JDL Warns Jewish Youths at Brooklyn College Will Fight Back if Attacked

Five members of the Jewish Defense League, three of them students at Brooklyn College, were scheduled to meet with college president John W. Kneller this afternoon to demand an end to "racism on the campus," Yossi Templeton a JDL student activist, told a JDL rally in front of the Gershwin Theatre of the college. The meeting, demanded by the JDL, followed yesterday’s melee between several hundred black and Jewish students which erupted in the Student Union Building and spilled out into the streets, following a speech on the campus quadrangle by Rabbi Meir Kahane, national chairman of the JDL, on the plight of Soviet Jewry. Following the speech, Rabbi Kahane and his followers marched to the canteen in the basement of the Student Union building and into a room usually occupied by black students where, according to JDL’ers, they were attacked by the black students. The black students claimed JDL had provoked them. Speaking to 500 JDL members and sympathizers, Templeton castigated Kneller and the college administration for "giving in to groups who they were afraid would wreck the school if their demands were not met" while ignoring Jewish students who he said, would only present Kneller with petitions which he could throw into a wastebasket and ignore. To the cheers of his audience, Templeton declared that Kneller is going to learn that "the goody-goodies (Jewish students) are now baddy-baddies who can wreck the school with the best of them."

In his short but fiery speech, delivered shortly before the scheduled meeting with Kneller, Templeton stated: "If a Jew wants to sit in the basement area of the Student Union building, he is going to sit, If people attack Jews, we will break their heads. Kneller, if you are not capable of keeping order, we will keep order and you can leave." The crowd greeted the end of the speech with cries of "Never again! Never again! Never again!" and the singing of Hebrew songs before dispersing to return to JDL headquarters. Earlier in the day, a temporary injunction, requested by Brooklyn College, was granted barring Rabbi Kahane and JDL non-student members from the college campus. JDL has an on-campus chapter. The injunction was viewed as a blunder by some faculty members who said singling out Rabbi Kahane and the JDL when other individuals and groups, some of them black, have entered and disrupted the campus in the past, would only play into the hands of the JDL. They believed the injunction, which the administration made public by issuing mimeographed statements to the students, would garner support for Rabbi Kahane and the JDL. A JDL member, commenting on the injunction, called it "totally discriminatory." Rabbi Kahane made no effort to appear at the college as he had promised to do yesterday. He was reported to be out of town.