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JDL Bombing Suspect Not
The Outcast Being Portrayed
From FW
12-14-1

The Southern California JDL head isn't the outcast the Jewish community is now trying to portray him as. In fact, he was selected to be the presenter to the former Prime Minister of Canada of an honorary Degree from Tel Aviv University at a Synagogue in the most exclusive neighbourhood of Montreal in 1994.
 
He also was in Montreal just last month at Concordia University trying to stop a student protest against the treatment of Palestinians by Isreal.
 
He was supposed to speak tonight or tomorrow in Montreal but this had to be cancelled by his arrest in L.A..
 
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Roots Of A Militant Lie In Montreal
By Ingrid Peritz
The Globe and Mail.com
12-13-1
 
MONTREAL - Irv Rubin became a radical in California, but the path that led him there began 56 years ago in Montreal.
 
Mr. Rubin, arrested yesterday in Los Angeles for an alleged bomb plot against a mosque, has often said that the seeds for his militant beliefs were planted on the streets of Montreal, where he experienced his first taste of anti-Semitism.
 
Mr. Rubin became chairman of the Jewish Defense League but never let his sights stray far from his hometown -- even though his confrontational creed did not find a receptive audience there.
 
He has repeatedly declared plans to open Jewish Defense League chapters in Montreal, only to be given the cold shoulder.
 
"The Jewish community of Montreal completely rejects hate-inciting groups," David Birnbaum, head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Quebec region, said yesterday. "There's no place for the Jewish Defense League in Quebec. There are sentiments of anti-Semitism around the world, but it's not true that the situation is more aggravated in Quebec."
 
Mr. Rubin left Montreal for southern California with his parents when he was 15. In 1971, he heard a speech by JDL founder Rabbi Meir Kahane, a seminal moment that transformed him.
 
"If you see a Nazi," he recalled Mr. Kahane saying, "don't try to convince him you're a nice guy." Instead, Mr. Kahane told his listeners, "smash him."
 
The moment transformed Mr. Rubin from a self-described "nice Jewish boy who obeyed every law" to a radical linked to violence and arrested more than 40 times. The JDL was set up by Mr. Kahane to mount armed response to anti-Semitism in New York. Its members were linked to bombings, mostly against Soviet targets because of the treatment by the Soviet Union toward its Jews. By 1972, Mr. Rubin, at 26, had become the group's West Coast co-ordinator.
 
His profile in the United States rose as he appeared regularly on the nightly news taking on neo-Nazis and Arab activists. But his efforts to tackle supposed enemies in Quebec were never taken seriously.
 
Despite his brushes with the law, he appears to have had access to mainstream-society events. In 1994, he attended a social function at a synagogue in Westmount to present an honorary degree from Tel Aviv University to former prime minister Brian Mulroney.
 
Along the way he married Shelley, a writer who is active in Jewish causes. They had two children and, in her words, scraped by on contributions from the JDL and Mr. Rubin's occasional part-time work as a jack of all trades.
 
In 1994, he announced plans to set up a vigilante-style group in Montreal to protect Jews from what he described as nationalist francophone Quebeckers. He repeated the intention after the 1995 referendum on sovereignty.
 
In 1999, his plans for a Montreal office went as far as placing classified ads in Canadian newspapers to recruit members. He maintained a JDL presence was warranted in Montreal as an "insurance program" to protect the Jewish community. The plans always made headlines but never bore fruit. Jewish groups said they did not need protection and disassociated themselves from his group.
 
A current Web site attributed to the Montreal chapter of the new Kach movement -- the group that Mr. Kahane founded in 1970 and that is outlawed in Israel -- extols Mr. Rubin as a "great Montrealer" and calls on Montreal Jews to "make a new revolution."
 
The Web site refers to the creation of a new group called the Jewish Defence Force and attributes the new threat to Jews as coming from Islamic and Arab groups, not Quebec nationalists.
 
But Mr. Birnbaum said that to his knowledge, Mr. Rubin's group has no organization in Montreal.
 
 
Copyright © 2001 Globe Interactive,
a division of Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.
 
 
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