Jewish Defense Organization

The Jewish Defense Organization is a militant Jewish organization in the United States.It is right-wing in its stance on Israeli defense and foreign policy issues. Its positions on issues of Jewish concern in the United States are more nuanced, and it has criticized both right-wing and left-wing manifestations of what it sees as anti-Semitism and racism with equal rhetorical fervor. The JDO takes no stance on most domestic U.S. issues unless they relate directly to the fight against anti-Semitism. One exception is gun control, which the group strongly opposes. It has worked with both left-wing and right-wing Jews on problems involving bigotry.

After some apparent problems with its previous websites, the JDO currently maintains www.jewishdefense.org.

JDO's fight against anti-Semites

The JDO's security team has occasionally patrolled Jewish neighborhoods in the aftermath of anti-Semitic incidents, and has urged other Jewish groups to do likewise. JDO members attempted to help provide security in Crown Heights during the 1991 Crown Heights Riot. The group has engaged in fights against neo-Nazis and white power skinheads in Las Vegas and other cities. It has also demonstrated, although without incident, against Louis Farrakhan in New York City. The JDO often gives its demonstrations pseudo-military names such as "Operation Klan Kicker" or "Operation Nazi Kicker"

In 2004, the JDO gained much media attention after holding rallies at an apartment house on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where a neo-Nazi activist and aggressive Holocaust denier ran his operation. In 1989, it attracted major attention in the music and entertainment press by launching a boycott of the rap group Public Enemy in response to anti-Semitic remarks by Professor Griff, its self-styled Minister of Information. As a result of the media controversy, Griff was kicked out of the band, and Public Enemy apologized for his remarks.

The JDO has adopted a tactic of pressuring hotels and other public facilities to cancel meetings sponsored by anti-Semites such as David Duke. In early 2004, the JDO waged a phone-in campaign to pressure a Florida company to remove billboard messages sponsored by the National Alliance, an organization widely regarded as neo-Nazi. In September 2006 Columbia University scrapped plans for an address by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because of security and logistical problems. The move came as the JDO expressed outrage that the hard-line leader had been invited to speak.

In late 2006 the JDO initiated Operation Screwball, aimed at the total destruction of the small Haredi Jewish group Neturei Karta. The Neturei Karta opposes Zionism and calls for a peaceful dismantling of the State of Israel, in the belief that Jews are forbidden to have their own state until the coming of the Messiah. On Sunday January 7, 2007 several hundred JDO members and their local supporters taunted Neturei Karta members for attending a Holocaust denial conference in Iran. The protesters shouted "Nazi traitors! Go back to Iran! You are killing Jews!" at members of Neturei Karta in the Rockland County community of Monsey. The protestors, mostly members of the Jewish Defense Organization, brandished bullhorns and waved signs, as did members of Neturei Karta. On January 14, 2007 some 200 JDO members and sympathizers gathered outside a Brooklyn hotel to protest the presence of Moshe Aryeh Friedman, an anti-Israel rabbi who spoke at a Holocaust-denial conference in Iran.

In June 2007, New York City Police investigated the JDO after it plastered fliers over Brooklyn Councilman Charles Barron's office, calling him an anti-Semite for voting for a defeated proposal to name a street after controversial black nationalist activist Sonny Carson.

Mordechai Levy

Main article: Mordechai Levy

MMordechai"Levy is the founder and current leader of the JDO. He spends much of his time promoting the JDO's Camp Jabotinsky, which provides self-defense and gun training for young Jews at a facility in the Catskills. Levy is an avid follower of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, after whom the camp is named, and often repeats Jabotinsky's motto: "Better to know how to shoot and not need to, than to need to and not know how."

Levy's research on hate groups

Levy, helped by JDO supporters, collects information on neo-Nazis, the KKK and Arab terrorist support networks. Over the years he has developed a reputation among journalists and with law enforcement for his ability to ferret out obscure information. A 1989 Village Voice article on Jewish militants reported:

His [Levy's] uncanny ability to track down KKK members and neo-Nazis astounded federal officials. "Levy does appear to possess membership lists of neo-Nazi groups and KKK members across the U.S.," a confidential FBI memorandum reported.

After the massacre of five left-wing anti-Klan demonstrators by Klansmen and neo-Nazis in Greensboro, N.C. in 1979 (an incident known as the Greensboro massacre), Levy came forward with information to help the victims in their attempt to win justice, although he did not agree with their Marxist politics. Paul Bermanzohn, one of the survivors of the neo-Nazi attack, recalled the efforts to establish in court that the FBI had possessed advance knowledge of the plot:

Most incriminating of all was an affidavit from Mordechai Levy of the Jewish Defense Organization. When Levy got his FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act, he found an entry dated November 2, 1979, the day before the massacre. In it, the FBI reported that Levy told one of their agents, "I have information that Harold Covington of the National Socialist Party of America is up to heavy illegal activity. Covington has been training in the Jefferson County area with illegal weapons. He and his group have plans to attack and possibly kill people at an anti-Klan gathering this week in North Carolina."

Campaigns

In 1989, Levy traveled to Louisiana in an attempt to encourage a community effort to stop David Duke, the former Klan leader, from being elected to the state legislature. When Duke was elected, Jewish community leaders, who had remained silent in the face of the threat, at first tried to blame it on a backlash from Levy's tiny meeting (which in fact had received considerable television coverage). But as Duke's support continued to grow, the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans joined with civil rights activists and mainstream politicians in November 1989 to found the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, which started doing on its own initiative much of what Levy had called for. As a result in large part of the coalition's efforts, Duke was defeated in his back-to-back attempts to win election as governor and U.S. senator in the early 1990s.

From 1980 to 1984, Levy infiltrated the Lyndon LaRouche organization on a part-time basis as a security consultant. He provided valuable information to journalists and law enforcement that helped to eventually bring about the criminal convictions of LaRouche and several of his followers. He also ran a one-man disinformation campaign that convinced at least some of LaRouche's security staffers of vast plots against their leader. The LaRouchians ruefully concluded in 1984, after Levy had gone public against them, that he had been an "agent of chaos" (a designation taken, appropriately, from the title of Norman Spinrad's classic science fiction novel about an anarchist conspiracy).

In April 2007, the JDO launched a campaign to get Prof. Norman Finkelstein fired from De Paul University, referring to him as a "long time Marxist-Communist hater of Israel" and "That piece of human exxrement."