Monday - June 19, 2006

Sleepless In Jericho

There are so many things wrong with this incident that I have been unable to comment on it for the last week.  How could this little girl dupe her parents into getting her a passport? Whatever possessed her to take money from a stranger in a war zone, purchase a plane ticket and go to meet him? She is only 16, which is the age of consent in Michigan and he is either 20 or 25, depending on which news source you read. Nobody is sure.

Fortunately, the girl was tracked down by US authorities in Jordan and shipped home. Now, poor Abdullah is crying himself to sleep because his “soulmate” didn’t appear. This AP report paints him as a jilted lover, not a sexual predator. Maybe. Regardless, he had no business enticing Katherine to run away and come help him raise goats for the rest of her life.

If I were Katherine’s father, I’m afraid there would be some stern punishment in store for her and I ain’t talking about taking her iPod away. By the time I got through with her, I’d probably have worn out three or four belts and the young girl wouldn’t be able to sit down for a month. Cruel? No, sometimes when a child acts like their brains are up their butt you need to communicate directly with the problem.

As for this MySpace.com crap, shut ‘em down. These chat rooms and meeting web sites have caused more trouble than they are worth. They have become nothing less than on-line crackhouses. Until we can figure out a way to protect minors completely on-line somebody needs to provide strict monitoring of these web sites. And somebody needs to give a stern lecture to Katherine’s parents about actually being parents instead of witless jerks. Period.

Palestinian Anguishes Over MySpace Romance
_{June 19, 2006, 11:22 AM EDT}

JERICHO, West Bank (AP)—The Palestinian man who befriended a 16-year-old Michigan girl through the MySpace.com Web site and invited her to join him in Jericho said he is heartbroken by U.S. authorities’ decision to send her back home.

Abdullah Jimzawi, 20, told The Associated Press that his love for Katherine Lester, of Gilford, Mich., was pure and they planned to marry. The music buff, who spends at least 10 hours a day on the Internet, decried attempts to portray him as an Internet predator.

“We love the same things, the same songs and we have similar dreams. I fell in love with her because she is innocent and goodhearted. We found ourselves as soul mates,” he told the AP on Sunday at his family’s comfortable house.

Jericho, a town of 17,000, is largely immune from the violence and mayhem plaguing the rest of the West Bank. Jimzawi, a high school dropout with close-cropped hair, a two-day beard and large, dark eyes, said Katherine was willing to convert to Islam and that the pair remain in close contact, speaking to each other at least five hours a day via Internet phone calls.

MySpace.com is a social networking Web site whose enormous popularity with teenagers has raised concerns among U.S. authorities, with scattered accounts of sexual predators targeting minors they meet on the site. Jimzawi works in his father’s business delivering goods to minimarkets and has never gotten into trouble.

Earlier this month, Katherine boarded a flight to Israel after slipping out of her mother’s house. At a stopover in Amman, Jordan, U.S. authorities seized her passport and sent her back home.

Had Katherine made it to Jericho, Jimzawi said, she would have slept in his sister’s bedroom, not his. He said he would have walked with her through the tree-lined streets of Jericho, and his family would have celebrated her 17th birthday together on June 21. “When I realized she wasn’t coming I felt my whole world collapse,” he said. “My tears didn’t stop and I couldn’t sleep for three days.”

Posted by The Skipper     on 06/19/2006 at 12:33 PM   
Filed Under: • Love-Marriage • Odd-Strange • Paleswine •  
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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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