Shame on the NYT for their Anti-Semitic Coverage

 .. of the tunnels found under "770" -- one of the most famous religious addresses in New York.  Except... instead of writing for the readers they wrote for the Jewish people.  

A day late with the story -- this should have been in yesterday's newspaper as the arrests occurred Monday and the videos were up online, Ms. Katie Rosman and the second byline on the story (there's always two or three or four writers creditied per article these days...) gave us an intense background of the sect and their founder, but ignored the important implications:

did these American Jews (the article describes some of their younger student members as "extremists") evade the New York City laws that prohibited other congregations from worshipping during the pandemic?  Hm.  is it indeed anti-semitic to ask if this particular Jewish congregation was following American law during that time?

Also, the videos clearly show stained matresses being pulled from the tunnel...  Who was sleeping/fornicating down there?  With whom?  Will the police analyze the stained matresses to learn if it is blood on them?

Another video showed a black-hatted congregant emerging from the tunnel like a sewer rat.  Is that anti-semitic to say, as it took the round man some time to hoise himself up and out of the tunnel entrances -- through the grate covering it that led to a public street...

The article tries to diffuse questioning -- acts as though this is an internal issue and gives us all the Believers' point of view:  that the deceased leader of this temple is thought by some to be the Messiah and still alive.  Nice color to the story, but it's a shame the relevant details were missing...

Other than "to another building" and the street outside where we viewed with our own eyes a person crawling out into New York City itself, where did these tunnels go?  Were they used to hide people, for human trafficking?  Who was sleeping down there and why?  Were any children involved in this, or women pressed into service here? (The stains seemed to make you think of blood -- hymen or metrual, rather than feces and definitely too dark to be sweat -- and were positioned where you might find an abdomen if a person were laying down on it...)

It's just not cool anymore to sweepingly dismiss as "anti semitic" the questions that extremist sects in America too should be answering about the infrastructure of our shared country in their city, and whether or not these tunnels were dug to invade other laws re. religious places of worship permitting members to gather together and worship during pandemic times.

Do better, NYT.  Don't let extremists take a foothold ignoring the collective laws, especially when the police were facing such violence rooting them out as some clearly tried to escape justice and emerge outside from their tunnelling.  The police were just doing their job, and those holding all peoples to the same rules in this country are not the enemy, nor are we anti-semitic.  

Times have changed, the Holocaust was long long ago in terms of innocent people being targeted and killed on this planet.  Please start covering the Jewish people and their extremists too as equals to the rest of us?  Because under the eyes of the law, they are.  Links to the videos the NYT chose to omit from their coverage by Ms. Rosman et al.

They were attacking cops with furniture:  I imagine the NYT riot police would have been called out, and many many more than 9 people arrested, were this a Muslim or black place of worship...  Be straight, NYT.  Maybe assign non-Jewish writers to cover these stories?  I feel the same way when I keep reading the Jewish bylines covering the stories of violence in Gaza and the West Bank today -- some like Isabel Kerchner seem to "soften" things, perhaps for PR spin to protect their own.  I'm an anti-semite for proposing no conflict of interest on stories like that, I guess... ;-)

(They have a Horowitz on the Vatican beat, so please don't tell me cross-cultural religious coverage cannot be done...)  We see you, and with competing social media sites that post first-hand material like video, we really see the spin in these stories now... #NadaMas

ADDED:  Remember NYT editors and publishers?  This is taking place in America where the rules remain the same for the Jewish people -- extremists too.  No more, no less.  Again this is America, not Israel.  Please cover these stories equally and lay off the anti-semitic labels for those who simply tell the truth without the pro-religious spin?  Nip this in the bud, and enforce the law equally for all Americans living here no matter their religious beliefs or your shared ethnic heritage with the people you are covering (for) in these news stories?

... and God bless teh American cops who went down into those tunnels and immediately recorded what they saw and who they chased out onto the streets.  That's the way law enforcement should work. (No innocent people were harmed in the making of these videos of the enforcement of the law of the land.) Compare and contrast as you will to other stories in the news today...

PLUS:  A good newspaper no matter its size would have a police scanner in the newsroom, and would have dispatched a reporter to the scene timely to cover the story firsthand.  This one reeks of "I am reporting this from home watching social media sources and drawing on my background knowledge of this particular sect" rather than any on-the-scene coverage of the policework live outside the place as it was occuring.  That's where the "anti-Semitic" charges come in -- they don't like what some extremists on the other side said in commenting, but the videos themself are neutral.  My point is when you give special news coverage treatment to this sect, that's anti-Semitic to treat the differently than were there non-Jews being arrested in a story like this.  And again, when people are putting hands on police... why so few arrests?  and what was the true purpose of altering the city infrastructure this way?  How did they dig those things -- who helped them?  There should be follow up coverage, as sunlight surely needs to stream into coverage of places like this. #Transparency+Truth