Bill de Blasio began his career in New York City politics with David Dinkins whose administration’s policies were responsible for the city’s first pogrom against the Jewish community of Crown Heights.
Not long before Bill de Blasio joined Team Dinkins, he was a member of Team Sandinista.
The Sandinistas, or FSLN, a radical Marxist terrorist organization, took over the country and drove out most of Nicaragua’s Jewish community. By the time they were done, the ADL blasted Nicaragua as “a country without Jews, but not without anti-Semitism.”
This was the revolution that de Blasio supported while volunteering at the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York. The NSN, staffed by Marxists, served as the mouthpiece for the Sandinista regime funneling its propaganda into the United States and conducting tours celebrating the ruling party and denouncing the opposition.
The New York Times describes Bill de Blasio as one of the first eager subscribers to Barricada, the Sandinista paper. This was the Barricada that denounced the “traditional ‘Jew-style’” of the United States Congress for not immediately providing the money to finance an election in Nicaragua.
“They had a youthful energy and idealism mixed with a human ability and practicality that was really inspirational,” Bill de Blasio said of the Sandinistas. That energy included throwing firebombs at a synagogue during Shabbat services while shouting “Death to the Jews,” “Jewish Pigs” and “What Hitler started we will finish.”
I wrote that back in 2013. So this isn’t a surprise to anyone who was paying attention to Bill de Blasio’s political roots in the radical Left. His current anti-Semitic antics are just the inevitable consequence of his membership in a toxic political movement.
On Tuesday night, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared war on New York’s Jewish community. The very same mayor who went to the gym the day after closing New York City’s schools, restaurants, and bars and who took a stroll in Prospect Park on Saturday, as news was breaking that 28 New York City schoolteachers had died from the virus, has ventured out yet again into a crowd. This time, he went to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where a large number of Satmar Hasidim had gathered. The mayor went to personally “ensure the crowd was dispersed,” the mayor explained in a tweet.
And then, he took things one step further.
“My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed,” the Mayor tweeted. “I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”
It was grossly anti-Semitic, casting New York City’s 1 million Jews with the brush of a few hundred. And it was doubly offensive given the mayor’s failure to protect Orthodox Jews last year as they suffered daily physical attacks on the streets of New York City.
Unsurprisingly, de Blasio had no opprobrium for the thousands of New Yorkers who, like himself, were tempted by the weekend’s warm weather to enjoy the city’s parks.
Couple all that with the fact that Satmar Headquarters is claiming that the mayor’s office initially approved the funeral and coordinated it with the NYPD, and you have a truly shameful debacle.
Why pull a bait and switch, approving the funeral and then arriving in person to break it up?
Politicians don’t arrive at the head of the cops to break up an event. Not unless they’re looking for a photo op.
The obvious answer here is that De Blasio approved the event only to use it as a stage for a photo op.
That’s cynical and ugly.
But that’s Bill de Blasio.
As Ungar-Sargon correctly notes, this is about a larger issue, though she doesn’t localize it within the Left, even as she notes the media bias.
Compare the coverage of Orthodox funerals – photos of which are breathlessly shared on social media – to the (correctly!) mournful coverage accompanying a southern funeral with 200 attendees that turned into a “super-spreading event,” or the compassionate concern for communities in New York struggling with the never-ending feeling of isolation.
Two New York Times stories on April 9 provide an instructive compare-and-contrast. One article was headlined “Fear and Frustration Increase With Spike in Cases in Jewish Enclaves.” It was about Monsey, a hamlet in upstate New York, where cases were spiking, and the reporters started by saying that Monsey had the highest per-capita rate of infection in the state – a number that would no longer be accurate just a week later, as Ari Feldman reported in The Forward. “The source of the problem,” The Times explained, “lies in small pockets of the county that are home to a large number of Orthodox Jewish residents, some of whom, according to authorities, have refused to adhere to social-distancing requirements.”
While Orthodox Jews were cast as the “source of the problem,” absent any substantiating data, another article in the same edition of the paper bemoaned the “Losses Sweeping Immigrant Enclaves in Queens.” This piece explored reasons immigrant communities were suffering so much loss from the virus, including overcrowding, high rates of poverty, and a big language barrier – all things that are equally true of the Orthodox community, but that American journalists almost never bother to mention.
The Democrats are swinging far to the Left. The New York Times has run multiple pieces celebrating the USSR. The Soviet Union’s treatment of Orthodox Jews involved gulags and firing squads.
Leave a Reply