Aftermath Of Violence
Fear And Comfort
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The shooting of five
people, three of them
small children, at
a Jewish center in
Los Angeles set off a
chain reaction of
concern around
Detroit and around
the nation. Here is a
sampling of responses
and actions.
Contending With Terror
.
Jewish leaders say "lone wolf" attacks are is hard to prevent.
DANIELKURTZMAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
L
ast week's shooting rampage
at a Jewish community cen-
ter in Los Angeles struck an
all-too-familiar chord of fear
in the Jewish psyche.
The fear comes not only because
this was the latest in a string of recent
violent anti-Semitic attacks across the
country, but because it was carried out
by a lone extremist intent on sending
a message — an unmistakable echo of
the kinds of terrorist attacks Israelis
have long suffered.
In taking a page from the book of
Mideast terrorism — and by following
the example of the Oklahoma City
bombing — right-wing extremists in
America have apparently learned that
it does not take a mass movement ro
carry out their agenda, just one well-
armed individual.
8/20
1999
6 Detroit Jewish News
"This incident was not just a hate
crime. It was a terrorist attack," said
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate
dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
in Los Angeles.
Taken with other recent anti-Semitic
attacks and threats, the Los Angeles
assault that wounded five people at the
community center, including three
children under 10, and took the life of
a Filipino postal worker nearby, has cre-
ated a climate of fear among Jews
unseen in this decade.
This summer alone, the torching of
three synagogues in Sacramento, the
discovery of a "hit list" of Jewish com-
munity leaders in northern California,
the shooting spree in an Orthodox
neighborhood in Chicago, last week's
attack - on a Jewish Community Center
in Granada Hills, Calif., and a series
of other incidents have threatened the
Jewish community.
The image of children linking hands
as they were led away from the site of
last week's shooting jarred the entire
nation, especially after the suspected
gunman's declaration, upon turning
himself in, that he wanted to send "a
wake-up call to America to kill Jews."
Despite the frequency and fervor of
the recent attacks, federal and state
investigators and experts who monitor
hate activity maintain there is no evi-
dence of an organized effort by white
supremacists or other right-wing
groups to target the Jewish communi-
ty or other minorities.
Nor is there evidence of an upsurge
in the number of people affiliated with
those groups, although a growing
number of self-proclaimed hate groups
have used the Internet to announce
their presence and expand their reach.
Instead, some experts fear a rise in
so-called "leaderless resistance" has
spawned a wave of independent,
"copycat" attacks.
"There seem to be a series of lone
wolves acting on the basis of ideology
that's put out by hate groups all over
this country," said Mark Potok, an
analyst with the Southern Poverty Law
Center, a Montgomery, Ala.-based
organization that tracks hate groups.
"It looks almost like a series of
copycat crimes as much as the begin-
•
ning of a revolution."
Like other groups that monitor
hate activity, the center has received
numerous threats in recent weeks from
extremists, according to Potok.
One anonymous letter sent in the
wake of the deadly shooting spree car- \
tied out in Illinois and Indiana by
Benjamin Nathaniel Smith over the
July 4 weekend called Smith "a martyr
to the cause" of creating an "interna-
tional Aryan commonwealth.
"He isn't even the tip of the iceberg,"
the letter continued. "He's just a grain
of sand in a worldwide beachhead. Us