Jewish Defense League

JDL

12/12/2006

The Jewish Defense League was active for roughly two decades. Shortly after its 1968 founding in New York City, they began harassing Soviet interests for their sale of weaponry to Israel's Islamic enemies and for the USSR's unwillingness to let Russian Jews immigrate into Israel. They also attacked PLO offices for obvious reasons.

The Jewish Defense League began as a vigilante group in New York City, committed to protecting the orthodox Jewish population in Brooklyn from anti-Semitic acts. They were said to have burglarized the Palestine Liberation Organization's UN mission in their first act of aggression. While the JDL was founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, he left the U.S. shortly after the group's formation. In 1971, Kahane emigrated to Israel and founded the Kach party. The assassination of Alex Odeh, director of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, prompted Meir Kahane to officially separate himself from the League

The Jewish Defense League was dealt a significant blow in 1987 upon the conviction of several members. Having personally met one of those who was incarcerated, I can attest that his punishment grossly exceeded his crime. Today, the JDL is not actively engaged in aggressive or criminal actions.

While two former JDL members were arrested in 2001 for their plot to bomb the office of a Lebanese-American from Orange County California, who was a Hezballah supporter, and a mosque in Culver City, California, they were acting independently. Irving Rubin committed suicide in prison while awaiting trial and Earl Krugel pleaded guilty to the plot in 2003. In September 2005, Krugel was sentenced to 20 years in jail for his role in bombings which never occured. Two months later, he was murdered in prison by Muslim militants.

Meir David Kahane was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1932. He received a degree in International Law from New York University, and ordination from the Mir Yeshiva in Brooklyn. He edited the Jewish Press, and served as a rabbi and teacher in New York until the mid-1960s. He also rallied Jewish support for the Vietnam War. His controversial methods met with mixed success and greatly exacerbated the Black-Jewish tension already present in New York City's Islamic population - especially in with regard to the Nation of Isalm.

Kahane's methods were often outside the law, and he spent several years in jail as a result of his actions. He and his family moved to Israel in 1971, where he founded the anti-Islamic Kach party. The party's platform called for the annexation of all conquered territories and the forcible removal of all Palestinian Muslims at war with Israel. The Kach party gained popular support until, prior to the 1988 Knesset elections, the Kach party was banned from running by a Labor-Likud coalition. The ban was based on an amendment added to Israel's Basic Law that disqualified any candidate whose platform included "incitment to racism." Two years later, Kahane was assassinated in New York City by an Egyptian militant, who was acquitted of the crime on a technicality, but later convicted in relation to the World Trade Center bombing - the blind Qur'anic scholar Sheikh Rahman