Is Satmar's Zalman faction conspiring to damage Ken Thompson's campaign? Is haredi NYC Councilman David Greenfield, who just endorsed Thompson, the man behind racist anti-Thompson ads? Is a haredi P.R. flack double-dealing Thompson, as well? It's politics at its Brooklyn dirtiest.
Brooklyn D.A. Charles J. Hynes
A well placed source tells FailedMessiah.com that leaders and major activists in the Zalman faction of Satmar met with Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes yesterday. The meeting was personally called by Moshe Gabbai (Friedman), the leading powerbroker in the faction (after the Williamsburg Satmar Rebbe Zalman Leib Teitelbaum himself) who controls most of the faction's purse strings.
Those leaders and major activists who were not traveling with Teitelbaum to pay a condolence call to the family of noted philanthropist Paul Reichman in Toronto were allegedly given an ultimatum by Friedman – show up at the meeting with Hynes or resign.
They showed up – despite the fact that the Zalman and Aharon factions had both already endorsed Thompson.
Hynes and the Satmar participants allegedly discussed how to damage Ken Thompson enough before next week's election to allow Hynes – who was crushed by Thompson in the Democratic primary and who is now running with the endorsements of the Republican and Conservative parties – to eek out a win.
Meanwhile, New York City Councilman David Greenfield was 90 minutes late to the press conference that was meant to announce his "endorsement" of Thompson.
Greenfield, who is very press savvy, not only was late – allegedly because of a council vote – he also allegedly did not send out a press release blast to all the normal local media announcing his endorsement.
Before the primary, Greenfield accused Thompson anti-Semitism, claiming that if Thompson was elected D.A. he would "target Jews" for prosecution.
When pressed by a reporter after his lukewarm endorsement of Thompson, Greenfield claimed that his race-baiting statements before the primary were just part of New York City politics as usual.
However, sources continue to claim that Greenfield only endorsed Thompson because he needs to do it to maintain his standing within the Democratic Party and have any chance of being elected council speaker. But, these sources say, behind the scenes Greenfield is working against Thompson and for Hynes.
In fact, one of these sources insists that Greenfield is behind the race-baiting Yiddish-language ads run by the Hynes campaign against Thompson in the Yiddish press since over the past weeks.
Meanwhile, Thompson wrote an open letter to the Jewish community (reproduced below) that was published in, of all places, Ami Magazine – the haredi magazine that equated anti-child-sex-abuse activists and bloggers with Nazis, which encouraged readers to take (violent) revenge on these bloggers, and which published a cover story on the purported rise of anti-Semitism in America that was illustrated by a photoshopped photo depicting Nazi soldiers goosestepping in front of the White House, which was flying Nazi banners. Two weeks ago, Ami published an article glorifying vigilante violence against non-Jews.
Featured on that incredibly racist and offensive 2012 cover depicting Nazis in charge of the White House was haredi P.R. flack Yossi Gestetner, who went on to a consultant to be hired – and then quickly fired – by the New York State Republican Party, which wanted nothing to do with Gestetner after it learned that Gestetner had acted as a P.R. consultant-spokesman for a massive Williamsburg fundraiser for now-convicted Satmar pedophile Nechemya Weberman and had been involved in similar roles in other unsavory haredi cases. It also panicked when it learned that Gestetner belonged to a rabidly anti-Israel hasidic sect – allegedly, Satmar's Aharon faction.
About one year later, the Hynes campaign was in the process of hiring Gestetner when that hire was thwarted, in part by the publicity it generated when FailedMessiah.com exposed it.
Both Hynes and Gestetner deny he was ever hired by the campaign or that negotiations took place.
However, a source close to the situation told me that Gestetner and the Hynes campaign were negotiating Gestetner's fee but had not come to an agreement when the story broke.
The story should have ended there, but it did not.
Instead, Ken Thompson's campaign inexplicably hired Gestetner as a consultant just weeks later, troubling many anti-child-sex-abuse advocates and victims – although most continue to support Thompson anyway. They despise Hynes, whose decades long record of coddling haredi criminals and running roughshod over those haredi criminals' victims is all too well known to them.
The question now is Gestetner's loyalty.
Is he truly working and doing his best to help Ken Thompson win?
Or is he pulling a "Greenfield," working quietly behind the scenes to sabotage Thompson's campaign?
New York politics is a dirty business, and no one gets down in the mud and rolls around in it with glee as well and as often as hasidic fixers and hasidic community activists do.
But it's still too early to say definitively whether Greenfield and/or Gestetner are rolling around in that mud to hurt Thompson's campaign.
However, it is not too early to note that ongoing criminal investigations by state (and, allegedly, federal) authorities into certain alleged crimes (that do not necessarily directly involve Hynes, Greenfield or Gestetner) may reveal a bit more than Greenfield, Gestetner, certain hasidic leaders, and especially Hynes could have ever thought possible. And in a world like Brooklyn where secrecy is a pervasive shield for crime and bad behavior, this would most likely not be a good thing for any of them.
Here is Ken Thompson's open letter to the Jewish community published in Ami Magazine.
I asked Thompson's campaign to comment on Ami's history of race-baiting and use of Nazi imagery to demonize President Obama and anti-child-sex-abuse activists and bloggers. It chose not to answer.
However, a source close to the Thompson campaign who request anonymity told me the letter was published in several other publications, as well as in Ami. When I asked for the names of those publications, the source did not answer.
Please click to enlarge: