FIRST OFF . . .

The Jewish Defense Organization plans to step up its campaign against rap group Public Enemy now that rapper Prof. Griff, who had been fired for making anti-Semitic statements, is back with the group. “You can’t believe a collection of devils,” JDO director Mordechai Levy said Wednesday. Levy will ask the record industry to boycott the Public Enemy organization, and is planning a meeting Sept. 24 in New York to enlist support. “We are going to demand that any Jewish person, or any person with decent values, have nothing to do with the group.” A more moderate spokesman for the Jewish community, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said of the return of Griff, “It’s a terrible message to the young people of America.” The controversy started in May, when Griff said in an interview that Jews are responsible for “the majority of wickedness” in the world. In a radio interview for the syndicated Radioscope network, which will be aired on KJLH-FM (102.3) Sunday at 10 p.m., Public Enemy leader Chuck D. said that the group intends “to make people realize that the media messed with the wrong people when they tried to mess around with Public Enemy.”