Andrew Cuomo, who had no problem with mass demonstrations for BLM…
…has very different rules for ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Also please see this article for a very full discussion of Cuomo’s press conference. During it, Cuomo used an old photo and said it was new (he used others that purportedly really are new, as well), but it’s the substance of his remarks that interests me more.
I am struck by something I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere – which is that Cuomo keeps referring to the accused communities as “Orthodox.” Although that it true, it is like referring to them as “Jews.” “Orthodox” describes a large group of Jews, but there are many many divisions within that group. The ones in question are not just Orthodox, they are ultra Orthodox. And actually, they are not just Orthodox, they are ultra-ultra-Orthodox. Calling them simply “Orthodox” has the effect of expanding the accusation in the eye of the general public to all Orthodox Jews.
I have written previously on related topics, in regard to ultra-Orthodox views and accusations and misconceptions that they are anti-vaccers. Please read. Please also read this post of mine about accusations similar to the present ones regarding the group’s COVID behavior. An excerpt:
The genesis of de Blasio’s admonition to “the Jewish community” – a pretty diverse group, and in NYC a fairly large one – was apparently a funeral for a rabbi held in Brooklyn by an ultra-Orthodox sect called the Satmar. Not only are they not “the Jewish community” at large, they’re not even “the Orthodox Jewish community.” The NY Satmar are based in Willliamsburg, and they are such an extreme sect that they could correctly be called not just ultra-Orthodox but ultra-ultra-Orthodox. They are so Orthodox they are radical, if that makes any sense (among other things, they don’t recognize the state of Israel). It’s hard to get a bead on their numbers in Brooklyn, but let’s just say that although it’s in the thousands, it’s a miniscule percectage of the Jews of New York City. They no more represent the Jewish community than the Branch Davidians represented the “Christian community.”
But that didn’t stop de Blasio from referring to them that way. It is no accident, either, although he tried to backtrack somewhat when howls of protest ensued regarding his addressing Jews in general. De Blasio may be mayor of New York, but he’s a leftist of the Corbynesque variety, and anti-Semitism is part of the genre.
Oh, and by the way, the Satmar said they had a police permit for the event and tried to make the crowd conform to social distancing rules:
“Neither de Blasio nor his police commissioner, Dermot Shea, addressed reports that the funeral procession had actually been coordinated with the New York Police Department and the knowledge of City Hall. Shea said that 12 summonses had been issued for refusal to disperse and for violating social distancing. ‘That event last night never should have happened,’ he said. ‘It will never happen again.’
“The mourning event in the Williamsburg neighborhood Tuesday night was organized by followers of the late Rabbi Chaim Mertz. Organizers said that they thought the procession would conform with social distancing guidelines because they asked everyone to stay six feet away from each other. The police department cooperated by barricading streets and putting up street lights, according to David Greenfield, the CEO of a Jewish anti-poverty organization and a former city councilman.
“Video of the event showed that funeral marchers were also guided by members of Shomrim, the Jewish community security organization. A Hasidic source who is familiar with the Shomrim’s preparations for the funeral, but not authorized to speak publicly, told the Forward that the Shomrim and NYPD had worked together in planning the funeral.
“‘The plan was to have a specific number of people who could go into one street, then close it down, and have the car go to the next street,’ the source explained. The source added that in addition to lights and barricades, the police had also approved having a sound system so that attendees could hear eulogies, but that at the last minute, officers ordered organizers not to use the speaker system.
“In their joint news conference, de Blasio and Shea did not respond to the claims of NYPD involvement.”
That was written about five months ago.
And yet they will still vote Dem.
LYNN HARGROVE:
And yet you are ignorant of the fact that Orthodox Jews vote majority Republican. And the ultra-Orthodox are very very strongly majority Republican (75%). See this.
Hypocrisy is rampant. Protesting is essential for “mental health” purposes, but religious services are verboten because they are too risky? The logic of it fails me. The democrat governors and mayors are not making sense. Unless they are anti-religion. Which they are. Which makes them unbelievers – in the Constitution as well as religion.
At least he shows his marxism.. and engelsism… those who have read deeply things like the magyar struggle, know that this will always come up, its foundational to the ideology as there are certain groups who will not change to become something else.. whatever excuse justifies action and obfuscation is fine so long as for them it works and hides the sources..
J. J. Logic and argument presume at least a common language. In this case and such other cases, only English is common, and most of the nouns and verbs have”floated” to other meanings.
deBolshevik wants to disadvantage Jews and so he does. His excuses look plausible if one is an idiot or looks beyond the actual incident–protests are apparently immunizing events–for some context or coherence. One of the tells is if you presume he is ignorant of the actual context and larger issues, then you inform him as if that would have an effect…and it does not. One supposes he already knows but if he refuses to address the inconsistency….where are you?
Save yourself time and energy; presume people like this are lying, down to “if”, “and”, and “but”
That they leave you fuming is irrelevant. They have the cops and you don’t.
Cuomo is a mass murderer and did so intentionally.
Hypocrisy and religious animus doesn’t begin to compare.
One of the great ignored stories in American politics is the rise of anti-Israel sentiment on the Left. It’s a weird combination of fairly traditional anti-Semitism combined with white guilt/anti-colonialism focused on the supposed victim-status of the Palestinians.
Of course, you can criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic but there’s basically NO ONE patrolling that line on the Left. I sometimes wonder if there’s not some connection on some level to the Left’s obsession with white supremacy, blaming others for their own sins.
Mike
Geofrey – I do not call Cuomo an intentional mass murderer. He believed what his advisors told him. That there would be 10’s of thousand of critically ill people flooding his hospitals in less than 6 weeks. Italy was a just a warm-up compared to what was coming to NYC. Remember his call for 44K respirators and that Trump was not helping him enough. His team believed the initial models that were grossly bad. That is why he was in a panic to clear the emergency rooms. So he issued a hasty order, not well thought through, to put the aged back to their homes and he wanted no argument.
Where his conduct turns criminal is that once they realized that the case load was not going to be anywhere near what was projected he did not rescind the order. That is why he should be shamed and prosecuted because he would not admit that he made an error. If he explained himself and asked for forgiveness it would have been granted.
I really believe that the state of NY is in play with the proper attention from the Republicans. NYC is disrupted and people tend not to vote with they are struggling to put ends together or they moved and not registered in the new place. NYC is what offsets and overwhelms upper NY. Another set of riots would be the “coup de grace”.
Hold on, it’s going to get even crazier. In a sense, this is like what people were living through in Russia 1917, Germany 1918-20 and France 1968. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
One of the great ignored stories in American politics is the rise of anti-Israel sentiment on the Left.
MBunge: Beats the heck out of me. I lived in San Francisco across the Bay from Berkeley and watched it happening. I was a leftist, supported Israel and sort of thought that was normal. Nazis, the Holocaust, right?
Wrong.
I’ve gotten a lot of things wrong, but that was one of the wrongest.
We find ourselves living in ever more dangerous and desperate times.
It has become so clear the enemy Democrats don’t give fig for the Constitution.
Cuomo has no problem threatening synagogue shutdowns despite the First Amendment. Neither was there any hesitancy about limiting church and synagogue attendance in Vegas though casinos became wide open.
De Blasio is a frank Jew-hater. But his hatred is extensive and not limited to Jews!
For observant Jews, it is the Law, capitalized, that was given to them by YHWH via Moses, since interpreted by countless rabbis. It is not nickel-and-dime cranky stuff; the Law forms part, perhaps the spine, of the civilized West. The Old Testament lead directly into the New.
Most Jews today consider themselves an ethnic, I believe, not a religious body, not the twelve tribes of Israel.
Bloomberg is a non-observant Jew. Never hear of him entering a synagogue to worship, do you?
Anti-semitism is on the march, and Black Lives Matter. BLM is anti-semitic, and many blacks are also. But what is far worse is on the white side; that is where the mass of anti-semitism resides. It is growing, and it is quite insufficiently opposed. CAIR gets a free pass, while AIPAC is condemned. And the ADL does not fight back hard enough.
Who defends Israel’s right to exist? Why, Evangelical (Protestant) Christians and the Trump wing of the GOP. Democrats fret about the BS apartheid of Palestine, which means they are OK with Hezbollah.
Sparticus:
I disagree with your Cuomo mitigation. His Commissioner of Health advised him to act as Cuomo did, presumably after doing some homework, and the decision was both criminal and stupid at the outset.
Clearing the nursing-home chronically ill who were COVID positive out of hospitals back into nursing homes in order to make room for more COVID-sick?
Any fool MD would have told him these elderlies were the most likely to die, of any contagious process. The so-called “R-naught”, a measure of infectiousness, was thought very high in those early days, and it applied to everyone. The elderly NH crowd was not exempt. So Cuomo is a mass murderer, on top of being a shitty governor generally. I deem him an Evil One.
“UItra-orthodox” is not a term used within the observant Jewish community. It’s close to a pejorative, used by the secular media, and actually makes no linguistic sense. You can’t get more orthodox than orthodox. The word orthodox literally means “correct opinion”.
The term used within the orthodox community to those who are punctilious about their religious observance is “chareidi”, from the Hebrew word for “tremble”, i.e. they tremble before the word God (Isaiah 66).
Johann Amadeus Metesky:
The Orthodox community is not Cuomo’s audience when he labels these people “Orthodox.” He should mention the exact group or groups he’s talking about rather than make it seem as though he’s talking about the entire Orthodox community as a whole.
Cicero; Sparticus:
If I remember correctly he sent them back to nursing homes that did not have proper PPE, and did not supply them with it. That was the problem in particular. He required the nursing homes to take them whether the nursing home had proper protection or not. So nursing homes became hotbeds of infection.
I am Sparticus,
I do not make that charge lightly. And the facts fully support that charge.
In addition to Cicero’s points, I’ll add that multiple nursing home directors protested from the very start of Cuomo’s directive and did so repeatedly and directly to his health director. In response, Cuomo insisted they follow his order and even threatened the protesting nursing home directors with pulling their state nursing home licenses if they refused to accept those released hospital patients.
No way was Cuomo not informed of the nursing home director’s calls and emails. As had he not been so informed, when the story emerged, he would have thrown his health dept. administrator under the bus…
Geoffrey and Cicero – I take your points very seriously but I really do believe that it was a panicked reaction that was not thought through by he and the health director. My contention is that he didn’t act with criminal intent initially, but then he got stubborn and his refusal to change crossed into criminal behavior.
I remember those warnings from the nursing homes and the weak rationalization that the states provided back. Living in Michigan with my very crappy governor she did the same thing initially then created “quarantine” homes where all infected were sent. A video of a mentally challenged young black man beating on an elderly white man came from one of these homes.
Is Cuomo stupid? No, but he is very arrogant. I remember his noon briefings where he was lionized by the press and several floated the idea of him replacing Biden as the nominee. Maybe he didn’t want to admit to an error in judgement as he preened to the cameras on the off chance this could happen. Only he can tell us.
This sounds harsh but I tell everyone when they complain about the shutdown here in Michigan. “Just remember, you voted for this.” And in New York’s case, twice. Reality is a bitch when it hits you upside the head. It helps focus’s people’s mind about this upcoming election.
So in the end I am a bit more charitable about Cuomo and Whitmer at the beginning of the pandemic as I am with Trump and Fauci. But I shifted my opinion when the foolish inane decisions, second guessing, contrary instructions and the open political manipulation of this crisis became apparent.
Good things are being done here in Michigan as we just delivered a petition to repeal a 1945 law that Whitmer used in error to conduct her reign of irrational dictates. We needed 340K votes and we turned in 550K which was 50K over goal. The law can be repealed without any input from her. She is throwing a hissy fit. I am sure Obama the community organizer would approve as we took citizen action. I am waiting for his congratulation message to us……….not.
Another item, when Cuomo was sending those released hospital patients to the nursing homes, he had a readily available alternative. Trump had sent a Navy hospital ship to New York City and Cuomo could have easily sent those patients to the hospital ship. Instead he left it empty.
That’s such an obvious and far safer alternative for where to send still infectious recovering patients to stay.
So Cuomo intentionally sent them to where they would do the most harm, while having no valid reason to do so. Nor was this a one time mistake, infectious patients were sent to the most vulnerable over the course of many weeks.
The facts just don’t add up to giving Cuomo any slack on this issue at all. I repeat the charge; Cuomo is a mass murderer and did so for his party’s political gain. Then when initially questioned about it, responded with, words to the effect of; ‘well, they were going to die sooner or later anyway’.
Geoffrey – your point is very strong and I accept it.
We interrupt this program to bring you a little….decency, humanity and bravery:
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/10/4/21498970/as-utahs-candy-bomber-turns-100-his-sweet-story-remains-timeless
H/T Instapundit
Hi, Sparticus. I’m glad for your news from the Old Northwest. How long does it need until that petition takes effect? Does it have to be certified by the Sec’y of State or a court or something?
Spartacus, Geoffrey, and Neo, this is one reason I love this blog: because of commenters like you, who can listen politely to an opposing argument, conduct a civil and fruitful discussion of an issue, and sometimes even change one’s mind! Facts, not insults – so rare today.
These might be the Jews for Trump brigade somewhere around the Eastern Coast. It’s also a religious thing, of course, as atheist or apostate Jews don’t really care if they can worship at temple or not.
GB, C isn’t the only mass murderer traitor in your country. There’s an entire vampiric elite and Cabal in charge of you humans.
This is why I recommended that you kill your slave masters, not fight a war or do an “election”. Those aren’t really going to resolve the fundamental issue here.
The good news is that the anti cabal alliance, took that seriously in the Deep State. They did and are still conducting invisible covert military operations.
While the rest of you sit around collecting/buying more ammo, that you never see any use for.
Geoffrey Britain and Cicero,
Spot on. Cuomo had options. Lots of them. Heck, he could have used the abandoned school gymnasiums around the state like field hospitals if the military field hospitals or the USNS ship, which he didn’t utilize, hadn’t been enough.
He chose to send the sickest patients to the same buildings where the most vulnerable were. If his health advisor told him to do that, then the advisor is downright evil. If he followed the advise, Cuomo is stupid and evil. I have no medical knowledge outside of lifeguard training at 17 years old and Basic First Aid/CPR now and even I know that idea is criminally stupid.
Or worse, if they got exactly what they wanted. But I won’t make that leap yet.
I met Cuomo once and was not impressed. I work with people who know him better and they say my initial impression was correct: he’s an imbecile with finally honed political instincts.
I understand what Sparticus is suggesting. The people of NY are not going to throw Cuomo in jail for his actions at the beginning of the pandemic. If you want to gain support for getting him thrown in jail, if not the least thrown out of office; you need to focus on Cuomo’s actions, or particular inaction, once it was clear just how much of an error in judgement was made. Start with what we can all agree on, especially in this small group, before trying to spread the message of something harder for others to understand or agree.
“Start with what we can all agree on“
Except we can’t all agree on it. “We” in the broadest sense, that is. That’s because New York citizens who swooned over Cuomo’s press conferences would have to admit they were wrong. New York media who overlooked Cuomo’s incompetence would have to admit they were wrong, National pundits who talked up Cuomo as a hero while he was in the midst of badly failing would have to admit they were wrong.
Most of the time it’s good to tolerate, compromise, and even make excuses. It’s an imperfect world full of imperfect people. But sometimes you have to plant your flag so there’s something people can see and move toward when disaster hits,
There’s a reckoning coming. If we’re lucky, it will come in the nicest possible way during a second Trump term. But it’s coming no matter what and having the right flag to follow might be the key to survival.
Mike
Cuomo acquiesced to the BLM/Antifa thugs, but scolds and punishes Orthodox Jews.
He is duplicitous, oleaginous, vicious and vacuous (other than that he’s ducky).
I believe this sect of jewish folks votes Trump; that’s all you need to know folks.
It seems really, really stupid for Cuomo to fail to distinguish, as Neo points out, among the many Jewish groups in his state, not an insignificant number of voters. But why he chose to make an example of one religious group when other religious people are already chafing from the restrictions is beyond understanding. Is he trying to reinforce the Republican line that Democrats are anti-religion?
This entire family is shamelessly self-serving and a bit stupid. I thought it was just Fredo but it’s the whole famdamily.
Neo. As to Cuomo’s “target”, if I read you right it should have been the sect/tradition having the meeting.
Why do you think his target is that restricted?
Observant Jews, those obviously by dress, have been attacked frequently over the last couple of years on the street. Last fall, the NYT mentioned a complete lack of white neo-nazis as perps.
Nobody seems to care. Perhaps Cuomo was, in fact, targeting all Orthodox Jews of any type as those who irritate his loyal voters. So, if he wants to damage a different sect/tradition, he’s already covered.
Richard Aubrey:
I don’t think his target is that restricted.
I am saying that if this was really just about the behavior of a couple of congregations of a particular sect (or that sect in general), he should have restricted his comments to that sect or congregation and offered specific proof. He did not. His comments were much broader. Therefore it is certainly possible his target was broader.
His attacks on people’s liberty do not gain or lose moral and legal authority based on the how accurate he managed to label the oppressed group in question. To harp on that point strikes me as sniveling pedantry when strong moral pushback and solidarity is what’s most needed. It’s telling the dictator, “THOSE jerks were violating your sacred decrees, not THESE jerks!”.
Just home from shopping this morning from Chico to Durham:
List:
Canned goods. Check.
Ammo. Check and double-check.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
? Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Sam:
It’s not pedantry, sniveling or otherwise, to point out particular prejudices when we see them. In this case, Cuomo is singling out Jews, and in making the accusation more sweeping than he need make it, that is another way in which he errs and tries to blame an entire group for what may or may not be the actions of a few.
That does not take away from criticism of the general assault on liberty, and on religious liberty as a subset of that, which has been discussed over and over on this blog and others. It only adds to it.
Never mind.
Democrats are anti-religion
Democrats are alt or quasi-religious: Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, relativistic, which is ostensibly a “secular” religion, but only in the popular sense. Religious philosophy is a behavior protocol (e.g. “ethics”). They are theists that kneel before mortal gods and goddesses. Democrats are almost uniformly members of sects in the Progressive Church.
“he’s an imbecile with finally honed political instincts.” – Fractal Rabbit
Of course, this is what Democrats and NeverTrumpers (and even some Trump supporters) say about President The Donald.
However, Cuomo seems to be cornering the market on demonstrating its truth in his case.
Sparticus:
“Is Cuomo stupid? No, but he is very arrogant.”
—————————————-
Arthur C. Clarkes’ Third law:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
So, should there be a corollary to it? “Any sufficiently advanced arrgance is indistinguishable from stupidity.”
Copyright pending, etc., etc.
Solz also said the bolsheviks were mistly jewish and also terrorists.
That was scrubbed fast
Jews do not assimilate in giving up “their” culture for the local majority culture. They obey the local laws, have great work ethics, push education for themselves and their kids, have very very few kids out of wedlock.
Plus have the highest avg. IQ of major ethnic groups.
They are almost always more successful than the locals. Markedly so, yet seldom ostentatiously so. They are, generally, better people.
Normal folk hate “better” folk, very often.
Human nature, tribal nature.
Hutus murdered the more successful Tutsis in Rwanda, in 1994.
Not exactly racism, but tribalism.
Like the Malays who murdered the more successful local Chinese; helped push them into forming an independent Singapore.
Like Russian Bolsheviks murdering small land-owning kulaks.
Noted above – Orthodox Jews more often vote Trump, but actually Republican. Trump now, also favored Romney – https://matzav.com/orthodox-jews-voted-90-for-romney/
Any who vote for Reps, now especially Trump, are targets of Dem hate. Prior Kavanaugh / Palin / Bush / Reagan hate shows it is growing tribal hate.
The Democrats are creating a tribal society, and fomenting hatred for the Rep tribe — a tribal hatred that shows its ugliness in many ways like double standards in law enforcement, firing Reps or those who disagree with the Woke quasi-religion.
The very strange thing is how many successful white males are supporting the tribalization and the increased tribal hatred against whites and against males. Against the Christian capitalist West which has done so much good in the world.
Successful Jews always provide a good local “them” target for tribal hatred. America, more than any other place in the world, has been an anti-tribal melting pot. Where middle class success of home ownership in a low crime area is available to just about every adult willing to follow the 4 rules to avoid poverty:
1. HS education – able to read, write, do basic math
2. Keep a job for more than year – work habits and work ethic
3. Avoid being a parent outside of marriage – this is hard, and especially hard for those having sex before marriage, and especially for those with bad work habits and low education
4. Avoid being a criminal.
Unjust persecution of Jews is often popular with less successful folk who feel entitled to the material fruits of other folk’s successful efforts.
So sad that it’s accepted so much in the USA.
Jews do not assimilate in giving up “their” culture for the local majority culture.
The 19th century German Jewish population in the United States has largely disappeared except to the extent they were enveloped by the succeeding Ashkenazic wave from Tsarist Russia, the Hapsburg lands, and the Balkans. The breakdown of endogamy among the latter since 1965 has been exacerbated the demographic implosion that was already baked in the cake from low fertility. (By Joseph Epstein’s account, the standard model of the American Jewish family ca. 1950 consisted of a father, a mother, and two children born precisely six years apart so mama has one preschooler at a time). The future of American Jewry can be seen in British Jewry today: proportionately much smaller, predominantly religious, and less affluent and influential.
Art Deco:
I agree that Jewish families in America, except for the Orthodox, have hugely assimilated both by intermarriage and by giving up religion. But that description of Jewish families (2 children 6 years apart) in the 1950s is way way off. I grew up in the 1950s in New York, and knew tons of Jewish families, and none of the ones I knew were anything like that. It was not at all uncommon to have more than 2 children. Three was rather common and even four wasn’t all that unusual. And the children were ordinarily much closer to each other than 6 years apart.
Nowadays it’s different. Lots of intermarriage, and often just one child. The Orthodox, of course, are a contrast, with very big families.
Pingback:Playing on Our Trust – Sierra Faith