A prominent labor lawyer running to replace Corey Johnson on the City Council says NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea should be “hung by his cahones (sic).”
Arthur Z. Schwartz, one of six candidates in the West Side’s District 3, which includes Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and Hell’s Kitchen, made the vulgar remark in a candidate questionnaire by the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, a citywide advocate for the LGBTQ community.
“Should the NYPD Vice Squad be eliminated?” the survey asked, one of several questions on police and jail issues.
“Yes,” Schwartz replied.
“Should Dermot Shea be fired immediately?”
“Hung by his cahones,” Schwartz wrote, misspelling cajones, the Spanish word for testicles.
Schwartz, 68, a longtime progressive activist, has been endorsed by Black Lives Matter of Greater New York and the Transportation Workers Union, among others.
His son, Jacob Schwartz, a former de Blasio administration employee, was sentenced in 2019 to three years in prison after pleading guilty to possessing child pornography.
Schwartz made no apologies for his comment. “Shea is never, ever critical of anything his officers do,” he told The Post. “I think he has only exacerbated tensions between the police and both the minority community and white activists… and I think that’s disgraceful.”
From his website:
Arthur offered himself as counsel to social movements, having counseled anti-nuclear groups, anti-Central America intervention groups, ACORN, NY Communities for Change, Make the Road NY, Occupy Wall Street, anti-gas pipeline activists, and Black Lives Matter. He founded Advocates for Justice, a non-profit legal foundation whose work includes working with parents who have sued Success Academy a dozen times for mistreating students, and encroaching on space needed for special education students. He has won election and polling place reform, (he was on a team which got the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary restored), representing elderly tenants in eviction and landlord disputes. Currently, Arthur also hosts a weekly radio show on Mondays at 5 PM on WBAI, whose guests have included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Samelys Lopez, Jamaal Bowman, Mondaire Jones, and Jumaane Williams and leaders of environmental, tenants rights, criminal justice reform groups and groups fighting systemic racism, like Black Lives Matter. And, when WBAI was faced with closure in 2019, Arthur successfully litigated in court to keep the nonprofit, listener-supported station on the air, and then became General Counsel to the entire nationwide network it was part of.
“I love the West Village, but I think I picked it by accident,” confesses Arthur Z. Schwartz. For the Bronx-born attorney and current New York State Democratic Committee Member for the 66th Assembly District, it wasn’t the first neighborhood he had in mind. “In 1981, I actually bought a little building on 6th Street in the East Village,” he recalls. “My mother was giving me the money for it so I asked her to come to the signing. She looked at the building and afterward, at dinner, started to cry, saying, ‘I don’t want you to live on a block like this!’ So I canceled the contract and decided I wanted to live in the West Village instead. I walked around the entire neighborhood until one day I noticed an apartment for rent at 99 Bank Street. Here I still am 28 years later.”
It was also Schwartz’s mother from whom he got his sense of community service. “My mother had a penchant for volunteering for many different causes,” he remembers. “She wasn’t political, though. She was more interested in community service and activism on the local level.” Taking it one step further, Schwartz parlayed his community service into political office. Beginning in 1990, when he founded Friends of Bleecker Playground, Schwartz went on to hold such various positions as member of the Executive Committee of Village Independent Democrats; member of Community Board 2 in Manhattan (since 1991); park activist for the West Village; and Board member, Hudson River Park Alliance and Friends of Hudson River Park. It was this last position that got him elected to his first term as Democratic District Leader.
When asked how the West Village has changed since he first moved here, Schwartz mentions three things. “First, I would say that the Village was much more economically diverse,” he says. “There were a few co-ops but most people who lived here were tenants in rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartments. They were mostly struggling artists of some sort, an amazing array of them. Nowadays, except for older people and some of my neighbors, West Village artists are on a completely different level. They’re extremely successful, so economically it’s become much more high end.
“Secondly, it’s become much more family-friendly here,” he continues. “That’s a big change. It was my political base when I ran for office: working with local parents to clean up parks and playgrounds and make life better for our kids.
“And the third is that the West Village was much more gay. Today it hardly is. A lot of my gay neighbors died in the 80s or moved on to other areas, like Chelsea. However, I built pretty close ties with gay and lesbian activists around here and maintained those ties over the years. That was a part of my political identity that I learned from living here, but that aspect has definitely changed.”
As a long-time West Village resident and politician, Schwartz also has a few ideas about how he’d like to see this neighborhood in the future. “For one, I’d like to preserve the last vestiges we have of local businesses,” he ventures. “Every time one of them closes I feel like a piece of us is taken away. Also, I think we’ve got enough high-end wealthy people. We need to maintain some economic diversity in the West Village. And I say that as a building owner who’s paying $65,000 a year in property taxes! I have to get the most out of the apartments in my townhouse so I understand the pressures on landlords. Most of my fellow non-billionaire neighbors pay huge real estate tax bills and they’re struggling to stay in their houses.”
Despite the challenges, living here never grows old for Schwartz. “There’s a special quality to the West Village,” he declares. “It’s amazing how many people you know when you walk down the street. It’s like a small town. I find it incredible to live in New York in a low-rise neighborhood that’s close knit and friendly and yet be fifteen minutes from Times Square. I can’t imagine ever leaving.”
This may be easier said than done — at least for those still interested in facts. For starters, the claim that Mary was a “Jewish, Christian and Muslim woman” is only two-thirds true: yes, she was a Jew by race and background; and yes, she was a Christian in that she literally birthed Christ(ianity); but she was most certainly not a Muslim — a term and religion that came into being 600 years after Mary died.
Worse, far from being the Eternal Virgin, as she is for 1.5 billion Christians of the Catholic and Orthodox variety, Islam presents Mary, the Mother of Christ, as “married” to and “copulating” with Muhammad in paradise — a depiction that would seem to sever rather than build “bridges.”
In a hadith that was deemed reliable enough to be included in the renowned Ibn Kathir’s corpus, Muhammad declared that “Allah will wed me in paradise to Mary, Daughter of Imran,” whom Muslims identify with Jesus’s mother. (Note: The Arabic word for “marriage” (نكاح, or nikah, denotes “legal sexual relations,” connotes the “F” word, and is wholly devoid of Western, “romantic,” or Platonic connotations.)
Nor is this just some random, obscure hadith. None other than Dr. Salem Abdul Galil — previously deputy minister of Egypt’s religious endowments for preaching — affirmed its canonicity in 2017 during a live televised Arabic-language program. Among other biblical women (Moses’s sister and Pharaoh’s wife), “our prophet Muhammad — prayers and be upon him — will be married to Mary in paradise,” Galil said.
If few Christians today know about this Islamic claim, medieval Christians living in Muslim-occupied nations were certainly aware of it. There, Muslims regularly threw this fantasy in the face of Catholic and Orthodox Christians who venerated Mary as the “Eternal Virgin.” Thus, Eulogius of Cordoba, an indigenous Christian of Muslim-occupied Spain, once wrote, “I will not repeat the sacrilege which that impure dog [Muhammad] dared proffer about the Blessed Virgin, Queen of the World, holy mother of our venerable Lord and Savior. He claimed that in the next world he would deflower her.”
As usual, it was Eulogius’s offensive words about Muhammad — and not the latter’s offensive words about Mary and any number of other things — that had dire consequences: He, as well as many other Spanish Christians vociferously critical of Muhammad, were found guilty of speaking against Islam and publicly tortured and executed in “Golden Age” Cordoba in 859.
One expects that all of these “inconvenient” facts will be quietly passed over during the Pontifical International Marian Academy’s webinars. And if they are raised, no doubt Christians will somehow take the blame, as almost always happens in academic settings. As one example, after quoting Eulogius’s aforementioned lament against Muhammad’s claim of being married to Mary, John V. Tolan, a professor and member of Academia Europaea, denounced it as an “outrageous claim” of Eulogius’s own “invention.” He then railed against the martyr — not against his murderers or their prophet:
Eulogius fabricates lies designed to shock his Christian reader. This way, even those elements of Islam that resemble Christianity (such as reverence of Jesus and his virgin mother) are deformed and blackened, so as to prevent the Christian from admiring anything about the Muslim other. The goal is to inspire hatred for the “oppressors[.]” … Eulogius sets out to show that the Muslim is not a friend but a potential rapist of Christ’s virgins. (Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination, p.93)
As already seen, however, it is Muhammad himself — not any “Christian polemicist” — who “fabricates lies designed to shock,” namely that Mary will be his eternal concubine.
This, incidentally, is the main problem the purveyors of Abrahamism fail to acknowledge: Islam does not treat biblical characters the way Christianity does.
Christians accept the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, as it is. They do not add, take away, or distort the accounts of the patriarchs that Jews also rely on. Conversely, while also relying on the figures of the Old and New Testaments — primarily for the weight of antiquity and authority attached to their names — Islam completely recasts them with different attributes that reaffirm Muhammad’s religion as the one true and final “revelation,” as opposed to Judaism and Christianity, whose biblical accounts on these figures are then seen as “distorted” because they are different from Islam’s later revisions.
Far from creating “commonalities,” it should be clear that such appropriation creates conflict. By way of analogy, imagine that you have a grandfather whom you are particularly fond of, and out of the blue, a stranger who never even met your grandfather says: “Hey, that’s my grandfather!” Then — lest you think this stranger is somehow trying to become your friend — he adds: “And everything you thought you knew about grandpa is wrong! Only I have his true life story.”
Would that create a “bridge” between you and this stranger trying to appropriate and recast the image of your grandfather?
Posted at 10:49 am on February 26, 2021
What vaccination stall, readers might ask? It’s been very apparent here in Minnesota, where appointment availability in participating pharmacies dried up early last week before the worst of the storm hit, and have yet to materialize almost a week after it passed. I’ve mentioned it on Twitter the last few days; the only participating pharmacy still scheduling vaccinations is mainly-rural ThriftyWhite.
SEE ALSO: Triggered media respond to Biden’s whiff on Khashoggi
The media, however, has seemed curiously incurious about the lack of supply. Today the Washington Post finally reports that “logistical” problems kept pharmacies and states from getting their planned distributions, and that might continue into next week:
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