Man jailed for pretending to be Jewish and having sex

There's an Al-Jazeera story today on an Israeli Arab man who has been convicted of rape for having otherwise consensual sex with a woman who he told he was Jewish.

Sabbar Kashur was sentenced on Monday after being convicted of "rape by deception".

Prosecutors acknowledged that the sex was consensual, but accused him of misrepresenting himself.

[T]he Kashur case appears to be the first time a person's race has been used as the determining factor.

"In this case, the ruling seems to say that if a 'reasonable' Jewish woman knew a man was an Arab, then she would not make love to him," Abeer Baker, an attorney with Adalah, an organisation that advocates for Arab rights in Israel, said.

A poll conducted in 2007 by Israel's Geocartography Institute found that more than 50 per cent of Israeli Jews thought marrying an Arab was "equal to national treason". Jews are legally forbidden to intermarry in Israel.

Here's what the Guardian is saying:

Gideon Levy, a liberal Israeli commentator, was quoted as saying: "I would like to raise only one question with the judge. What if this guy had been a Jew who pretended to be a Muslim and had sex with a Muslim woman?

"Would he have been convicted of rape? The answer is: of course not."