The BBC this morning reported on a bizarre case in Israel of an Arab man convicted of “rape by deception,” because he’d led the Jewish woman with whom he’d had consensual sex to believe he was Jewish. Ha’aretz has the story here. Plainly it’s a racist verdict, and a bizarre one — but there’s more to the story than Ha’aretz lets on. According to the BBC radio report I heard, Israeli courts have previously convicted a man of “rape by deception”, after he pretended to be a government housing official who offered help getting an apartment in exchange for sex.

This is crazy. You start putting men in jail for rape for lying to women to get into their pants, you’ll run out of prison space within two weeks. What happens if a cad tells a woman he loves her to convince her to sleep with him, but doesn’t really mean it. Is that rape by deception? How do you prove such a thing?