Israel’s government isn’t confirming it just yet, but published reports in the country’s press indicate that the nation’s minister of communications and a top orthodox rabbi met last week and that the rabbi demanded the minister get even tougher on cell phone porn.
United Torah Judaism leader Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv and Minister Ehud Olmert – who is also Israel’s minister of industry and trade – met September 27 behind closed doors, a month after the communications ministry began moving aggressively against cell phone porn, according to the daily newspaper Haaretz. That move, the paper said, included disclosure that the ministry had warned cell phone companies they faced heavy fines for breaching laws over phone sex services.
“The concern of the rabbis over these services is not unfounded. The mobile phone companies report that the services are gaining considerable traffic in areas where ultra-Orthodox populations are concentrated,” Haaretz said October 8. “The phone-sex services on mobile phones have a substantial advantage over those via land lines. The client can be on his own with the mobile phone at a private spot and is not required to conduct the call in the presence of family members, fellow members of a yeshiva or workmates.”
Orthodox factions have been successful in getting the government to pass restrictive phone sex service laws in Israel, the paper said, including a requirement for mobile phone operators to confine such services to special prefixes and verifying those using the services were 18 years old or more. Olmert is said to have pressed heavily to make sure the law was enforced “in every tiny detail” on the cell phone companies, the paper added, despite the companies not being the phone sex service providers.
It’s the third-generation cell phones that have Elyashiv and fellow orthodox rabbis alarmed, with reports from places like southeast Asia that the third-generation units have opened a “wealth of opportunities” involving cell phone porn, which Haaretz said accounts for about a third of the added 3G cell phone services revenues.
“The problem is that in 3G mobile phones the phone sex services are likely to become more sophisticated: in contrast with the erotic conversations for which demand is relatively small, alert entrepreneurs will be able to provide pictures and video clips for payment,” the paper said. “3G devices, some of which are already on the market from Pele-Phone and Cellcom, offer high quality color screens, MP3 format sound, a quick transformer, an expanded memory and broadband access for rapid download of video clips from the net. 3G also enables live broadcast of films as they are being shot.”
So far, two Israeli companies who have launched 3G services. Pele-Phone and Cellcom have said they don’t intend to provide 3G porn, and a third, incoming startup Partner, has said they have no intention of providing such services when they launch at the end of the year, Haaretz said.
