Jewish Defense League
Other names: JDL
Type: Jewish religious-political and militant organization in the United States
Founded: 1968
Affiliations: Israel Now (sister organization in Canada) - English Defence League
Headquarters: New York City - Los Angeles - Toronto
Organisation Ideology: Jewish Supremacism/Religious Zionism/Anti-Arab Fundamentalism
Founder: Rabbi Meir Kahane
Leadership: Shelley Rubin (U.S) - Meir Weinstein (Canada)
Online Resources
Official website: None
Account suspended
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190 and 96 followers respectively
Overview
The formation of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) goes back to 1968 when extremist Jewish Rabbi Meir Kahane was serving as the Associate Editor of the Jewish Press - an American weekly newspaper based in Brooklyn, New York. He began receiving a growing number of calls and letters about attacks and crimes committed against Jews and Jewish institutions in the United States and at that point, Kahane took the very first step towards establishing the JDL by publishing an advertisement on the front page of the Jewish Press on May 24, 1968, which read: “We are talking of JEWISH SURVIVAL! Are you willing to stand up for democracy and Jewish survival? Join and support the Jewish Defense Corps.” The name was later changed to Jewish Defense League to avoid being designated as a militant group.
Kahane declared JDL’s mission was to stand firmly against anti-Semitism in the public and private sectors in the U.S. In one of his speeches, he claimed that America's leading Jewish organizations had failed to defend Jews from anti-Semitism, which, in his opinion, was “exploding” across the country.
The first Jewish Defense League rally was held on August 5, 1968, at New York University, with some 15 members chanting, “No Nazis at NYU, Jewish rights are precious too.”
In a 2004 congressional testimony, John S. Pistole, Executive Assistant Director for Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence for the FBI, described the JDL as “a known violent extremist Jewish organization and that 18 officially classified terrorist attacks in the U.S. were committed by Jews, 15 of those by members of the Jewish Defense League, from 1980 through 1985.
In November 1990, JDL’s founder, Kahane, was assassinated by Egyptian-American El Sayyid Nosair in a Manhattan hotel where Kahane was delivering a speech in front of a crowd of mostly Orthodox Jews.
Ties to Extremism
JDL members have carried out hundreds of violent racial attacks, deadly shootings and bombings, and other assaults in the US and Palestine/Israel between the late 1960’s and 2017.
Before his assassination, Kahane was arrested and charged with numerous violent crimes linked to his JDL operations in the United States throughout the 1970s, including bombings, kidnappings, and assassination plots. In addition, he was accused of promoting JDL activities in 1975, were he was sentenced to one year in prison for planning to manufacture bombs, after he was discovered urging JDL members to abduct or murder Soviet diplomats, blow up the Iraqi embassy in Washington D.C, and organize arms smuggling to Israel.
In 1985, a group of JDL members killed the Palestinian-American activist and West Coast Regional Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Alex Odeh, by a bomb in California. In addition, one of their deadliest attacks was in 1994, when a JDL member, Baruch Goldstein gunned down 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in the city of Hebron in the West Bank, in what became known as the Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre. Following the Hebron tragedy, the JDL declared its sympathy for the assailant.
Two JDL members were also charged in 2017 for severely beating a 55-year-old Palestinian-American community college instructor during a demonstration outside of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in Washington D.C, one of whom was from Canada.
JDL members remain active in the US and other countries, including Canada, where it is not banned and works openly, threatening Palestinian-Canadians and their sympathizers, despite the fact that it was designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. in the 1990s, as it openly states that they consider America and the rest of the globe to be virulently anti-Semitic, and believe that only the most extreme means of opposition, including violence, can safeguard Jews.