It’s not enough that New York politicians had given Black Lives Matter protests a de facto dispensation from COVID-19 restrictions while limiting religious gatherings, prompting a June rebuke by a judge. Now it appears that while Governor Andrew Cuomo has just fined a number of synagogues $15,000 for violating his virus-oriented prohibitions, large Muslim gatherings are escaping mainstream media and politician scrutiny.
There was, for example, the Arbaeen procession earlier this month. This is a yearly fall event in which Shiite Muslims in Flushing, Queens, honor Mohammed’s grandson, “whose death at the hands of a Sunni caliph marked the pivotal break between Shiites and Sunnis,” informed FrontPage Mag’s Daniel Greenfield Tuesday.
As Queens now has a sizable Muslim population, these processions have become regular occurrences — and Covidian paranoia hasn’t changed that. Neither has Cuomo or Mayor Bill de Blasio. In fact, they behave as if they don’t even notice the events.
This is despite their all being on video. Consider the footage below of throngs of Muslim men beating their chests, many not wearing masks or with them lowered, and not social distancing.
While the procession marched down a major Flushing street, neither a police officer nor a reporter documenting the event could be seen, according to Greenfield.
In fact, it’s “one of a number of Shiite mass gatherings in New York and New Jersey,” Greenfield also tells us, “including more mourning events for Imam Hussein [Mohammed’s grandson] on Manhattan’s Park Avenue in August, where few of the participants wear masks, and another in Kensington, Brooklyn around the same time.”
Greenfield additionally points out that while the orthodox Jewish prayers of the High Holy Days and the Sukkot celebrations were covered by NYC’s major papers, such as the New York Times, the Muslim events weren’t news “fit to print.” This may be partially because Cuomo and de Blasio didn’t tar the Muslims as disease spreaders and threaten their religious institutions with closure.
Such scrutiny was avoided even though the “Ashura Jaloos event took place in late August in the Kensington 11218 zip code which is listed on the ‘orange zone’ on De Blasio’s coronavirus watchlist,” writes Greenfield. “The Queens procession took place in another watchlist neighborhood where coronavirus rates have been rising.”
“At the end of August, Governor Cuomo threatened to crack down on Orthodox Jewish weddings and blamed the ‘Jewish community’ and the ‘Catholic community’ for spreading the coronavirus, but made no mention of any action against Muslim events like the one in Manhattan that had taken place a few days before his threats against Orthodox Jews,” Greenfield also reported.
“On October 4th, the Queens procession took place,” he continued. “A day later, Cuomo held his infamous antisemitic press conference in which he threatened, ‘I have to say to the Orthodox community tomorrow, ‘If you’re not willing to live with these rules, then I’m going to close the synagogues.’”
Unsurprisingly, Cuomo didn’t illustrate the China-virus threat mass gatherings allegedly pose by showing images of the recent Muslim processions; he didn’t even make note of them. He instead supported his argument that Hasidim were the disease vectors by sharing a picture from a Jewish wedding — from 2006.
Moreover, while the media asserted that the virus outbreaks were occurring only in areas heavily populated by orthodox Jews, laments Greenfield, the truth is that the yellow, orange, and red zones (pandemic designations) in Brooklyn and Queens include many mosques.
Yet leftist politicians don’t dare criticize Muslims, the journalist opines. “And the same papers that scold, sneer, and mock at men in fur hats would never dream of ridiculing shirtless Muslim men slapping their chests in public,” he adds. “That would be racist.”
In this vein, de Blasio tweeted in April, “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed.”
Yet there “was no such warning for Muslims who, unlike the Chassidic Jews of Brooklyn, were not harassed or threatened in any way,” Greenfield writes. “They went on conducting Islamic events with no interference. The New York Post did not spy on their weddings, the New York Daily News did not ridicule their religion, and the mayor and governor did not threaten to come after them.”
This double standard continues, of course. Consider the attitude toward the anti-Cuomo demonstrations, which I reported on yesterday. “‘Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jews burn masks in violent protests as New York cracks down on rising cases,’ a Washington Post headline blared,” Greenfield relates. “That’s the same paper which has repeatedly described Black Lives Matter riots that wrecked entire cities as being ‘mostly peaceful.’”
Mostly propaganda, is what it is. Cuomo may complain that New York has, reportedly, the most people (826 as of October 12) hospitalized with the China virus since July 15. As I wrote yesterday, however, “the statistic tells little without having the answers to the following questions”:
- How many of these patients are hospitalized because of the virus, as opposed to just “with the virus”?
- How many come from hot-spot areas?
- How many recent Wuhan virus deaths have there been in these areas?
- How many of the deceased died of, as opposed to just with, the virus?
- How many of the new infections are simply due to the colder weather, as opposed to supposedly imprudent behavior?
We can now add one more question, too: How many of the infected are Jewish, Christian, and Muslim and are any of these groups disproportionately affected? Don’t hold your breath waiting for the answer. For with the Democrats, First Amendment “freedom” is now a reward — not for remaining healthy, but for embracing a “woke” ideology that is very, very sick.
