The citizen defense effiort is being organized by Rabbi Yakove Lloyd, founder and president of the "Jewish Defense Group."
Lloyd said the street patrols would include 50 to 200 people of different religious faiths, mainly Jews, carrying shotguns in bags, along with people licensed to own and carry other types of firearms. Others will carry bats, pipes, cell phones and walkie-talkies and patrol the streets daily from 9 p.m. until 3 a.m. except Friday, the Jewish Sabbath.
Now, I am a gun control advocate who was literally mugged by reality (at the end of an automatic pistol). I gather this measure might help clean up a lot of street crime in NYC (it would certainly have prevented my mugging in DC).
But I still find the news quite unsettling, since the JDG, which Lloyd founded in 1985, is inspired by the late messianic Rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded the Jewish Defense League. In January, the league's chairman and a group member were charged with conspiring to blow up a mosque and the office of an Arab-American congressman in California. Both pleaded innocent and are scheduled to go on trial Oct. 1.
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