Editorial Bear

She is a 26-year-old Jewish Israeli. Her name is Jasmine Avissar. He is a 27-year-old Palestinian Muslim, Osama Zaatar. Jasmine and Osama's is a love story, and it tells you so much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Full story here.

This is a very sad story - I have to admit, I emphasis a lot.

When marrying somebody from another country, the challenges you face as newlyweds are startlingly different from the ones normal people deal with.

While most couples were dealing with paying rent and maybe buying a house, Tina and I had to deal with a more fundamental problem - which country would we live in? Which country would have us?

Most newlyweds lay out their hard earned cash for furniture and carpets... Tina and I found ours was filtered off into the pockets of unscrupulous immigration lawyers and handed over to American and British government departments.

To get Tina's permission to live in the UK cost us over £1,000 in all.

To finally get my green card cost us thousands of dollars.

And if the financial cost wasn't bad enough, Tina and I lost years. We were married in 2003 and we won't finally be able to start our lives until at least December of 2007.

But maybe that indicates how thousands of miles and the meddling of bureaucratic governments can't come between people who care about each other.

Apparently the anti 'politically correct' are up in arms about this. Now normally, I'm the first to campaign against this sort of thing - I'm certainly against signs in Spanish being put up all over New York.

But the fact is, a large number of the Spanish speaking immigrants to America are illegal. To pander to their needs by supplying signs in their native language is ridiculous. REAL immigrants (like myself) have to prove a working knowledge of English (I just scraped through.) However, like immigration and even criminal laws, this is another American law that illegal immigrants seem to think doesn't apply to them.

It's a completely different story in England.

We're part of the European Union. Polish, Dutch, Spanish... Whatever EU nation you're from, you have FULL rights to live and work in England. Britain is no longer a truly sovriegn nation. We're part of something bigger - Europe.

If the Polish immigrants number sufficently to make Polish signs a requirement - they should be erected. It's NO DIFFERENT to there being signs in English all across France, to cater to the growing number of Brits who've had enough of England and decided to head abroad.