Israeli ex-Prez: A serial sex offender?

It takes courage for a woman to seek justice against her rapist, and it takes a double dose of courage if the alleged rapist happens to be the ex-president of Israel, Moshe Katsav. The accuser is known as ‘A', to protect her identity. She is now a 47-year old mother of three, petite, “smiling and opinionated”, as one reporter describes her.
On the basis of A's testimony, along with that of two other women known as ‘ H' and ‘L', the Attorney General announced that Katzav will be charge with several sexual offenses, including rape.  Readers will no doubt remember it was the specter of these charges that forced Katsav to resign as president, paving the way for Shimon Peres to take over the largely ceremonial post.  A has told police that Katsav raped her twice in 1998-99 when he was the tourism minister and she was his underling. And when Katsav was chosen to be Israel's head of state, he allegedly kept up the same sly and predatory habits, cornering female employees in his presidential residence, police say.
You wonder: how did this man get to be president? His behavior in this disgraceful affair seems to veer from blubbering protests of innocence to scary fits of rage against his women accusers. He leered from some newspaper pages like Joker, the mercurial villain of the Batman saga, while in others he looked like a wronged and pouting little boy.
Katsav's resignation over the scandal was the high watermark in a tide of sleaze and corruption that engulfed Israeli politics.  Ehud Olmert slinks off in disgrace as prime minister because of looming corruption charges. The ex-finance minister was accused of bilking funds from a charity that sent Israeli kids to view the Nazi death camps where their ancestors perished. And in the summer of 2006, a deputy premier stopped on his way to the cabinet room -- where war was to be declared against Hezballah—and forced his tongue into the mouth of a pretty, young female soldier. Nothing like a good war to get the libido going.
Let's hope that the next cabinet, probably led by Likud's Benyamin Netanyahu, will be less scandal prone.
It was a nice touch --probably unintentional-- that the rape charges were brought against the ex-president on International Women's Day.  This will give A, and all the countless women who undergo sexual harassment by their bosses, a small measure of satisfaction.

by Tim McGirk/Jerusalem