which issued a blistering 23-page report on trafficking in women in Israel that slammed the government for "[failing] to take adequate measures to prevent, investigate, prosecute and punish human rights abuses against trafficked women" from the former Soviet Union. The report included a list of specific recommendations, among them: making slavery and trafficking unlawful.
"Just two months ago, we had a hard time getting the police interested in even hearing Victoria's testimony," reports the Hotline's Rozen. "They said it would be her word against that of her pimps, and they couldn't build a case on that. It was only after I had testified before the Knesset inquiry commission that the police called back to say they would like to see her. They were shamed into it. And we should all be ashamed that things like this exist in our 'enlightened,' democratic society and we still prefer to turn the other way."