Yesterday, you learned that New York mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted out an attack against Williamsburg's Jews for attending a rabbi's funeral on public streets, and he implicitly threatened to round them up for violating New York's lockdown.  Threatening to round up Jews is never a good look for a politician.

The Hasidic Jewish community was stunned by de Blasio's response because they'd been in contact with the police immediately after their rabbi died and believed that they had permission to hold the funeral:

In a statement distributed to reporters, Jacob Mertz, a spokesman for the congregation that organized the funeral, said organizers had the streets closed for the funeral to allow mourners to participate while following social distancing guidelines.

"Unfortunately, this didn't pan out, and NYPD had to disperse the crowds," the statement said. "We shall note that everyone followed the police officers' orders and the vast majority wore masks. Yet, the confusion and chaos led to scenes of large crowds. We understand Mayor Bill de Blasio's frustration and his speaking out against the gathering. As said, we thought that the procession will be in accordance with the rules, and we apologize that it turned out otherwise." 

The Williamsburg community may have been conciliatory, but others were not.  Many people, Jews and non-Jews alike, felt that de Blasio's conduct was especially grotesque because he targeted Jews with such specificity.  While de Blasio later claimed he wasn't being anti-Semitic, but was engaging in tough love, he didn't seem to feel that same tough love for any other groups.  Thus, under his "tough love" standard, de Blasio doesn't love the people on New York's crowded subways, or in Central Park, or standing on the streets watching the Blue Angels or Thunderbirds — and he especially doesn't love the city's Muslims:

Nothing to see here pic.twitter.com/kJHHgjeRAA

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) April 29, 2020

Ted Cruz was quick to spot the difference:

Would DeBlasio have sent this identical tweet with the word “Jewish” replaced by any other religious minority? If not, why not? Laws should be enforced neutrally w/o targeting religious faith. #ProtectFreeExercise https://t.co/dMVcX0bin4

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 29, 2020

When attacks on Jews were spiking, de Blassio was slow to act. Now he says he'll have the police arrest Jewish mourners. https://t.co/Hu0lYtK6i9

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 29, 2020

Writing at the Tablet, Liel Leibovitz was justly furious about de Blasio's ignoring other crowd situations in New York.  He believes that de Blasio was engaging in the oldest anti-Semitic game in the world — scapegoating Jews to avoid blame for his own conduct:

Also, you should probably ignore that the mayor's bungling of this crisis is already singled out as a world historical case study in disastrously inept management. After fighting parents, teachers, and his own advisers and insisting that the city's schools must remain open, de Blasio suddenly caved. On the morning of March 15 he went on television to assure New Yorkers that the schools won't be shut; that same afternoon, he shut them down. According to the NYC Department of Education, 68 school employees have died of COVID-19. The morning after he shut down the schools, Hizzoner hit the gym, flaunting the very social distancing guidelines his own administration had issued. The subway, as a recent MIT study has confirmed, continues to spread the virus quickly and efficiently to all corners of the city. Members of the mayor's own staff, according to multiple reports, are nearing revolt, describing a constantly quibbling boss who refuses to listen to evidence and is incapable of resolution. Multiple municipal agency heads have told Politico that the mayor did not provide any guidelines regarding how they were supposed to conduct their work remotely. His calculations, several aides reported, seemed motivated largely by how they might be interpreted by his political base.

Unfortunately, Comrade de Blasio is not the only leftist coming up with conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel and the Wuhan virus:

While much of the world languishes in coronavirus quarantine, anti-Israel forces around the globe scheme to exploit the crisis to attack the world's only Jewish state. From official Palestinian media to American Islamist activists and their enablers on the radical left, illiberal propagandists have come together to exploit the pandemic panic.

Those allied with the BDS movement against Israel are using COVID-19 as a rhetorical cudgel to delegitimize the Middle East's only thriving democracy. After spending years bashing the Jewish national home and hoping to force the Jews who live there to subsist as a defenseless minority, BDS proponents have predictably turned their attention to the coronavirus, seeking to manufacture links between the pandemic and Israel.

Linda Sarsour, former co-chair of the Women's March and a surrogate for Bernie Sanders's now ended presidential campaign, served as the keynote speaker for a Zoom meeting hosted by Jewish Voice for Peace, a group that, despite its name, is widely documented as anti-Jewish and anti-Israel. In her remarks, she portended Gaza's COVID-wrought demise, calling the virus a potential "entire death sentence for over 2 million people."

"That blood," she continued, "will be on the hands of the American people ... and Israel."

Things are so bad that even NPR has noticed an uptick in Wuhan virus–related anti-Semitism, although it naturally blames conservatives and Christians.  What NPR misses is that, as always, the anti-Semitic conservatives and Christians are fringe figures, while the leftists — people such as de Blasio and Sarsour — sit in the center of the Progressive power system in America.

All these anti-Semites should probably avoid any future plasma treatments for the Wuhan virus.  Those Orthodox Jews who have recovered from the virus (perhaps because they got the hydroxychloroquine treatment) have been donating blood for plasma treatments.

And as always, there's still humor to be found in almost any situation: