29/6/97

'Daughter of the Sea' is a tramp

    Ever been to Bat Yam? Did you get out alive? Were you murdered, swindled, robbed, run down, blackmailed, assaulted, kidnapped? 
    If you read this here newspaper regularly, you might have noticed Bat Yam merits mention more often than Haifa or Beersheba, maybe more than New York, London or Paris. I noticed. And I began to wonder if it was my imagination.
    Having nothing better to do (ah, the life of a columnist), I spent a few hours mowing through the newspaper's electronic archives to get a better idea of just what kind of town Bat Yam is. And let me tell you, I think I'd feel safer as an evangelist in Teheran. 
    There's bound to be a proud Bat Yamnik reading this who'll cancel his subscription upon reading this. Or more likely, send me a letter bomb. But hey, I'm not making any of this up: it was all right here in black and white, and newspapers tell it like it is, right?
    This, then, is Bat Yam like it is: since 1989 (that's how far back the electronic archives go), there have been about 1,200 stories mentioning today's spotlight city. Most of the articles were merely passing references to Bat Yam, or of a "pareve" nature -- neither negative nor positive. Many were irrelevant to this research: sports and business items, for instance.
    There were 12 reports of a positive nature: a new factory, a math contest winner, an educational trip to Malaysia, two happy immigrant stories, a lottery winner, a bit of art and theater, and an eggplant recipe.  
    (Bet I get half a dozen calls for the eggplant recipe.)
    The bad and the ugly accounted for more than 300 stories (and I think it was very gracious not to include any items in that list mentioning Aryeh Deri's Bat Yam background).   
    Murder and traffic casualties won first place, with 32 items on each. Smuggling and purse snatching did very poorly, tying for last with one point each. Narcotics (25) and assault (23) made the Final Four, nosing out accidental deaths (22) and robbery (20). Robbery might have done much better, but I arbitrarily separated theft (5) into a separate category. 
    Terrorism was another prominent subject, but I stopped counting after 16 because each incident provoked sustained coverage. 
    You get a pretty grim picture of Bat Yam from the rest of the list (2 to 10 reports for each): rape, arson, prostitution, tax evasion. Bribery and blackmail. Nine scams of various and imaginative descriptions. Two kidnappings, lots of organized crime, sexual assault, illegal assembly and the occasional casino raid. An additional 14 serious crimes defied categorization.
    You have to look past the sheer numbers to get an idea of the panache of Bat Yam's newsmakers. 
    During one narcotics raid, police failed to come up with any drugs, but did find a baby alligator in the closet.  
    One man was arrested for torturing his son; another man beat his mother while she was sitting in her wheelchair. There was a schizophrenic murder (only one), an acid party raid, a bomb plot, child prostitution, and a baby's body found in a garbage dump.
    A woman tried to throw her nine-yer-old daughter over a third-floor railing.
    A burglary ring was smashed: all the suspects were children.
    Police foiled a planned mass suicide by Bat Yam cult members.
    One guy committed self-castration.
    A cemetery cantor was arrested for knocking out the teeth of another cantor during a fistfight: they were brawling over who had the right to conduct services. 
    And the mayor's car was torched. 
    There were seven stories on drownings, two gas explosions, two floods, six fires, and, for goodness sake, an earthquake.
    Poor Bat Yam.
    Homelessness.
    Corruption.
    Riots.
    Pollution.
    Strikes.
    Pornography.
    Racism. 
    A fashion show put on for the JNF evolved into a strip show. 
    A city bus driver lied to two 10-year-old children, saying he was going in their direction. He then abandoned them (in Bat Yam!), saying it was "not my problem" when they cried that they had no money.
    A group of celebrants at a party beat up a policeman and a lawyer. An emergency call was put through to the police station, but they refused to come, saying they didn't want to get involved.
    A rabbi, Ya'acov Ohayon, told a Bat Yam audience that secular Jews are a greater threat to religious Jews than Hitler was.
    I think this is not what Herzl had in mind.