Jewish Defense Organization
By the mid-1980s, Levy had left the Jewish Defense League to form the Jewish Defense Organization. After a bomb at the California offices American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee killed its West Coast director, Alex Odeh, both the Jewish Defense League and the Jewish Defense Organization came under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation Two weeks earlier, according to the New York Times, The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's New York office appeared on a list entitled "Enemies of the Jewish People" handed out in Washington, DC by Levy. Levy was quoted in a UPI report denying responsibility for the murder: "We had no hand in this, but this man deserved what he got." Asked about the attacks by the New York Times, Levy said "We aren't claiming credit, but it couldn't happen to better people, more deserving people. They're getting a taste of their own medicine."
Levy was charged with four counts of attempted murder and other charges after he opened fire on late JDL leader Irv Rubin in 1989, hitting an innocent bystander. Rubin was attempting to serve a subpoena on Levy. Levy was acquitted of all charges except one count of felony assault with a deadly weapon, for which he served 18 months of a 4½ year sentence. Levy pleaded guilty in 2000 to unrelated charges that he assaulted a 12 year-old boy in New York State.
Levy collects information on neo-Nazis, the KKK and Arab organizations. A 1989 Village Voice article on Jewish militants reported:
His 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.
Read more about this topic: Mordechai Levy
Famous quotes containing the words jewish, defense and/or organization:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“He said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause,—a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. When the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.”
—Henry George (1839–1897)