#NYC’s double standard and other commentary

From the right: NYC’s Double Standard

“Haredim, as ultra-Orthodox Jews are called, translates to ‘those who tremble.’ But as New York’s leaders are learning, the Haredim tremble before God — not politicians,” notes The Wall Street Journal editorial board. They’ve been “protesting in the streets and courts against new harsh lockdown restrictions” in ZIP codes “including several Haredi neighborhoods,” in which Gov. Cuomo “singled out religious institutions” for “special limits.” Mayor de Blasio in April “raged about a large outdoor funeral for an Orthodox rabbi, threatening ‘the Jewish community,’ but in June, he attended an even larger Black Lives Matter protest.” No wonder “some residents suspect new rules are based more on politics than science.” Asked “about the double standard,” Hizzoner “called protests and religious services ‘apples and oranges.’ ” “That’s how he and Mr. Cuomo could allow and praise huge protests against the police this summer, but bar 11 Jews from praying together today.”

Media critic: More ‘Islamophobia’ Smears

Tera Dahl is the latest target in the media’s “rampage about Trump’s politically incorrect appointments” to the United States Agency for International Development, with outlets like Politico and The New York Times unjustly accusing her of anti-Muslim sentiments, sighs K. E. Grubbs Jr. at Issues & Insights. Dahl, a former congressional and White House aide, supported Trump’s successful Abraham Accords and tends to “defy bureaucratic inertia, performing global good for ever-more grateful countries” throughout her career. But she recognizes that “religion, any religion, can attract violence-prone extremists and that some overly sensitive practitioners of the religion in question prefer that it not be mentioned.” Those who hold this belief against her “clearly do not know how to process such realism, and their journalism shows it.”

Election watch: Rules Changes Tank Confidence

According to a new Gallop poll, only 59 percent of people trust that presidential votes “will be cast and counted accurately, matching an all-time low,” laments Jeremy Beaman for the Washington Examiner. The survey attributes this in part to “the president’s assailing of mail-in voting,” but an even more obvious factor is that “less than a month away from Election Day, the rules are still changing.” At least four states have extended mail-in deadlines past Nov. 3. North Carolina crafted new rules only for a judge to stop their implementation, and South Carolina just changed signature requirements. “All these extra-legislative changes sow doubt and confusion.” No wonder voters are losing faith.

Foreign desk: No Brexit-Russian Collusion

After a three-year investigation, reports Brendan O’Neill at Spectator USA, Britain’s information commissioner found no truth to “the chattering-class belief that Cambridge Analytica,” led by CEO Alexander Nix, “stealthily and probably illegally harvested people’s online data in order to manipulate our minds and make us vote Leave” in the Brexit referendum. And the office “found no evidence to back up one of the key stories about CA — that it colluded with Russia to shift Brits towards Leave.” That “tall tale” became “the go-to explanation for why Remain lost the referendum.” It couldn’t be “that millions of rational Brits, more than capable of thinking for ourselves, decided that it was time to leave the EU.” How “deeply patronizing” that was, “depicting the electorate as putty-minded fools and calling into question the legitimacy of the largest act of free and fair democracy in the history of this country.”

Religion desk: A Chinese Warning to the Vatican

Through two millennia, the Catholic Church has “faced not merely ­national regimes with their parochial ambitions, but systematic ideologies that were, in effect, rival political religions demanding the submission of a citizen’s whole being, body and soul,” observes Francis X. Mayer at First Things. Chinese Communism is one such rival political religion, which is why Vatican diplomats dealing with Beijing need to be more mindful of “its hostility and its determination to replace any independent understanding of God or gods with its own omnipotence.” “If you sup with the devil, you’d better bring a long spoon.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board