NASTINESS CONTINUES

As more Haredim desecrate the Torah/Bible by harrassing a woman on an Egged bus:

The controversy over the exclusion of women in Israel resurfaced on Thursday when Dolev Karazi, a young woman who boarded an Egged bus in Ramat Gan, claimed that ultra-Orthodox men told her to sit at the back of the bus and proceeded to curse and spit at her.

Karazi said she was considering filing a criminal complaint against those behind the assault. In a conversation about the incident with Israel Hayom, she said that she got on the 319 bus after a day at college to head home to Nes Ziona. She sat in one of the front rows near the driver and during the course of the ride, several ultra-Orthodox men boarded the bus as well. According to Karazi, at one of the stops an elderly haredi man got on the bus, noticed her and demanded that the driver force her to move to the back of the bus.

"I was reading a newspaper and the man, a very old man with white hair, began ordering me to go to the back," Karazi said. "He said that according to the Halacha [Jewish law] women must sit at the back and called me a 'shiksa' [a derogatory term for non-Jewish women], 'holera' [literally 'cholera,' or vile] and 'dirty.'"

Karazi updated her Facebook page as the incident unfolded. "An old haredi man ordered me to move to the back," she wrote. "When I replied that I wasn't interested in doing that, I was shouted, cursed and spat at. I said to myself 'dear God, it's Israel in 2012, is this what you meant in your Torah?'"

Which they obviously didn't even bother to provide any verses from to back up their horrific attitudes. She should file criminal complaints against them, if that's what it takes to send a message, and the driver should be scowled upon for being such a wimp.

According to a report by the Israel Religious Action Center released in late Dec. 2011, exclusion of women from the public sphere was dramatically on the rise in Israel during that month. The report cited a 66 percent increase in reported incidents in which women were excluded or discriminated against, where most of the incidents occurred in places such as buses, cemeteries and medical centers.

In the same month, a ministerial committee on the status of women, headed by Culture and Sport Minister Limor Livnat (Likud), held deliberations to discuss the marked increase in the exclusion of women. The committee voted to create an inter-ministerial panel that would submit recommendations for combating the phenomenon.

They've still got a lot of work to do.