Bari Weiss, "Bill de Blasio Finds His Scapegoat"
David Shasha
Tikvah Fund David Project Bari Weiss Finds Her Scapegoat!
Here again is my attack on the debased Jewish attackers of Mayor Bill De Blasio:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/i8ZF-UUVpUg
I was doing a bunch of things after I posted it, and did not get to my New York Times reading until later in the day.
And what do you think I found there?
“Bill de Blasio Finds His Scapegoat”!
The complete article follows this note.
That’s right, it is our dear friend Tikvah Fund David Project Bari Weiss again:
Prior to this pitiful Williamsburg funeral Hasidic apologia, she was all about the “Culture Wars”:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/opinion/coronavirus-culture-war.html
Even during Coronavirus, she does not give up on the prime Tikvah directive!
It was in that article that she first lashed out at De Blasio for his Coronavirus response, which she is now doing again, as her Neo-Con Tikvah Fund takes over all the different political factions in the Jewish institutional world.
The latest was in Jewish Currents, a neo-Marxist Left Wing outlet:
https://jewishcurrents.org/an-argument-among-friends/
I will not dispute Weiss’ recounting of De Blasio’s timeline on Coronavirus, only to say that it closely resembles the Lysol Trump talking points on Nancy Pelosi:
What we can say for sure is that both New York and California, whatever their respective faults, have been dealing with the Trumpdeath Pandemic in a much more responsible way than Trump has.
But Bari Weiss does not like to ever mention Trump in this regard, as she can more easily scapegoat De Blasio by calling him an Anti-Semite.
And Weiss knows something about Anti-Semitism, as she keeps telling us:
It is apparent that she was not aware of the second Hasidic funeral that proved De Blasio was correct:
The Tikvah machers are very taken with themselves, and gain energy in proportion to the ways in which other Jews validate their toxic view of the world.
Given her obvious love for Seinfeld in the latest De Blasio attack, I would suggest that she should specifically be focused on Season 7, Episode 15, rather than the one she cites to close the article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shower_Head
That classic episode is #6 in the following list of the “10 Most Jewish Seinfeld Episodes”:
https://www.cjnews.com/culture/entertainment/10-jewish-seinfeld-episodes
Everyone is an Anti-Semite, as Uncle Leo claimed:
While anti-Semitism is most definitely real, there are many Jews out there who sometimes take it a bit too far, throwing around the term ‘anti-Semite’ around without proper justification. The most candid representation of this is Jerry’s uncle Leo, known for his signature, “Hello!” who, in the episode The Shower Head, thinks that the cook at Monk’s Cafe cooked his burger medium instead of medium-rare “because he’s an anti-Semite.” Jerry then wittingly responds saying, “The point I was making before Goebbels made your hamburger…,” referring to Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Later in the episode, Leo claims his own girlfriend is also an anti-Semite, to which Jerry quips, pointing at him, “Can you blame her?”
I was surprised that Weiss ignored this one!
But maybe I wasn’t.
And, of course, for Tikvah Weiss criticizing Israel is itself Anti-Semitic:
Trump, not so much:
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1211773270971887622
The question here is ultimately whether or not De Blasio is allowed to protect the citizens of this city.
The relentless pressure being applied on De Blasio by Neo-Con Jews like Weiss makes his job that much more difficult, as it gives the proverbial green light for Hasidim to endanger public safety by putting more lives at risk – including their own.
David Shasha
Bill de Blasio Finds His Scapegoat
By: Bari Weiss
Bill de Blasio was hankering for a scapegoat. The need was entirely understandable.
On the mayor’s watch, New York City has more than 162,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and more than 17,000 deaths — the most of any American city by far. Subway cars have turned into homeless encampments; nursing homes have become charnel houses. There is a hospital in the East Meadow of Central Park, and mass graves are being filled on a small island off the coast of the Bronx. Just yesterday came the news that dozens of bodies were rotting in two trucks outside a funeral home in Brooklyn, discovered only when neighbors complained of the stench.
The coronavirus is a stealthy killer, and all the qualities that make New York the greatest city in the world also put it at greatest risk for this virus: We live cheek by jowl; we cram ourselves into little boxes to go to work and to dinner; we welcome millions of tourists from all over the globe. We were going to be vulnerable no matter who was in charge.
But at every turn, with his reverse Midas touch, Mayor de Blasio has done precisely the wrong thing, making a fool of himself as he plunged the eight million people under his care into greater danger.
On March 2, as the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, was telling people in her city to “prepare for possible disruption” by getting essential medicines and figuring out child care in the event of school closures, our mayor took to Twitter to encourage New Yorkers “to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus.” He suggested we head over to Lincoln Center to see a film called “The Traitor.”
On March 14, when the entire nation of Italy had been locked down for five days, Mayor de Blasio’s message was, “I’m not ready today at this hour to say let’s have a city with no bars, no restaurants, no rec centers, no libraries.” The very next day, he announced the closure of all schools, but not before he advised people to head to their favorite bar for one last round.
On March 16, while the city’s parents were trying to figure out how to hold down their jobs and home-school their children, the mayor treated himself to a final workout at the Park Slope Y. Unchastened by the backlash to his prioritizing of self-care over public good, he continues to indulge in some nonessential travel, schlepping from Manhattan to Brooklyn with his wife and entourage to stroll through Prospect Park.
Given all this, you’d think that the mayor would want to keep his head down.
But this is Bill de Blasio, the man whose political instinct drove him to quote Che Guevara at a Miami union rally and to suggest on national television that the only reason black voters support Joe Biden is they don’t know enough about his record.
So it should not have come as a surprise when the mayor took to Twitter on Tuesday evening to say: “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. 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.”
The tweet came in reaction to a funeral on Tuesday in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for Chaim Mertz, a prominent Hasidic rabbi who died of Covid-19. As many as 2,500 people apparently showed up and the police had to disperse the crowd. The mayor traveled to Brooklyn to survey the scene.
The funeral, like other religious gatherings that have taken place during this pandemic, is a violation of the most sacred Jewish value: choosing life. The price of ignoring the rules on social distancing has been impossibly high; the Hasidic communities of Brooklyn have been decimated by this virus.
“The failure of leadership here cannot be overstated,” said Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, a writer and the wife of an Orthodox rabbi, about those who encouraged the funeral. “This is almost reminiscent of the stories of Hasidic rebbes leaving their flocks during the Holocaust. Only this time, followers will be able to know exactly how they were abandoned and by whom, because now this information is public.”
And the danger isn’t contained to the Hasidic community. “You are putting my cops’ lives at risk and it’s unacceptable,” the police commissioner said on Wednesday.
It is. There is no excuse.
But those who have violated the social-distancing rules number in the thousands. New York City is home to more than a million Jews — a community that, quite understandably, given Jewish history, doesn’t take well to blanket threats from the government.
“For him to paint the entire Jewish community as uncooperative was breathtaking,” Max Rose, the Democratic congressman from Staten Island, told me. “Words matter. Threatening every Jewish New Yorker with arrest was beyond insensitive.”
More to the point, the Jews at that Williamsburg funeral don’t have Twitter accounts. If the mayor really cared to address this community, he would have grabbed a bullhorn and found a Yiddish speaker.
But that wasn’t the mayor’s goal. The point was to signal to the rest of us that he was a man of action, entirely in control of the situation. What he did was send an inadvertent message to anti-Semites that Jews were to blame.
“Hassids own so much,” Felix Biederman, a co-host of the popular left-wing “Chapo Trap House” podcast, tweeted on Thursday. “Just zero regard for the rest of humanity or any idea of modernity and they’re also like yeah we need to live in the middle of this city for whatever reason.”
Hasidic Jews aren’t particularly well-off and have been in these neighborhoods for generations. Presenting them as interloping vultures is not simply a lie. It is classic anti-Semitism.
The day before, the mayor tweeted his concern about an anti-Jewish hate crime, saying that such “loathsome hate” has no place in New York. But hate already has a home in Mayor de Blasio’s New York.
More than half of all hate crimes in the city in 2019 were attacks on Jewish people. Jewish faces have been smashed with paving stones in broad daylight. Jews have been punched, stabbed, slapped and slurred. Jewish children’s school buses have been pelted with stones. Synagogue windows have been shattered. Jewish women have had their head coverings ripped off.
Ms. Chizhik-Goldschmidt worries that events like the funeral will make things worse. “This deeply irresponsible behavior puts me and my children at risk,” she said. “Anti-Semites are already using this as further fuel for their fire, which has been growing and growing.”
“Being a Hasid means you are a visible Jew,” said Mordy Getz, a community leader and the owner of a bookstore in Brooklyn. “In Switzerland I was harassed with my wife. In Ukraine I was chased down. I’ve always believed this country was different from Europe. But now everyone I know is petrified.”
New Yorkers deserve a mayor as outraged about this as he was about Tuesday’s funeral.
In the meantime, Mr. Mayor, since Lincoln Center is closed indefinitely, can I recommend some home viewing? Season Five Episode 22 of “Seinfeld,” a classic, in which George Costanza does the opposite of every single one of his instincts and winds up, for once, a success.
From The New York Times, May 1, 2020