The Jewish holiday of Chanukah has two major symbols: the menorah and the dreidel.

The menorah, a candelabra with eight branches, and one light above, memorializes the liberation of the Temple from the religious persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Syrian-Greek ruler who had outlawed Judaism, and the other a spinning top recollects how Jewish children learning the word of G-d in the banned ‘hedge schools’ of ancient Israel would take out tops and pretend to be playing games when Antiochus’ inspectors arrived.

American Jewish children had lit menorahs and spun their dreidels for generations without imagining that an Antiochus would arise in America. Let alone that he would arise in New York.

In 2020, Chanukah came early when another abominable tyrant, fresh from killing 11,000 nursing home residents by forcing facilities to accept infected coronavirus patients, decided to adopt the medieval habit of blaming the virus on Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. A swarm of inspectors from every department were sent out to schools and then to the hidden schools.

And in 21st century America, children huddled in basements, afraid to make a noise, and then, if Cuomo’s men found them, were ready to claim that they weren’t in school, just playing games.

A month before Chanukah and Christmas, the Supreme Court's conservative justices, three of them appointed by President Trump, delivered a Christmas present in Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo and a Chanukah present in Agudath Israel of America v. Cuomo. Like his Syrian-Greek predecessor, Cuomo furiously raged at the restraint imposed on his power.

Cuomo’s hatred for religion is driven by the same mad idolization that had led Antiochus to take Epiphanes, ‘the visible god’, as part of his name. Antiochus had put idols in the temple, Cuomo had placed his self-idolizing coronavirus memoir into the windows of every bookstore.

That egotistical hatred of a G-d that isn’t a culture war idol, that isn’t named Cuomo, Obama, or Ginsberg, is why the battle for religious freedom is far from over in this longest of Chanukahs.

When the pandemic lockdowns arrived, I was still completing the mourning year for my mother. In Jewish tradition, losing a parent ushers in a year of grief. I did not listen to music or attend parties, and I spent an hour each day traveling to synagogue to lead prayer services in her memory. The recital of the Kaddish, praising G-d, is said to uplift the souls of the deceased.

And then all the synagogues were forced to close.

In a dark time when the New York Post dispatches undercover investigators to do Cuomo’s work for him and spy on Jewish weddings, when the media breathlessly digs up tales of secret prayer gatherings (“Post the names and addresses, expose them,” a quote in one Los Angeles article read, “If you have information and say nothing then you could be endangering lives”), few dare to speak of the underground prayer railroad. But what more needs to be said of the state of 21st century America than that there were underground churches and synagogues.

My mother was born in the Soviet Union. As a teenager, she had terrified her parents, who had witnessed their family members being imprisoned and executed, by rejecting Communism. After being expelled from school and barred from higher education, she had joined the Jewish underground networks that had gathered together in homes to sing Jewish songs, to illegally copy Hebrew dictionaries, commemorate the Holocaust, and covertly bake Matza for Passover.

Americans tend to think of such a loss of freedom as an alien and unimaginable state. This year taught us how thin the line that divides us from the age of Antiochus or the age of Stalin really is.

For now, the synagogues are open again and many of the religious schools in Los Angeles are teaching students though some, in an echo of the dreidel, are operating officially as day camps.

The Supreme Court decision that halted some of the declarations by the modern Antiochus and his Democrat peers that religion, unlike cannabis dispensaries and film shoots, is non-essential, would not have happened if President Trump and Senate Republicans hadn’t put Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court. When religious freedom hangs by the fraying thread of a single justice, even as Democrats plot to seize Georgia Senate seats and pack the court, then it’s hardly there even if for the moment some of the worst Democrat depredations were halted.

The tragic truth is that if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg were alive today, Chanukah would be cancelled. It would be cancelled with the connivance of her, and of Justice Breyer and Justice Kagan, much as Christmas would be cancelled with the connivance of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sotomayor. The irony of Tikkunolamists of Jewish descent lighting a menorah shaped like Ginsburg, to honor an activist who would have cancelled Chanukah escapes them, much as the problem with sacrificing pigs in the temple baffled Antiochus’ Jewish collaborators

Tikkunolamism is the modern Hellenism, a militant pagan secularism that idolizes utopian culture heroes while disdaining the intangible idea of the holy presence of an unseen G-d.

Antiochus placed idols in the temple and ordered that pigs be sacrificed because he only understood religion as power. To defile something sacred was to wield power over it. In their culture wars, leftists follow the same obsessive pattern of degradation, using elephant dung and urine on Christian symbols, draping naked women in the symbols of the Jewish faith, ridiculing Chanukah in the pages of the New York Times, and making the menorah into a mockery.

And when that doesn’t work, there’s always compulsion under the guise of a greater good.

Antiochus had taken the surname Epiphanes, meaning ‘the visible god’, to mock the invisible G-d. But the power of G-d had made a mockery of his armies, his blasphemies, and his rule.

The power of Chanukah, and of faith, is in the unseen, from the force that caused a single flask of oil to burn in the Menorah for eight days, to the covert Torah being studied by the children as they pretended to spin a top, to the hidden omnipotent might of an unseen G-d.

And this year, the suppression of public prayers made us appreciate them all the more.

Religious freedom and all that comes with it is all too often taken for granted. It can be difficult to relate to our ancestors who sacrificed so much for their faith when we don’t need to sacrifice. When the mandates, decrees, and lockdowns came down, we saw the unseen, the preciousness and precariousness of our religious freedom, that we had taken for granted.

Out of the dark times, we experienced the smallest taste of what our ancestors had endured to keep the faith, and through that renewed the meaning to be found in holidays like Chanukah.

Religious people respond to religious persecution by seeing the unseen. It is the unseen that is the source of faith in a world that places its confidence in material power above all else. And the insights and the might of the unseen make a mockery of the worst of that blasphemous power.

Another Chanukah arrives in a world in which Antiochus can be found in Albany, New York, in which the synagogues and schools open today might be forced to be shut tomorrow, and in which the ideological faction that makes a point of defiling Chanukah along with most religion, which would close most houses of worship if it could, plots to lay claim to the White House.

When George Washington visited the family of a Jewish officer, a story relates that he told them of first encountering the Menorah in the hands of a Jewish soldier at Valley Forge.

"Perhaps we are not as lost as our enemies would have us believe. I rejoice in the Maccabees' success, though it is long past,'' Washington had supposedly said. "It pleases me to think that miracles still happen."

Even in the darkest period of a dark year, we are not as lost as our enemies would have us believe. Neither the trials nor the triumphs of faith are long past. And miracles still happen.

Before Thanksgiving, Los Angeles imposed a curfew and, in a shocking oversight, asked Hollywood to follow it. While the entertainment industry isn't as big a part of the local economy as it would like you to think, its producers, directors, and stars provide a disproportionate share of the capital that the Democrats politicians who run the place use to get elected to higher office.

After ordering Hollywood to restrict filming to the same curfew as other businesses, a few hours later the order was withdrawn followed by a final plea to film shoots to “to voluntarily limit and/or avoid activities likely to invite a negative community response" which could "jeopardize community confidence in our ability to operate safely."

As if allowing movie studios to shoot around the clock while shutting down small businesses might "invite a negative community response" or raise questions about the corrupt system.

The film permit office now claims that “the State of California has viewed workers supporting the film, television and commercial production industry… as essential for the state’s critical infrastructure.”

What role does shooting movies play in the “critical infrastructure” of California? Money.

Not for the economy. In that regard, the entertainment industry is much less crucial than many of the industries that had been shut down by the lockdowns. With unemployment claims topping 8 million and California Democrat leaders fighting to eliminate freelance workers, that’s a drop in the bucket. If the crews in question were working in restaurants, they wouldn’t matter.

But the critical infrastructure that Hollywood funds is the political ambitions of the Democrats.

During the gubernatorial race, Hollywood poured millions into Newsom’s campaign, and celebrity fundraising helped put Garcetti into the mayor’s office. The Democrat with the biggest haul of industry cash usually wins. Your local pizza shop isn’t going to compete with that.

If only there were some sort of industry dedicated to exposing social injustice using art.

While restaurants spent a fortune prepping to meet the new regulations, only to be shut down anyway, the entertainment industry goes into a new lockdown with nothing to worry about.

All of this is happening under the watch of Muntu Davis, LA’s top health officer who was picked in the wake of the Black Lives Matter race riots to implement “equity”. Equity is now the top value at LA County's Department of Public Health which declares that it seeks to "ensure just systems, policies and practices". That means giving Disney a pass, but shutting down cafes.

This is what social justice lockdowns look like. Not just in LA, but across the country.

"New York City's economy is in a downturn, but film production has been a bright spot," a New York Times article chirps. Even while Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio targeted Chassidic Jews, ranting about weddings and synagogues, the entertainment industry and its allied media were exempted, and the accompanying rules were bent and broken.

Even while Democrat leaders were lecturing about the dangers of church and synagogue services, the Video Music Awards went on and celebrities were allowed to dodge curfew.

Since no election could go forward without Saturday Night Live, the high school talent show staffed by unfunny social justice activists, with occasional celebrity cameos, went forward, along with a live studio audience. Cuomo and De Blasio, not to mention the media, decided not to notice that SNL was flouting the rules by paying audience members so they counted as crew.

Having a live audience of Manhattanites to laugh when you howl insults at President Trump is an essential activity in New York. Unlike irresponsible, non-essential stuff like religious services.

As the New York Times notes, "The major studios... all report that they are full." 559 permits have been granted and 35 series are already filming in the city even though, as one studio boss notes, “one person every week or two test positive somewhere on the lot.” Unlike churches or synagogues, or weddings, these shoots are never described as superspreader events.

In a truly surreal scene, New Amsterdam, a TV drama, was caught filming outside Bellevue Hospital, blocking the path of real doctors and nurses, a population prone to infections. Even while Democrat leaders complain that there aren’t enough hospital beds, the NBC medical drama takes up space in and around hospitals while getting a free pass from the authorities.

The Times story noted that, “the large crew found it impossible to perfectly socially distance” and leaves it at that, while photos show no actual social distancing by the crews.

But the New York Times has its own Hollywood studio deals involving the 1619 Project.

Governor Cuomo is so dependent on entertainment industry cash that he flew out to California for fundraisers, including one organized in Beverly Hills by the MPAA featuring major studio heads with tickets going for as much as $50,000. This year, Cuomo held a fundraiser for his birthday featuring movie stars who praised him for protecting Hollywood's tax credits.

Those $420 million in tax credits are a net loss for the state, but a gain for Cuomo. That tops California’s film tax credit total of $330 million.

Cuomo had been insisting that the “state has no money”, and was threatening to cut first responders. He even tried to tax volunteers who came to help during the pandemic.

"We're not in a position to provide any subsidies right now," Cuomo falsely claimed. Then he called for maintaining the same insane level of Hollywood subsidies, and went further by making sure that only the big studios who fund his corrupt ambitions cash in on the $420 million.

After claiming that there would be no money to pay police, no money for anything, New York State kept the $420 million in subsidies but limited it to studios spending over $1 million.

The “state has no money” for cops and firefighters, but has $420 million for Hollywood.

Just to bring the corruption up to Chicago levels, Cuomo's proposal made sure that Saturday Night Live, but no new productions, would get access to the $420 million subsidy. If only there were some talented political satirists with a weekend show who could mock this crookedness.

Back in California, Disney's Captain Marvel got $20 million in tax credits in California. Netflix's 13 Reasons Why, which has been blamed for encouraging teenage suicide, vacuumed up over $40 million. You can’t expect one of the wealthiest companies in America to set off a spike in teenage suicides and promote pedophilia without some serious taxpayer subsidies.

When California and New York dole out $750 million in tax breaks to some of the wealthiest donors in a powerful industry who fund the political ambitions of top Democrats like Newsom and Cuomo, there’s no reason to expect their projects to be subjected to everyone else’s rules.

That’s why the order to limit film shoots to the 7 AM to 10 PM curfew was quickly pulled in LA. The county may be banning public gatherings, and destroying the last surviving small businesses who were on their last legs, but film shoots are back at half of pre-pandemic levels.

And that’s not just in America.

The UK has some of the most onerous lockdowns around, and its order shut down clothing stores, mobile phone shops, cafes, hotels, museums and “places of worship”, but left open "professional film and TV filming". Religion is non-essential, but television must go on.

There has been a great deal of discussion about the harm caused by the lockdowns to the livelihoods of tens of millions of people, but there’s been little discussion about who has been exempted from lockdown restrictions and their corrupt political and economic rationales.

The best leverage against lockdown self-righteousness is the exposure of the hypocritical and discriminatory treatment that closes small businesses while leaving giants like Amazon and Target, Disney and Netflix, wealthier than ever because of the lockdowns that benefit them.

The LA Film Office warned productions about a “negative community response”. It’s about time.

Last year, President Trump called Baltimore a "disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess".

Speaker Pelosi responded by calling Trump’s comments “racist attacks”. Vox claimed that Trump was using “racist tropes” and US News conducted a fact check accusing him of racism.

Now the rat race numbers are in. Orkin, the past control company, ratted out the "rattiest cities" and Baltimore has broken through into the top 10 for the first time. Like a rat clambering after a piece of moldy cheese, Charm City leaped up four places to be America’s 8th rattiest city.

Baltimore has never been able to deny that it’s a rat-infested hellhole. But Democrats and their media are good at deflecting with false accusations of racism and then changing the subject.

"If there are problems here, rodents included, they are as much his responsibility as anyone's, perhaps more because he holds the most powerful office in the land,” the Baltimore Sun had retorted in an editorial after President Trump’s criticism of the terrible conditions in the city.

But there’s one thing that the rattiest cities in America have in common. And it isn’t Trump.

In Chicago, rated as the rattiest city in the country six times in a row, 83% of residents, dead or alive, legal or illegal, human or rat, voted for Hillary. The last time Chicago had a Republican mayor was 1931 and the ratty city has no official Republican members on its city council.

It does however have multiple socialist city council members.

Despite promises by Democrat officials, the city’s rat problem only keeps getting worse.

In May, rat complaints nearly doubled even as officials insisted that there were no more rats.

“It doesn’t mean that there’s a lot more rats. People are seeing them, and they are calling,” Josie Cruz, the Deputy Commissioner of the Bureau of Rodent Control, argued.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel had created the bureau with 120 employees and a $10 million budget.

Cruz has been on this job for at least two decades and tens of thousands of rat complaints keep coming in. Chicago has tried dry ice, spears, and rat birth control. The one thing it hasn’t tried is getting rid of the Democrat rats that have burrowed deep into its municipal government.

The number of rat complaints in Chicago rose from 32,855 in 2014 to 50,963 in 2017. That’s 1,876 complaints for every 100,000 people. And since exterminator folklore has it that there are 10 rats you don’t see for every rat you do see, that means Chicago has half a million rats.

If they just registered to vote, the Democrats would never lose Illinois.

What makes Chicago so much more rat-infested than other cities? The answer lies with a corrupt Democrat system in which trash pickup and rodent removal was controlled by local aldermen who could use it for political patronage. The system was finally abandoned in 2013 but the rats had gotten too much of a head start and have burrowed throughout the city.

But that’s just what happens when a city votes for Democrats. First Democrats, then rats.

Hillary Clinton became the first Democrat to get over 70% of the vote in Los Angeles County. Not coincidentally, Los Angeles is once again in second place as the 2nd most rat infested hellhole in the nation. In New York City, Hillary Clinton won 79% of the vote. It’s unknown if the rats voted, but if they did it was probably as a bloc because the city is 3rd in the rat race.

The rat problem in Los Angeles and New York is easily traceable to its vagrant population.

Democrat politicians had embraced living on the street as a protected and subsidized activity. A typhus outbreak followed in Los Angeles. The disease, which is carried by fleas living on rats, centered around Skid Row, the epicenter of the city’s homeless population. The ban on evicting vagrants or preventing them from covering the streets in filth has been a boot for the rats.

And Los Angeles Democrats even took special steps to protect the rats by banning rat poison.

Like every other quality of life problem, New York City’s rat crisis turned critical under De Blasio.

According to Open the Books, there were 44,850 rat sightings in Brooklyn and 33,553 in Manhattan alone. Despite spending $32 million and a trap that drowns rats in liquor, there’s no end in sight. A 2014 study estimated that there were over 2 million rats in New York City. At the rate at which rats reproduce, there will soon be more rats than Democrats in the Big Apple.

In Washington D.C., the 4th rattiest city in America, Hillary Clinton won 86% of the vote. In San Francisco, the 5th rattiest city, 84% of residents voted for Hillary.

It's only fitting that the rats should be overrunning D.C.

When visiting the Lincoln Memorial before President Trump's inauguration, I saw a rat scurrying up the stairs. Even the Washington Post, the city's official rat paper, has run headlines like, "I saw 13 rats in 20 minutes. D.C., we have a rodent crisis."

Rat complaints in D.C. rose from 2,443 in 2014 to 4,097 in 2019.

Mayor Muriel Bowser responded with rat tours dubbed "Rat Walks". They haven’t helped.

To no one’s surprise, Capitol Hill has the third highest number of rat complaints in D.C.

Meanwhile, San Francisco had legalized public vagrancy, resulting in streets that were covered in human waste. Like Los Angeles, Democrats banned some forms of rat poison making it all but impossible to kill them. Exterminators are so in demand that they have waiting lists.

"Poop. Needles. Rats. Homeless camp pushes SF neighborhood to the edge," the San Francisco Chronicle headlined one story. And then there are San Fran locals like "rat girl" who breeds and releases hundreds of rats in the city.

No wonder, San Fran has as many rats as Democrats.

Detroit is once again the 6th rattiest city in America. Motor City rats are also car enthusiasts and have been known to crawl into cars, chew up the fuel injection system, or nest in the dashboard. One mechanic reported 15 cars damaged by rats in six weeks.

And that might not be the only thing the rats are chewing up.

Too many votes were registered in 37% of Detroit's precincts during the 2016 election, but it wasn't enough to hand Hillary a win in Michigan. This time out there might be more rats.

Philadelphia rose 3 places to become the 7th most rat-infested city in the country.

"They look like cats to me," one resident complained. Another neighborhood described “jumping rats” operating in broad daylight.

82% of Philadelphia residents voted for Hillary Clinton and only 15% for President Trump.

While there isn’t a firm statistical correlation between the number of rats per square mile and the number of votes cast for Democrats, any city infested with rats is also infested with Democrats.

And vice versa.

It’s no coincidence that the most rat-infested cities in the country are also the places where Hillary, and any Democrat with a pulse, will walk away with at least 70% of the vote.

Minneapolis, unsurprisingly, Denver, and Baltimore round out the rest of the top 10. What unites all of them is an unswerving allegiance to the Democrats and a massive rat problem. Of the 20 rattiest cities in America, only two have Republican mayors.

Baltimore does indeed have rats. It also has two kinds of elected Democrat officials: those who have already been convicted of a crime and those who have not. Charm City is unique in the number of city officials who have been arrested and tried for assorted forms of corruption.

As long as someone rats them out.

The Baltimore City Council consists entirely of Democrats. Baltimore's last Democrat mayor won three quarters of the vote. Baltimore's rat problem has been growing with its Democrat problem.

A Baltimore City Health Department report conceded that “the rodent infestation rate in Baltimore is six times the national average.” And, unlike other cities, Baltimore has mostly given up. Rats are the city’s unofficial mascot, showing up on souvenir t-shirts and sweatshirts.

From “Charm City” to The City That Reads” to “The Greatest City in America”, Baltimore has tried out many slogans. But there’s only one that really fits it.

Rat City.

Meanwhile the fallout from Mayor Pugh's arrest, conviction and sentencing on fraud and conspiracy charges, continues to reverberate through the Democrat establishment.

Rat City has many rats, but maybe they aren’t Baltimore’s biggest problem. Democrats are.

Every year, Shiite Muslims in Flushing, Queens conduct the Arbaeen, a procession in honor of Mohammed's grandson whose death at the hands of a Sunni caliph marked the pivotal break between Shiites and Sunnis, slapping their faces and chests for their beheaded Imam Hussein.

Queens now has a large Muslim population, and regular fall processions of wailing crowds.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose horrifying move forcing nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients may have killed between 6,000 and 11,000 senior citizens, has vowed to crack down.

On Jewish weddings.

“Whether it’s young people at a bar or religious people at a wedding, it’s the same thing to me. It’s ignorant, it’s disrespectful and it violates the law,” Cuomo fumed.

Religious people being ignorant, disrespectful, and violating the law by attending a wedding is awful. But when celebrities want to perform at MTV’s VMA awards, they get a special exemption from quarantine regulations because Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, and Miley Cyrus gyrating on a stage is respectful, whereas the communal celebration of G-d and family life is disrespectful.

During the 1980s, the place where George Washington stood with his men as the Declaration of Independence was read out loud, had become a grimy hellhole full of junkies, crazies, and muggers.

City Hall Park, nestled between the Woolworth Building, once the tallest building in the world, and the modest capital building of what had been the greatest city in the world, had become the tragic symbol of its decline. Under Democrats, the park was dirty and unsafe during the day, and even worse at night. Tourists couldn’t believe that junkies and muggers prowled right outside the halls of city government.

"When I was United States Attorney from 1983 to 1989, almost every day I would look out my window and see City Hall Park. And I would see a park that looked terrible. And it seemed to me that people say something about themselves when they let the most important area of their city look bad and deteriorated," Mayor Giuliani said at the park's rededication.

The renovation put up a replica of the 1820s fence, brought in a Victorian fountain, and restored the statue of Nathan Hale, the patriot who was hung elsewhere in Manhattan, though many other patriots were executed by the British on a gallows a few hundred feet away. The renovation remade City Hall Park from a symbol of despair to hope and symbolized the rebirth of New York City.

Now, garbage and filth are spread out everywhere, along with posters of George Floyd and BLM graffiti.



"I promised then that we would restore City Hall Park to the beauty that it had in the 19th century, so that it could symbolize the regeneration, the rebirth, the reinvention of the city of New York," Giuliani said in his speech, calling it a “a final gift from the 20th century to New Yorkers of the 21st.”

The gift has been rejected by the radicals and racists who have taken over New York and hate beauty.

The sidewalks have been defaced, everything is covered in graffiti, and the sacred ground over which the grass lies is littered with tents, sleeping bags, and soiled with worse things by Occupy City Hall.

The walls of the beautiful Surrogate's Courthouse's building, a Beaux Arts confection inspired by the Paris Opera, have been covered in hateful Black Lives Matter slogans, including "Kill Pigs", and if you stop by at the right time, you can see a dummy in a police uniform and a pig mask being hung.

The occupiers renamed the historic park, Abolition Park, demanding the abolition of the NYPD, while behind them are the ghosts of two fallen towers where so many of New York’s Finest gave their lives.

Instead, great buildings are scrawled with the names of criminals who died in confrontations with police.

The resurrection of City Hall Park was a symbol of hope, its transformation into Abolition Park by its new occupiers is a symbol of darkness and despair. While the Democrats and their media allies cheered the defilement of the park, the consequences of turning back the clock on New York City quickly kicked in.

One of the occupiers went after a camera crew and a reporter was hit in the face with a 2-by-4.

That was one of a number of violent encounters between the occupiers and the media. City Hall Park has become so dangerous that government employees and local residents who had paid top dollar to live in some of the area’s new luxury skyscrapers avoid it. And the occupiers, many of whom are vagrants and junkies, have taken to staging violent battles with each other in full view of the police.

The occupiers claim that the problems are the result of "unlearning and relearning” things like ownership and safety. What they’re actually relearning is the same thing that their nearby Occupy Wall Street predecessors had learned about what happens when you set up an illegal encampment.

Get rid of the police, and the junkies, the pushers, and the crazies come back.

In the City Hall Park area, the police have been defunded, and are referring all complaints to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office. Local residents claim that the NYPD has been told by De Blasio not to interfere.

City Hall Park has a long history of violent unrest by Democrat thugs.

During the Civil War, a mob of Democrats had descended on the New York Tribune building, currently the site of the Pace University tower on the other side of City Hall Park. Horace Greeley, whose statue is one of those still standing in the park, had run the preeminent Republican newspaper of the day.

Democrat thugs had attacked police precincts and were coming for the Republicans in the Tribune.

Henry Jarvis Raymond, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, and co-founder of the New York Times, set up Gatling guns to take on the Democrat mob.

The rioting and looting tore apart the city because New York's Democrat leaders, like their successors today, had made common cause with the mob and were hoping that the unrest would contribute to Lincoln's defeat. While the Democrats were willing to let the city burn, President Lincoln acted.

The military set up artillery at City Hall Park, business owners armed their workers to protect their stores, and forty-pound bombshells from the Navy were even set up to be launched. Soldiers used bayonets and howitzers and broke the Democrat mob rioting and looting across New York City.

Governor Seymour, the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and the party’s future presidential candidate, who had called the rioters, “my friends”, went down to defeat next year.

That is how Republicans used to deal with Democrat riots.

“I stood on the steps of City Hall and I looked out at this park, as I had done many, many times, and what I saw was not the kind of park that New York City should have,” Giuliani said at the rededication. “That day I led everyone in reciting the Athenian Oath of Fealty, to the city of Athens,” And the final words of that oath are, ‘To pledge to transmit this city, not only not less, but far greater and more beautiful, than it was transmitted to us.’”

Bill de Blasio, a crony of Dinkins, whose support for rioters and criminals had brought the city to its knees, came to office with a very different message that declared that New York City was racist.

The era of New York City’s rebirth, of public safety, of clean streets and nice parks, was over.

Giuliani had left City Hall Park as a legacy of what he had stood for. De Blasio is leaving City Hall Park, with its needles and human waste, its hateful Black Lives Matter graffiti and violent fights, as his legacy. While City Hall Park was finally cleared out by the NYPD, it's only a temporary move.

It's not just Bill de Blasio’s legacy. It’s the legacy that the Democrats have always left. Whether it was in 1863 or 1963, the urban legacy of the Democrats is crime, riots, and blight. And if you doubt that New York City is a Democrat hellhole once more, look at a photo of City Hall Park now and then.

That’s not just what the Democrats have done to the place where George Washington once stood.

It’s what they’ve done to the great cities of this nation. And it’s what they intend to do to America.

Once again, just as in 1863, Republicans are the only thing standing between the Democrats and the utter ruin of a great city and a great nation at the hands of violent mobs and its Democrat leaders.

NYPD Twitter accounts, like most official government social media, are usually boring. So it was highly unusual when the police account for South Manhattan blasted the borough’s DA.

“Manhattan DA Cy Vance where are you? No show at any shooting scene!!! Our community is being attacked, there have been 24 people shot in the city in the past 24 hours....Where Are You!!!,” the official police account blared after a bloody July 4th weekend.

"Complete No Show in Manhattan North!! Shame!!" the account for Manhattan North chimed in.

The Manhattan district attorney’s poor relationship with the police had cratered when he announced that he was giving Black Lives Matter rioters a pass. That included the BLM racist who had scrawled obscene and hateful graffiti on the walls of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

In response, the NYPD pulled away officers assigned to Vance's office to handle crowd control.



But Cyrus Vance Jr., the son of Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, who had resigned to protest Carter’s approval of a military operation to rescue the Iran hostages, has other priorities.

Even as Vance failed to stop the BLM orgy of rioting and looting, he charged Amy Cooper, a woman walking her dog who became the star of an out of context viral video after calling 911 during an argument in Central Park, to burnish his credentials with the racist hate group.

And he pursued a Supreme Court case to get hold of President Trump’s tax returns.

While New York City was enduring a horrifying wave of violence, with 10 dead in 30 shootings in just one Sunday, Vance was busy fighting a national battle against President Trump. Even as the NYPD was shaming Vance for refusing to come to the scenes of the shootings bloodying the city, Manhattan’s aristocratic DA was busy burnishing his image with leftist virtue signaling.

Shootings are up 130% and burglaries are up 118%, but Vance was busy hailing his “tremendous victory” in the Supreme Court, not for New Yorkers, but for the Democrat Party.

Vance has never been especially interested in conventional crime anyway. The blue-blooded official, who despises the men and women in blue, had blown through almost $250,000 on dining and travel expenses in 5 years by doing things like staying at a five-star hotel in Paris and a London hotel with a rooftop pool overlooking St. Paul’s.

The money came out of the $800 million asset forfeiture fund under Vance’s control which has also been used to send cash to pro-crime groups and legal aid societies. The Manhattan DA’s office is effectively funding its own opposition in court while Vance lives the high life.

And that money is helping protect criminals and put them back on the street.

While Vance has been demanding to see President Trump’s taxes, and even went to the Supreme Court for his fishing expedition, it’s his own finances that ought to be under scrutiny.

After a model complained about being assaulted by Harvey Weinstein, Vance's office chose not to prosecute. One of Weinstein's lawyers was Vance's former law partner who had donated $24,000 to the DA and then another $10,000 after the case was dropped.

That money was part of the over $2 million that Vance had gotten from lawyers and law firms.

Like any good public servant, Vance promptly ordered an "independent review" of his donations by a non-profit partly funded by the corporate intelligence company that had gone after Harvey Weinstein's accusers. And whose corporate chairman had, obviously, donated to Vance.

Vance's office had pursued the "investigation" of the assault by Harvey Weinstein by pressuring the victim's roommates into portraying her as a stripper or a prostitute.

The NYPD’s Manhattan Twitter accounts may have tried to shame Vance, but he has no shame.

In 2011, Vance’s office had asked a judge to reduce Jeffrey Epstein’s sex offender status to the lowest possible level which would have kept the pedophile off a public registry of sex offenders.

The Board of Examiners of Sex Offenders had rated Epstein at a high risk of reoffending.

“I have to tell you, I’m a little overwhelmed because I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like this,” Justice Ruth Pickholz replied.

But Vance and his office often do things you never seen a prosecutor do before.

Even while New Yorkers are being shot at rates that are taking the city back to the worst days of the 70s and 80s, Vance is obsessively going after associates of President Trump.

Vance is not only chasing Trump's taxes all the way to the Supreme Court, while ignoring the NYPD's outcry over the death toll in Manhattan, he’s also chasing Paul Manafort.

Vance's pursuit of Manafort was already shut down on double jeopardy grounds, but the Trump-chasing DA isn't about to give up on trying the already imprisoned campaign figure on charges of conspiracy and mortgage fraud because Manafort claimed that his daughter was living in his SoHo condo on his mortgage application, when he was actually renting it on AirBnB.

If everyone in New York who did that sort of thing were put on trial, the prisons would be full.

Meanwhile, when asked about the huge jump in shootings, the Manhattan DA, flailed, claiming, “You can’t put your finger on what the precise thing is. We’re in the middle of a pandemic where 25,000 New Yorkers have died. So, I think there is fear. There is anger.”

The vast majority of New York City’s pandemic deaths affected senior citizens. That has nothing to do with why gang members are shooting each other on street corners and Vance knows it.

But Vance also knows that he’s facing multiple radical challengers, including a Muslim opponent backed by Linda Sarsour, and that the best way to triumph is by giving the finger to the cops, freeing criminals, denying that the crime wave has anything to do with the jailbreaks, and obsessively pursuing President Trump and his associates on the flimsiest of pretexts.

And that will help Vance win reelection so he can keep on staying at Parisian five-star hotels.

The real bread and butter of the Manhattan DA’s office isn’t putting away the muggers, murderers, rapists, and burglars who are terrorizing the borough like never before. It’s the $800 million slush fund that financed Vance’s lifestyle. And it’s the donations from lawyers and law firms that have stopped coming in once the conflicts of interest grew too serious.

And, without the legal cash, Vance’s best fundraising pitch is going to be targeting Trump.

That’s why Vance is throwing everything he has at President Trump and his associates while the bodies pile up in the hospitals and the morgues. Even as New Yorkers are shot and killed by the criminals that he ought to be putting away, he knows that his fate will be determined by how incompetently he fights crime and how vigorously he pursues the political enemies of the Left.

That’s why Amy Cooper was charged and the BLM vandal of St. Patrick’s Cathedral wasn’t. It’s why Vance is threatening cops and freeing BLM rioters. The worse Vance is at fighting crime and the better he is at fighting Trump, the more likely he is to win over Democrat voters.

And that’s why the bodies and the Trump lawsuits are piling up in New York City.

In April, Governor Gretchen Whitmer posed and primped on The Daily Show in a “That Woman from Michigan” t-shirt as a narcissistic slam at President Trump. That same month, that woman from Michigan issued an executive order, that the Daily Show and SNL didn’t mention, "protecting" residents of long-term care facilities, by forcing nursing homes to admit patients infected with the coronavirus.

Her order dictated that a "long-term care facility must not prohibit admission or readmission of a resident based on COVID-19 testing requirements or results" and told hospitals to discharge coronavirus patients back to the homes they had come from. Some nursing homes were designated as ‘hubs’ and coronavirus patients were transferred into them, even though these facilities had uninfected residents.

Despite claims that these ‘hubs’ would carefully separate infected and uninfected patients, that didn’t always happen. While there had been a plan to move coronavirus seniors to the 1,000 bed TCF Center in Detroit which was being used as an overflow hospital for coronavirus patients, they were instead sent to nursing homes. The TCF Center only ended up treating 39 patients before being mothballed.

As of now, at least 687 nursing home residents in Michigan have died in the pandemic and 290 coronavirus patients have been placed in Michigan nursing homes. These numbers are incomplete.

Next time, Governor Whitmer goes on the Daily Show, she can wear a new t-shirt, “Grandma Killer”.

 

In New York, Governor Cuomo’s Health Department had issued an order on March 25th to "expand hospital capacity" by forcing nursing homes to "comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals to NHs" and warned facilities that, "no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19."

It took over 5,000 deaths for Cuomo to partially reverse his grandma-killing policy which had killed 5% of residents of nursing homes in the state. It was a partial reversal, because nursing homes still couldn’t remove infected patients, but hospitals were no longer allowed to discharge infected patients to homes.

Cuomo has argued that no one should be prosecuted for nursing home deaths because they would have died anyway. “Older people… are going to die from this virus,” he argued, dismissing the outrage of the families of the dead. “I don't think there's any logical rationale to say that they would be alive today.”

"We've tried everything to keep it out of a nursing home, but it's virtually impossible," he falsely claimed.

His grandma-killing administration had tried everything, except providing protective equipment, not sending infected patients into nursing homes, or removing infected patients from nursing homes.

Cuomo had tried everything to stop killing grandmas, except not killing grandmas.

On March 31st, New Jersey Commissioner of Health Judith Persichilli issued an order stating that in order to achieve "the expedited receipt of patients/residents discharging from hospitals", "no patient/resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the post-acute care setting solely based on a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19." It was a virtual copy of the earlier New York State order.

New Jersey’s own nursing home death toll is approaching New York’s 5,000 death toll.

10,000 dead grandmas and grandpas haven’t dented the media’s adoration for Cuomo and Murphy. To paraphrase another leftist, a single dead grandma is a tragedy, 10,000 dead grandmas are a statistic.

But before New York and New Jersey had even made their move, Governor Tom Wolf’s grandma-killing administration had ordered Pennsylvania nursing homes to accept "readmissions for current residents who have been discharged from the hospital" in order to "alleviate the increasing burden in the acute care settings" including "patients who have had the COVID-19 virus."

Wolf’s Secretary of Health, Dr. Richard (Rachel) Levine, had transferred his own mother out of a nursing home and to a hotel.

“Dr. Levine has done a phenomenal job of making sure that we do what we need to do in keeping Pennsylvanians safe,” Governor Wolf insisted.

That phenomenal job amounts to 2,529 coronavirus deaths in nursing homes or 68% of the state's deaths.

On March 30th, Governor Newsom’s administration warned skilled nursing facilities that they "shall not refuse to admit or readmit a resident based on their status as a suspected or confirmed COVID-19 case."

“California’s directive is nothing less than a death sentence for countless residents," warned Patricia McGinnis, executive director of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform.

“I’m not taking in a COVID-positive patient for the sole purpose of emptying one hospital bed. In two weeks, I’m sending them back 20 new patients,” Dr. Noah Marco, the Chief Medical Officer of the Los Angeles Jewish Home, said. Half of California's deaths, or 1,276, have occurred in nursing homes, though not all are the SNFs that were ordered to accept coronavirus patients.

Whitmer, Cuomo, Wolf, and Newsom have been widely praised by the media, even though their disastrous policies likely led to the deaths of thousands of senior citizens in nursing homes. There were states that got it right, protecting senior citizens by barring the transfer of coronavirus patients to nursing homes, requiring negative tests before a transfer, and creating separate facilities.

Cuomo, Wolf, Whitmer, and Newsom, not only failed to protect nursing home residents, but their forced readmission policy brought infected patients directly into nursing homes, leading to mass death.

5% of the residents in New York nursing homes are dead, that’s grandma-killing on a genocidal scale.

While New York had banned testing as a basis for nursing home admission, in Florida, a “COVID-19 test must be negative prior to transfer to a post-acute facility”.

Governor DeSantis noted that his ban on sending coronavirus patients to nursing homes is the reason why the nursing home death toll was 13 times higher in New York and 25 times higher in New Jersey.

The media falsely claims that after at least 12,000 dead grandmas and grandpas Cuomo, Whitmer, Murphy, and Newsom did a wonderful job, and DeSantis did a terrible one. Their measure of success isn’t in grandmas saved, but in small businesses shut down, people terrified, and government power made absolute.

And if the media gets to write the history of the pandemic, that is what our children will be taught.

They will learn that in an emergency, wise governors listening to learned experts deprived people of their civil liberties and stopped a catastrophe that could have been much worse. That revisionist history will become the model for handling future crises. A big lie paid for in countless thousands of lives.

The big lie must not be allowed to stand and the truth must shake our political system until it rings.

"Who can we prosecute for those deaths? Nobody. Mother Nature, God?" Cuomo asked rhetorically.

Governor Cuomo says that no one should be prosecuted for the nursing home deaths. He’s wrong. The prosecutions should begin with him and tear through the bureaucrats who made and implemented those decisions. Millions of people trusted Cuomo and other Democrat officials to keep them safe. Instead they seized power, abused their authority, and killed enough grandmas to fill miles of cemetery.

The grandma-killing governors must be brought to justice.

When a violent thug was shot by a police officer in a small city in Missouri, the Obama administration came down on Ferguson with an iron fist. How is it possible that thousands of nursing home residents can die, that grandmothers and grandfathers, that 127 veterans in New Jersey’s state-run nursing homes, that 5% of New York’s nursing home population can perish with less care than the concern about a thug?

What do we amount to as a country if we not only let that happen, but let them get away with it?

Thousands of men and women who worked all their lives and paid their taxes, who raised families, who wanted to watch their grandchildren grow up, died in large enough numbers that their bodies piled up in sheds, and the same nation that ground to a halt for Michael Brown and Freddie Gray shrugs. Where is even a fraction of the outrage that has been lavished on Ahmaud Aubrey for those thousands of wrinkled men and women, black and white, gasping out their last breaths in nursing home beds?

Cuomo, Whitmer, Murphy, and Newsom did not believe that they were worth saving. If we do not speak the truth, if we do not fight for justice for them, then are we as a nation really worth saving?

Early on Easter morning on Clifford Ave, 3 people were shot. 2 of them recovered, but 1 did not.

The triple shooting in Rochester was one of a series of brutal gangland assaults in the upstate New York metropolitan area. Justin ‘Tookie’ McMillan's shooting by Dvontea Alexander marked the eighth murder in Rochester. Tookie’s social media photos showed him flashing stacks of hundred-dollar bills and gang signals. Dvontea Alexander, his alleged shooter, appeared to have a previous criminal record.

Dvontea was quickly arrested and charged. As with the aftermath of any gang-related shooting, social media quickly filled up with local comments alternately mourning or celebrating Tookie’s death.

After Tookie’s murder, a large crowd gathered on Clifford Ave to pay tribute to the dead man. Candles were lit, balloons were inflated, and empty bottles of Remy Martin cognac lined the sidewalk outside the corner convenience store.


Vigils after shootings in Rochester aren’t unusual. And even in the age of the Wuhan Virus, the vigils were going on. But the Tookie vigil drew over 200 people and attracted the attention of the authorities.

Mayor Lovely Warren said that she drove by the vigil and decided to allow it to continue.

“Knowing our community and knowing the passion and the need to mourn we decided that we were going to allow the community to come together yesterday to mourn the life that was lost,” she opined. “Yesterday that’s what this community needed and that is what we allowed to happen because it was done in a peaceful way and it was safe and we were able to keep eyes on it."

Police Chief La'Ron Singletary argued that, "Force could've been used to remove the crowd. Officers would've certainly liked to use force and increase the likelihood of an officer contracting COVID, if someone was a carrier of COVID in that crowd.”

Both Lovely and La’Ron were essentially arguing that people needed an outlet for their grief, and that trying to break up the vigil would have led to violence. Meanwhile, Lovely’s administration had been closing down playgrounds and removing basketball rims to keep people from gathering outside.

Monroe County Executive Adam Bello, a Democrat, condemned "incendiary" rhetoric about the vigil. Meanwhile he had been telling local residents to wear masks, threatening to close public parks, and complaining that too many people were going shopping. “We need to think about why we’re going to those stores, and how many people from each household is going to those stores," he scolded.

At the end of that same month, Rabbi Chaim Mertz passed away in Brooklyn from the Wuhan Virus at the age of 73. Rabbi Mertz was the leader of the Tola’as Yaakov Chassidic movement which took its name, "Worm of Jacob", from Isaiah 41:14, which reads, 'Fear not, O worm of Jacob, the numberer of Israel; "I have helped you," says the Lord, and your redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.'"

Rabbi Mertz's father had survived the Holocaust, losing a wife and 5 children. After remarrying, he fled Communist tyranny in Hungary in the fifties, and came to this country where he founded a small obscure synagogue in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. True to the name of their movement, both father and son were known as pious and humble religious leaders who would try to blend into crowds.

While the Tola’as Yaakov movement was tiny and Rabbi Mertz's synagogue rarely had more than two dozen congregants, the Mertz family was loved by its fellow Hungarian Chassidic Satmar dynasty which is also based out of Williamsburg. While the Mertz family had been humbly expecting a small turnout and had arranged with the NYPD to allow well-wishers to pay their respects, a large number of Satmar Chassidim also arrived to pay tribute to a man whom their religious leader had greatly respected.

The Mertz family had planned for a socially distanced procession with people wearing masks and walking down a closed street at the proper lengths from each other. Community groups tried to maintain order, handing out masks to new arrivals, and urging them to keep their distance. The larger than expected crowd led the NYPD to order everyone to disperse, but without a proper sense of direction, people didn’t know where to go and began to mill around up against the police barricades.

That was when Mayor Bill de Blasio arrived on the scene, later claiming that he needed to be there personally to break up the event. “I went there myself to ensure the crowd was dispersed,” he tweeted.

De Blasio’s claim was false. The NYPD and the funeral organizers had already made the decision to shut down the event. If the funeral was a potential infection site that was risking lives, as Bill de Blasio claimed, why did he need to go there in person and expose his police security detail to the virus?

What Mayor Bill de Blasio actually wanted was to show up for a photo op. Some have theorized that the entire arrangement had been a bait and switch in which the Mayor’s Office had approved a funeral only as a platform for the politician to arrive in a huff and declare that it was shut down.

Even otherwise friendly media outlets had been critical of Bill de Blasio's failures to prepare, warn, and take action against the virus.

The De Blasio administration had dismissed the idea that the virus was contagious on public transportation and had urged New Yorkers to go and participate in a parade in Chinatown. It had made no preparations to deal with the pandemic until it was too late. Bill de Blasio had made a point of casually violating safety guidelines while endangering the health of his own police detail.

And, like many traditional bigots, he had now found Orthodox Jews to be a convenient minority to scapegoat for his own failures while butching up and playing the tough guy.

It was classic anti-Semitism.

What happened next only reinforced that theory as the Democrat, who had badly failed at fighting the virus, took to social media to threaten the “Jewish community” that the “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,” he claimed. And the summons blitz he threatened did indeed follow.

There had been only a minimal police presence in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn when a rash of anti-Semitic hate crimes was taking place, but now an army of cops descended on Williamsburg, broke into a synagogue where religious scholars were studying their sacred texts, more than 6 feet apart, and began issuing summonses to anyone who was walking down the street while Chassidic.

Even though New York City's mask rule only requires wearing one when you're unable to be more than 6 feet from another person, summonses were being handed out to people just walking down the street at a reasonable distance. The only obvious distinguishing mark of those being ticketed was their religious identity.

The crackdown was underway.

It might have once been unthinkable that the mayor of a major American city could publicly threaten a religious minority and then lead an obvious discriminatory campaign targeting that group, while using them as scapegoats for his own incompetence, but the past few months have ushered in formerly unthinkable violations of the Bill of Rights as a new norm.

In a political environment where people can be arrested for leaving the house, for playing catch, or pushing their kids on a swing, where governors and law enforcement officers can casually dismiss the Bill of Rights as irrelevant to their jobs, a radical politico with a history in an anti-Semitic Marxist movement can act out his worst ideological impulses to boost his future political prospects.

Crack down on enough Jews and maybe Bill de Blasio will do better in the Dem primaries in 2024.

Anti-Semitism, like so many other social ills, is a byproduct of a totalitarian society whose fears and hatreds are stronger than its principles and convictions. It is no accident that those who want us to be most afraid are targeting churches and synagogues to take away that which gives us hope and faith.

Fear gives politicians power; faith takes it away.

The tale of two funerals reveals the fallacies of lockdown culture. We are not all in this together. That was always a lie. The governors whose families are in their vacation homes in different states are not in this with us. Different communities are treated differently in the lockdown as in daily life.

The differences between Mayor Lovely Warren's tolerant response to the vigil in Rochester and Mayor Bill de Blasio's crackdown on a Chassidic funeral in Brooklyn is unfair and it's also human nature.

The alternative to everyone possessing the same set of objective rights is to be ruled by the subjective biases of everyone more powerful than us. But that is exactly what happens when an emergency is used to override our rights and that covers a multitude of abuses from corruption to religious persecution.

People of all races and religions should be able to mourn their dead. There is no culture so savage that it has uprooted this fundamental human norm. Even elephants bury their dead. How can humans do less? Is it possible for people to pray, to mourn their dead, and earn a living in a sensible manner?

It is. And we ourselves can best decide what that is right for our communities and ourselves.

A handful of politicians have chosen to treat their entire states as untrustworthy non-essential people who ought to be locked up in their homes and scolded daily for not cowering far enough under their tables and beds. That's as un-American as Bill de Blasio's misconduct.

They've gotten away with it because they taught us to be afraid of each other, of our loved ones, and, most of all, of ourselves. If we are going to change that, we have to stop being afraid of each other, and start being afraid of the politicians.

If we don't, the final funeral will be for our freedoms.

Awais Chudhary, a Pakistani immigrant, lived with his parents in their $920,000 house whose street number ends in 911, a block away from the Grand Central Parkway, where he hoped to drop bucket bombs on passing cars, and blocks away from the Dunkin Donuts where he plotted a stabbing spree.

On the other side of LaGuardia International Airport sits the New York City headquarters of CAIR.

If the 19-year-old Islamic terrorist had kept going after, in his own words, planning to use “a knife to spill the impure blood of a kafir” or non-Muslim, he could have easily ended up in the offices of the Islamic group most associated with defending and justifying Islamic terrorist violence worldwide.

Once upon a time, Queens was the home of working-class New Yorkers. These days it’s the home of a growing number of Islamic terrorists. The Pakistani terrorist’s mother showed up to support him in court wearing a full black burka. Cameras caught other members of the clan covering their faces with hijabs.

Burkas and hijabs are a common sight in Queens. As are mosques and FBI raids on terror homes.

The terrorist's family had a choice between the Al Madni mosque, the Nuriddin mosque, the Al-Falah mosque, the Khazara mosque, the Islamic Center of Jackson Heights, the Dar-ul Furqan mosque and many others not far from LaGuardia. And the terrorists have an even wider choice of kafir targets.

Earlier this year, Ashiqul Alam, a 22-year-old Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant, was arrested in a Queens apartment for plotting a bombing of Times Square. Alam had been interested in getting a suicide bomber vest and seeing the "flag of Islam” flying from “the Empire State Building."

Alam's social media revealed that he was a supporter of the campus hate group, Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as the Bangladesh Muslim League, and Jaamat e-Islami Pakistan. The Alam family’s apartment was a few miles away from where the Chudhary clan lived. The closest mosque, Dar-ul Furqan, was only a few blocks away in this predominantly Muslim enclave.

But terror plots just seem to spring up in Queensistan.

In August, Asia Siddiqui and Noelle Velentzas, Queens roommates, pled guilty to a pressure cooker bombing plot. Velentzas had gushed that paradise lies through the "flesh of the kufar” or non-Muslims, and had cited the attack by Zale H. Thompson, a Muslim convert, on two police officers in Queens.

Imam Charles Aziz Bilal of the Masjid Al-Hamdulillah in Queens denied the charges against the terrorists.

Siddiqi had been inspired by Samir Khan, a Pakistani immigrant formerly in Queens, who headed Al Qaeda's Inspire magazine. It was Khan who had authored the famous "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom" article that was used by the Boston bombers for their pressure cooker bomb, and by the San Bernardino shooters, and the Chelsea jihadist, Ahmad Rahimi, who set off bombs across New York.

Earlier this year, Najibullah Zazi finally pled guilty to a plot to bomb the New York City subway system. The Afghani Zazi family had moved to Pakistan and then to Queens. Zazi was recruited by Al Qaeda in Pakistan and along with two Muslim high school friends from Queens began plotting mass murder.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder had described the 2009 plot “one of the most serious terrorist threats to our nation since September 11, 2001.” Nevertheless, a decade later, Zazi was finally sentenced to time served. He will rejoin his father, Mohammed Zazi, who apparently doesn’t speak English, but admitted to covering up for his son and was sentenced to over four years in prison.

Amanullah Zazi, Najibullah’s cousin, whom Mohammed falsely claimed was his son, in an immigration fraud plot, and the terrorist’s uncle, Naqib Jaji, pled guilty to obstruction of justice.

Imam Ahmad Afzali, a Queens imam, had also tipped off the terrorist on September 11. Afzali has since been deported to Saudi Arabia. Masjid-al-Saaliheen and Masjid Hazrat I Abubakr, where Afazli preached, remain behind in Queens. The hulking Hazrat mosque overshadows the churches that surround it.

Zazi’s two Queens classmates, Adis Medunjanin, a Bosnian Muslim immigrant, and Zarein Ahmedzay, an Afghan Muslim immigrant, had both attended Queens College, and had participated in the Queens College Muslim Students Association. The MSA has been a gateway to terrorism for Al Qaeda figures.

But the NYPD’s monitoring of the Queens College MSA was attacked by the pro-terror media.

Admedzay had prayed at the Abubark mosque and studied Islam with Imam Afzali.

Unlike the other Queens plotters, Medunjanin did carry out a terrorist attack when he tried to ram another car, while shouting, “We love death more than you love your life.” No one was actually hurt.

Quazi Mohammad Nafis, a Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant living in Queens, had wanted to detonate a truck bomb at the Federal Reserve building. "We will not stop until we attain victory or Martyrdom,” he had declared. The Queens apartment where the Islamic terrorist lived and plotted the mass murder of Americans was a few blocks away from the headquarters of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA).

The Islamic enclave in Queens is home to more than 10,000 Bangladeshi Muslim settlers.

Nafis was just one of them.

Queens was also the home base of Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman Khan, another Bangladeshi immigrant, the former Secretary General of ICNA, and the head of the North American Imams Federation. Khan was sentenced to death in absentia in Bangladesh for torturing and murdering secular political opponents.

Khan’s killing squad was an offshoot of Jamaat-e-Islami, the same Islamist group which, Ashiqul Alam, the Bangladeshi Islamic terror plotter arrested this year in a Times Square plot, appeared to support.

The United States has failed to turn over the former ICNA leader to Bangladesh to face justice.

In previous generations, Queens had produced Donald Trump and David Horowitz. These days it’s the haunt of Islamic terrorists who plot the mass murder of kafir infidels in basements, apartments and hotel rooms. What was once an enclave of the middle class is becoming enemy territory.

Grand Central Parkway, where Awais Chudhary, the latest Islamic terrorist operating out of Queens, planned to drop bombs on passing cars, passes a few blocks from President Trump’s childhood home. There are 5 Islamic centers within a little over a mile of where Trump had grown up. Including ICNA.

Hijabs and burkas can easily be spotted on the border of the neighborhood where he used to live. Muslim preachers hand out Korans to passerby and the shadow of terror hangs over Queensistan.

Nafis plotted to kill hundreds of Americans one mile away from President Trump’s former home.

The decline of the borough that once gave rise to Trump and Horowitz into a terrorist enclave is the outcome of the immigration policies that have killed thousands of Americans. And the terror goes on.

That’s why President Trump understands that we won’t stop the terror until we stop the migration.








Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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