t\’s not Jets and Sharks, nor Bloods and Crips, but . . .\n\nTwo Israeli cliques somehow manage to \’just get along\’ in this hiphop music video from rappers Gad Elbaz and Alon de Loco
Dotted by temples, community centers and parks, the largely Orthodox Jewish Crestview neighborhood and its adjacent areas in West L.A. don\’t seem to be a typical battleground for gang bangers. But residents say that is exactly what it\’s become.
Bobbi Fiedler, who rode an anti-school busing platform to political prominence, stood out as the potential vanguard for Jewish conservatives when The Jewish Journal profiled her as its first cover story in February 1986. The Journal recently caught up with the still-active Fiedler, 69, between civic activities.
A gang-related drive-by shooting in the heart of the Pico-Robertson neighborhood late Sunday night left members of the Jewish community rattled and shocked.
Three years ago, Raymond P., a 28-year-old Iranian Jew, was a full-fledged member of a notorious Los Angeles street gang. He sold drugs and suggests that he may have participated in violent crimes. He doesn\’t want to talk about specifics but explains by saying he was desperate to pay for his drug habit.
An investigation into alleged home-grown Muslim extremists has yielded another arrest and prompted law-enforcement agencies and Jewish institutions to tighten security as the Jewish High Holidays approach.\n\nThe probe by the FBI\’s Joint Terrorism Task Force has apparently broadened with last month\’s arrest of Hamad Riaz Samana, a 21-year-old Pakistani student at Santa Monica College. Samana was taken into custody with no fanfare and information about him did not appear in published accounts for about two weeks.\n\nIn all, more than 200 federal and local counter-terrorism agents are probing for links between possible planned attacks on local Israeli and Jewish targets and the activities of Islamic gangs in California prisons.
With Israel\’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip scheduled to begin on Aug. 15, escalating right-wing and settler protests threaten to plunge the country into anarchy and could provoke a strong anti-settler backlash.
Protesters last week blocked major highways, poured oil and scattered spikes across a busy road; occupied buildings in Gaza, and threw stones at Palestinians and Israel Defense Forces soldiers. The army and police responded by temporarily declaring the Gaza Strip a closed military zone, ejecting the extremists from occupied buildings and making dozens of arrests.
In an unprecedented spate of interviews and public statements, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon condemned what he called the \”hooliganism\” of the far right, and vowed that he would not be deterred by it.
However, will authorities be able to maintain law and order in the face of even more extreme protest plans?
About two months ago, Dr. Mark Capritto, the tough-minded vice principal of Agoura High School, came face-to-face with one of Zionism\’s most unusual developments: a nice Jewish gang.
3:45 a.m. I am walking down a very dark, silent alleyway in Oakwood, a two-square-mile, mostly low-income community in Venice, behind police officer Robert Eisenhart. A 16-year-old boy, a member of the Venice Shoreline Crips gang, has been shot in the shoulder and in the middle of his back by a member of the same gang. Eisenhart is looking for the shooter, who may be at a party in a nearby darkened house. The silence is almost surreal. I am afraid of what may appear, or explode, out of the darkness. We arrived at the scene minutes before, and I see the boy wheeled out on the stretcher and placed in the ambulance as his brother, his sister and other gang members watch without overt emotion, in dazed silence. I am surprised at the dewy youth of the gang members, and by their glazed faces and darting eyes. The scene has the hopeless, listless feel of the ghetto: some lawns with piled-up rusted machinery, nails, weeds, tubs, broken bicycles, old porcelain, busted mattress springs. An old mattress is stuffed into the window of one house to keep out the cold and prying strangers.
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