Posted on 11/18/2005 3:43:04 PM PST by SmithL
A deafening silence overcame the Jewish community this month after Jewish Defense League member Earl Krugel was murdered in an Arizona prison.
The 62-year old Navy veteran and former dental technician — three days into a 20-year federal sentence — was exercising when another inmate came up behind him and hit him over the head with a concrete block, killing him instantly.
Why a loose cement block was just hanging around the exercise yard is still unknown. Authorities have been fairly tightlipped so far, but the investigation has reportedly focused on a white supremacist inmate.
Despite all the questions surrounding the case, not one Jewish group other than the JDL has called for an investigation. And they reacted in exactly the same manner after former JDL chairman Irv Rubin’s alleged suicide.
The truth is the American Jewish community has long been wary of associating itself with the JDL, which it sees as an obstacle to its own comfortable existence as non-threatening Jews. While Jews have shown concern in the past over the fate of Jewish prisoners housed with neo-Nazis and such, when it comes to the JDL, it seems that some Jewish lives are deemed more important than others.
But perhaps the JDL’s reputation as hardcore extremists is off the mark. Richard Rosenthal was a New York police officer who went undercover to investigate the JDL in 1970 and he wrote a book about the experience, “Rookie Cop.” The picture Rosenthal paints of the JDL hardly demonstrates the ruthless and criminally skilled organization so often portrayed by its opponents. If anything, JDL members were beset by mishaps, petty infighting and a lack of experience. Such internecine squabbling continues today with a split within the JDL that shows no sign of letting up, even after Krugel’s death.
Beyond all the accusations of extremism, it appears the JDL’s real crime has always been standing up unequivocally for the Jewish people. They are Jews who refuse to be victims. They believe in armed self-defense as the best means of combating anti-Semitism. For this they are shunned by the mainstream Jewish community to this day.
Indeed, there is such a strong prejudice among Jews against displays of strength that those who stray from the party line are immediately ostracized. This is why if one dares mention the JDL in Jewish company, they are sure to be met with either immediate dismissal or a barrage of animosity.
The Anti-Defamation League has been particularly strident in its denunciation of the JDL, going so far as to commend the FBI for arresting Irv Rubin. From the ADL Web site: “For more than a quarter of a century, [the] ADL has been monitoring the contemptible activities of the JDL and its leadership.”
Rabbi Myra Soifer of Temple Sinai synagogue in Reno (where the JDL recently held a conference) told the Reno Gazette-Journal: “There is nothing about the JDL I think as acceptable … I think, in the end, they are harmful to Jews and Jewish survival.”
Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, said of the JDL: “They’re extremists. They really have been marginalized. None of the credible [Jewish] groups would have anything to do with these people.”
Some have simply written off Rubin and Krugel’s deaths as the deserved end to lives of controversy. But the point isn’t whether Krugel and Rubin were the “terrorists” they’ve been labeled, but rather that prominent Jews in federal custody have a curious habit of dying under mysterious circumstances. In a time when liberal organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International devote an inordinate amount of energy to standing up for the rights of Islamic terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, one would think that Jewish “extremists” would garner as much concern. But the overriding attitude has been one of silence, dismissal and even contempt.
If there’s anything the JDL can teach the Jewish community, it’s the principle that Jews must stand up for other Jews. Unfortunately, this has not been the case with Irv Rubin and Earl Krugel, whose deaths are being largely disregarded because of their unpopular politics.
Perhaps it’s time to right that wrong.
Cinnamon Stillwell Ping
FReepMail me if you want on, or off this low-volume Ping list.
I usually like Cinnamon's essays, but this one is very weak, bordering on dishonesty. The JDL is shunned because they planned and committed illegal acts. This essay almost completely elides over this central fact about the JDL. We are by definition a nation of laws, with all to be treated equally under the law. Anyone who puts their racial or ethnic solidarity above the law deserves prosecution and derision. That goes for Jews just the same as anyone else. Try again, Cinnamon!
I'm still waiting for the authorities to release the name of the man who killed Krugel.
it’s the principle that Republicans must stand up for other Republicans.
"Jews must stand by Jews — including the marginalized JDL"
No we don't. Would Stilwell have opposed David Ben Gurion and stood by the Stern Gang and the Irgun? Make a choice, one or the other.
This is a very quiet thread. That says a lot right there.
..................
Did we read the same article? The one I read said nothing like that. You might consider a course in reading comprehension.
I haven't seen you post much. Is your screename, DerAngriff, meant to honor the German newspaper of the same name?
Der Angriff, huh?
"„Der Angriff“, the NSDAP party organ published by Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, is banned on 4 February 1931 by Berlin’s police superintendent Albert Grzesinski. Up to that time the organ had caused a furore with anti-Semitic slogans and shibboleths hostile to the republic. The Jewish assistant police superintendent of Berlin, Bernhard Weiß, was a also central target of Goebbel’s attacks."
Especially interesting since you're posting articles like "The New White Flight"
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1525681/posts?page=1#1
Terrorists are terrorists...End of story. The JDL plot terrorist actions, and therefore, they are terrorists, and deserving of the same fate as all terrorists.
Of course it is quiet. If you speak out against jews, it makes you an anti semite. No one wants to be that, it is worse than being a racist.
No, the question the article raises is whether Jewish groups should press for an investigation of the murder. That's not support of a terrorist or a terrorist organization. Clearly it's your feeling that jailhouse justice is OK.
Just a coincidence, I'm sure.
"Of course it is quiet. If you speak out against jews, it makes you an anti semite. No one wants to be that, it is worse than being a racist."
Thou doth protesteth too much.
excerpt from Deprogram Program, Sha'i Ben Tekoa, July 3, 2005
{I also have followed the Kahane movement almost from day one. I don’t need
the GSS to explain what I saw. In fact, the first time Rabbi Kahane came to public notice
in the newspapers anywhere was in the spring of 1968 when he and his JDL Jewish
Defense League boys appeared on the campus of Columbia University in New York
City. At that point in time, the number one story for weeks in America was the scene at
Columbia where students had occupied buildings in revolt against the Viet Nam war. It
was a media circus for about six weeks during which one politician after another, one
attention-seeker after another, showed up on the campus to express his support or
opposition, to get his face on TV that night, and when Rabbi Kahane was interviewed by the media on camera, yours truly by sheer happenstance was standing about four feet
away.
He was an unknown: just this guy, but surrounded by young followers who were
angry and menacing. As far as I could figure out, this Jewish Defense League, as they
called themselves, were boys from central Brooklyn ever increasingly menaced by the
metastasizing spread of black violence in their community with its dreadful street crime
and muggings of frightened white people, particularly little Jewish children; for the
“message” in their body language radiating in the street there was, more or less, “Don’t
mess with us: we are tough Jews who fight back, so watch out.”
And I found the behavior so peculiar because it was so out of place. This wasn’t
central Brooklyn. Alternately they seemed to be living in a reality in which they saw
themselves as threatened Jews in the streets of, say, Munich in 1935.
I wanted to say, “Hey guys, chill out. This is the Upper West Side. It’s not 1935
but 1968, and Jews are not being physically endangered here.” I thought that if they want
to fight violent antisemites, they should move to Israel and join the IDF.
Anyway, Rabbi Kahane did, in fact, within a few years do that, move to Israel,
around the time a bomb planted in midtown Manhattan in a Jewish impresario’s office
blew up and murdered a middle-aged Jewish woman, the impresario’s secretary. The man
was Sol Hurok who used to bring over from the Soviet Union performing artists to
perform in Carnegie Hall and such places. But since the USSR was so rotten to Jews at
the time, wouldn’t let them out, someone objected so vigorously to these cultural
exchange programs and left a bomb.
It has not been proven that the Kahane group was behind it.}
Funny, isn't it, how many people who think Randy Weaver, who was set up by an FBI informant, was innocent, and speak out against the use of FBI informants, referring to that case.
Meanwhile Earl Krugel, who was set up by an FBI informant, is guilty.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.