After the admirable cohesion displayed in Virginia, it’s disappointing to follow up with a much less tolerant account of interfaith relations in Tel Aviv.

As MondoWeiss wryly observes, the actions below are more fitted to Mississippi in the early 1960s than a contemporary Mediterranean city:

The youth department of the Petah Tikva municipality set up today a special team to assist young girls in the habit of mingling with men from minorities | Einav Yossef-Zada, Ynet 14.09.09

A special team in the youth department of the Petah Tikva municipality will locate [Jewish – DR] girls in the habit of meeting with men from minorities and will assist them. The decision comes after a relationship was discovered between a girl from the city and minority men from Jaljulya who murdered Arik Karp last month on a Tel Aviv beach.

“The problem of minority men is well-known,” said the chief of the youth department, Moshe Spektor. “Our attempts to deal with this problem are real and sincere. The municipality is making an effort to examine the matter in cooperation with the police.” [Source]

For “ethnic” read “Arab” and/or “Palestinian.”

The girl in question recently issued a statement admonishing fellow women to:

Stop hanging out with Arabs. Don’t get in trouble, take care [...] and be careful. Don’t drink alcohol. I hope they never have to experience something that terrible. They should avoid going out with Arabs. [Source]

That she felt the need to reiterate the caution against Arabs and not alcohol is interesting: somehow, the brutal beating of a family man strolling on the beach with his family is linked more to the ethnicity of the company, rather than that she was pretty sloshed.

The sanctioning of ideologies and actions predicated on what are essentially racist grounds is bile-inducing.

More to the point, it gnaws away at any chance of cohesion, dialogue, integration and, ultimately, peace in the region.