18 October 2006
The militant Jewish group Kahane Chai and two of its affiliates were rightly designated as terrorist organizations by the US State Department, a court in Washington DC has ruled. Kahane Chai, is a spin-off of the radical Kach movement of Rabbi Meir Kahane, an Israeli politician who was assassinated in New York in 1990. Kahane Chai, which means Kahane Lives, advocates the restoration of the biblical state of Israel and the expulsion of Arabs from the Holy Land. The Israeli cabinet declared Kahane Chai a terrorist organization in 1994, and the United States State Department followed suit in 1997. In 2003, the then US secretary of State Colin Powell reaffirmed the designation and added that 20 entities were aliases of Kahane Chai, including its website www.kahane.org. Powell found that the group had threatened to carry out assassinations, notably of Ariel Sharon when he was prime minister of Israel, used ''explosives or firearms'' to endanger people and property, and solicited money and members for terrorist organizations.