In Amsterdam, the cops are going to start going undercover as Jews in order to sniff out anti-Semites. According to MyFoxNewYork:
Cops will pose as Jews in an attempt to weed out anti-Semites under an unorthodox police tactic being considered in Amsterdam, Dutch newspaper Het Parool reported Monday.
[Mayor] Asscher proposed the tactic after secret television recordings aired on Dutch TV Sunday revealed young men screaming anti-Semitic abuse and making Nazi salutes at a rabbi as he toured different parts of Amsterdam.
The city’s police already use plants posing as gay men and the elderly in an effort to catch muggers and homophobes, Het Parool said.
Does this remind anyone else of an old NYPD Blue episode where they have to dress up as Hasids to help recover a stolen Torah? The episode was called Torah! Torah! Torah!
My favorite part is when Sipowicz describes himself as the kind of rabbi “who will wrap his payes around your throat and pull until I got you begging for God’s mercy–which will not be forthcoming!” My second favorite part is those awesome beards!
I also kind of love the horrible but amusing 1992 movie, A Stranger Among Us where Melanie Griffith goes undercover as a Hasidic Jew to solve a murder. She is totally unconvincing as a baal teshuva. Let’s hope the Dutch police are better at it than she is.
Hasidic
Pronounced: khah-SID-ik, Origin: Hebrew, a stream within ultra-Orthodox Judaism that grew out of an 18th-century mystical revival movement.
