Erik Eckholm (NYT) EAST TIMOR: TRAINING A DEFENSE FORCE In preparation for full statehood next year, the newly independent territory of East Timor will soon begin training about 200 soldiers to form a national defense force.
Saudi Arabia is also part of a new Arab League effort to form a joint defense force to fight extremist threats, including ISIL, and to reduce their dependency on U.S. military intervention.
But seeing local police in other American cities standing by idly while synagogues are burned and Jews are murdered, Newark's Jews decide to form an unofficial defense force, the Provisional Jewish Police, consisting of "incorrigible Jewish kids who had failed to graduate from high school".
There have been similar trends in other former Soviet states: Lithuania has reintroduced conscription, while Poland is forming a volunteer defense force it hopes will number in the tens of thousands in a couple years.
And on Wednesday, about 30 men claiming to be arbeki, a traditional form of a village defense force, stormed a school for girls in the northern city of Kunduz, assaulting the headmaster and the principal with the butts of their rifles, said Mohammad Zahir Nazam, head of the Kunduz Education Department.
The commander of the group, known as an arbeki, a traditional form of a village defense force, said the American forces had supported him at the beginning but then had backed away and never delivered ammunition or other promised support.
The United States has been channeling its efforts for a security force into a civil defense force, discouraging or disarming previously formed private armed forces.
They say that it is just a beginning, that one day soon Utah might mint its own coins, that retailers could have scales for weighing precious metals and that a state defense force could be formed to guard warehouses where the new money would be made and stored.
But there are some people who seem to have a natural defense force.
