Rabbi says Jewish group to start patrols of Brooklyn

NEW YORK -- Citizens armed with shotguns will patrol the streets of the heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhoods because of comments a suspected terrorist made about targeting them, a rabbi said.

The patrols, to begin June 16, are in response to comments Abdul Rahman Yasin made during an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" on June 2, said Rabbi Yakove Lloyd, founder and president of the right-wing Jewish Defense Group.

Yasin, who is sought by the FBI in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, said in an interview from a compound in Iraq that he and his accomplices originally targeted heavily Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

They later decided to attack the twin towers because they believed most of their occupants were Jewish, Yasin said. Six people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured in the 1993 bombing.

The largest segment of the population in the Borough Park and southern Flatbush neighborhoods is Hassidic and Orthodox Jews. There are 290 synagogues in the area.

Lloyd said the street patrols would include 50 to 200 people of various 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 will patrol the streets daily from 9 p.m. until 3 a.m. except Friday, the Jewish Sabbath.

"This will be a very effective deterrent against terrorism directed at American Jews and other targets," Lloyd said.

The rabbi criticized the police department for not adequately protecting the neighborhoods and said, "the only people who will view us as vigilantes already look at us that way anyway."

It is illegal to carry an exposed shotgun on city streets, New York Police Department spokeswoman Valerie St. Rose said. She said it was unclear whether carrying one in a bag is illegal.

"We'll monitor the patrols, and if there needs to be police action taken, it will be taken," said St. Rose, who declined to say how many officers routinely patrol the neighborhoods.

Opposition to plan

A community leader from Williamsburg, another heavily Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, said he opposes the armed patrols.

"The Jewish community condemns such a thing. We don't need it. We can't have civilians running around with guns. It's going to look like Beirut here," said Isaac Abraham.

The Jewish Defense Group is "a group of men and women who are proud to be Jews" and are committed to defending, demonstrating and rallying for Jewish causes and against anti-Semitism, according to its Web site.

The JDG, founded by Lloyd in Queens in 1985, says it follows the principles of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League.

In January, JDL chairman Irv Rubin and a group member were charged with conspiring to blow up a mosque and the office of an Arab-American congressman in California. Rubin and his co-defendant, Earl Krugel, pleaded innocent and are scheduled to go on trial Oct. 1.