THE JEWISH NEWS
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Born
The return of the JDL
and the Jewish underground.
ROBERT I. FRIEDMAN
ews need a crazy image
now," says Victor Van-
cier, the brash, tough-
talking 29-year-old head
of the Jewish Defense
League in New York.
"One reason Nazis
bullied Jews was be-
cause Jews were easy
targets. To put it blunt-
ly, crazy Jews live
longer."
Vancier — a small,
slight, boyish-looking
man who carried a
three-foot-long, black
metal flashlight that he
uses as a truncheon —
says that "craziness" helps Jews in a lot
of ways. "If the Soviets are afraid that
their diplomats in the U.S. will be killed,
that their offices will be blown up, and that
we will take other actions that will disrupt
Soviet-American relations, they'll realize
that they beter off letting the Jews go,"
he recently told me.
Dressed in jeans, a faded flannel shirt,
and a pale blue parka covered with grime,
Vancier said that a crazy JDL would also
liquidate neo-Nazis and American Arabs
who support the PLO, which he calls the
"proponents of the New Holocaust, the
New Genocide." He even talks about silen-
cing a prominent Palestinian-American
professor who is an outspoken supporter
of the PLO. "I think the man is a monster.
And that means anything goes. I believe
the Arabs are the new Nazis, the heirs of
the Third Reich. I don't wish him well to
say the least," he said, breaking into peals
of laughter.
The professor, however, isn't laughing.
Several months ago, his office was ran-
sacked and his apartment building was
broken into by a band of young Jewish
thugs. Vancier says he doesn't know who
was behind the break-ins, but calls them
"Jewish patriots."
Speaking softly, between sips of tea in
a Manhattan coffee shop, Vancier told me
he is in contact with the same Jewish ter-
rorist underground that the FBI says car-
ried out a string of bombings last year that
killed two people, including a prominent
Arab American official. For all his swag-
ger, Vancier won't say who is in the under-
ground or how they might be linked to the
JDL. Nonetheless, he claims to speak on
their behalf. "Gorbachev's proposed sum-
mit with Reagan in the U.S. next summer
will be met with an unprecedented wave
of violence," he says with rising excite-
ment. "If you think the Shiites intebanon
are capable of fantastic acts of suicidal ter-
rorism, the Jewish underground will strike
Mr. Friedman has written for a number of
publications, including the New York Times,
the Los Angeles Times, and the New York
Review of Books and the Village Voice.
N
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14
Friday, July 25, 1986
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS