(Illustration courtesy of Bosch Fawstin)

One word. Good.

We’ve seen throughout the abuses of power during the pandemic that the only thing politicians pay any attention to is legal action.

With the media squarely on the side of the abusers, and the public largely intimidated, legal action is one of the few remaining ways to push back. So the Lawfare Project’s move here is a reminder to the New York City boss that there’s more here than just letters.

The Lawfare Project, a Jewish legal and civil-rights group, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request as part of an investigation into the alleged targeting of New York City’s Jewish community.

“The Lawfare Project is concerned that, at a time when anti-Semitic hate crimes are skyrocketing in New York City, Mayor de Blasio has added fuel to the fire by singling out the entire Jewish community for the spread of the coronavirus, even threatening its members with arrest,” Gerard Filitti, senior council at the Lawfare Project, said in a statement. “In light of the mayor’s outrageous statement, we have filed FOIL requests to investigate whether the mayor and the NYPD have taken actions that have disproportionately, and unlawfully, targeted the Jewish community.”

In documentation provided to JNS by the Lawfare Project, several high-profile instances did not result in the NYPD issuing summonses or arrests for social-distancing violations.

It’s a good move by the Project.

If there were a civil rights organization protecting the right of Jews, this is what it would do. Unfortunately there’s only the ADL which has as much interest in Jewish civil rights as I do in fishing patterns in Macau. In the past, it might have at least gone through the motions. Instead there was a tweet to reassure the handful of legacy donors before the ADL gets back to its core mission of transgender education in high schools, allying with Islamists in North Dakota, or whatever the hell it’s doing today.

The communities themselves are not going to get on the wrong side of the Democrats. There are some budding advocacy groups, but they don’t have the legal muscle and experience to do this sort of thing. And we’ll see what this turns up.