The Jewish Defense League -- once called a "right-wing terrorist group" by the FBI -- is back.

Members of a resurgent hate group are being accused of violently attacking a Palestinian-American professor in Washington D.C. last weekend and of knocking another man unconscious. 

Videos and photos from a protest outside the annual conference for the American Israel Public Affairs Council on Sunday show a mob of Jewish Defense League members ganging up on 55-year-old Kamal Nayfeh.

Nayfeh can be seen in one video being repeatedly punched, kicked and hit in the face with flagpoles, even after he fell to the ground, until police officers arrive and stop the attack.

“They beat him after they heard he was Palestinian,” Nayfeh’s daughter, Danya, said in a statement Wednesday. “He was not threatening at all, it’s perfectly clear that my father was brutalized simply because of who he is.”

Nayfeh, a father of four from North Carolina who teaches at a community college in Charlotte, was in D.C. to visit Danya, a 25-year-old law student at Georgetown University.

Danya told The Huffington Post she’s participated in protests outside AIPAC conferences for years. She was among several hundred protesters at Sunday’s demonstration organized by IfNotNow, a left-wing Jewish organization opposed to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

Danya said her father and other family members had walked with her to the protest, but weren’t planning on participating. But when a Jewish Defense League protester shouted “something about there being no Palestinians,” Danya said, her father felt compelled to respond.

“I am Palestine,” Danya says her father, a Palestinian-American, calmly told the JDL protester. That’s when the attack started.

The five or so men who attacked Nayfeh, Danya said, were either carrying big flags or wearing black hooded sweatshirts bearing the clearly identifiable JDL logo: a Star of David with a fist. Also on the sweatshirts, she said, were the group’s slogan, “Never again.”

Metropolitan police later arrested two men in the attack. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington D.C., William Miller, told HuffPost that Yosef Steynovitz, of Vaughan, Ontario, was charged with a felony count of assault with significant bodily injury; and Rami Lubranicki of Howell, New Jersey, was charged with a misdemeanor count of simple assault.

“Both are free on personal recognizance pending court hearings,” Miller said, adding that the men were due back in court in April.

The criminal complaint against Lubranicki identifies him as wearing a “black hooded sweatshirt” during the attack. It also notes that he told a police detective he never assaulted Nayfeh, but was just trying to “pull his guys off the victim.”

Lubranicki was described on the right-wing website Politichicks as an “Israeli-born Jewish-American and a proud American patriot,” and the founder of the anti-Muslim group American Bikers United Against Jihad.

Reached for comment, Lubranicki denied being a JDL member and said he couldn’t discuss his case. Daniel Kovler, a lawyer for Steynovitz, also declined to comment on the case.

Nayfeh suffered “cuts and bruises all over his face and body,” according to a statement from the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a Palestinian rights advocacy group working with the Nayfeh family. An ambulance took the professor to George Washington University hospital, where he was treated for his injuries and released.

Danya told HuffPost she hopes the two men arrested are charged with a hate crime. (Miller, of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington D.C., wouldn’t comment on whether hate crime charges would be pursued, saying only that the case is “still under investigation.”)

“Our entire family is shaken by this incident,” Danya said in her statement. “Communities can’t feel safe and secure when the JDL and other hate groups are emboldened by this new hateful atmosphere we’re living in.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/jewish-defense-league-attacks-palestinian...

Ripper!

polite_gandalf wrote on Apr 3^rd, 2017 at 12:28pm:


Objection,  pure speculation.
Objection upheld

They weren't driving an articulated vehicle through a crowded shopping district.

Astonishing to see the excusing and even rejoicing of the brutal attack by the resurfacing terrorist group the Jewish Defense League.

I suppose its ok to bash Muslim's literally now?

Is it possible the reports of this assault were taken out of context and misquoted? 

As a professor you would think he would have more commonsense than to start an argument with a group of Jews in which his racist position is that Israel deserves to be condemned and vilified despite Hamas being a UN-declared terrorist organisation.

John Smith wrote on Apr 3^rd, 2017 at 1:24pm:


Yes ... sounds similar to certain other excuse makers here.

polite_gandalf wrote on Apr 3^rd, 2017 at 12:28pm:



He could have been patched up by an ambo and went home to his family. But I very much doubt he would have suffer any of the above mentioned fates that are regularly doles out by our muslim brethren.

It take a special type of religious scumbag to commit that sort of carnage, these idiots are no worse than a Sydney p1ss head on a Saturday night bender.


So calm your tits ladies it is no worse that a severe flogging and no where even close if it was the other way around.