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By Donald H. Harrison, San Diego Jewish World, a member of the San Diego Online News Association
Photo: Mejgan Afshan
October 21, 2022 (La Mesa) - A political action group calling itself San Diegans Against Hate has come out in opposition to La Mesa City Council candidate Mejgan Afshan, describing her anti-Israel positions as antisemitic. Afshan, daughter of Afghan refugees, was invited via her campaign website to respond on Wednesday, Oct. 19, by San Diego Jewish World, but had not done so by late afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 20.
San Diegans Against Hate is cochaired by political consultant Jared Sclar, who has specialized in local elections ever since establishing his political consulting firm earlier this year, and by Larry Kornit, who serves as a city housing commissioner in Oceanside and as cantor of the Conservative Congregation B’nai Tikvah.
In a letter to Jewish voters, Sclar wrote: “Mejgan Afshan, has an extremely troubling history of antisemitic activism and promoting anti-Israel extremism. Ms. Afshan is a known leader of the local BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction) movement which aims to eliminate Israel from existence. She personally teaches students how to become involved in this antisemitic movement which continuously attacks any Jew who supports Israel’s existence. Additionally, Ms. Afshan blames Israel for the killing of George Floyd, insisting that institutional racism in the United States has only become worse since Israel was founded in 1948.”
“The aforementioned rhetoric is toxic, divisive, and harmful to the safety of Jews in La Mesa, San Diego County and throughout the United States,” Sclar’s letter continued. “Simply put, these radical activists should never be given a perch from which to openly promote Jew hate. This is not a viewpoint we can accept from our local leaders at any level, especially the La Mesa City Council.”
Photo, left: Jared Sciar
To substantiate its objections to Afshan, Sclar sent to San Diego Jewish World several screen captures from Afshan’s Facebook page. One, dated June 22, 2020, using a photoshopped photo of a soldier with a knee on a man’s neck, was taken from the website middleeasteye.net, and read “knee-on-neck, mass surveillance and protest suppression: How Israel shaped U.S. policing.” To this Afshan commented on her Facebook page, “Civil rights leaders have also taken trips to Israel supported by the same organizations silencing these human rights abuses. … We want the same funds used to assist with this training of San Diego law enforcement agencies to be allocated back into the communities these same law enforcement agencies harmed.”
Responding to this charge made frequently by anti-Israel groups, Mickey Rosenfeld, Israel’s Police spokesman, commented in 2011 that the exchange program covers “topics such as border security and media response during crises as well as overviewing strategies for treating mass casualties, performing rescue operations, and establishing command and control at the scene of a terror attack.”
This year, Prof. David Weisburd, a criminologist at Hebrew University, conducted a training course for police officers in Massachusetts, Texas, and Arizona which, he said, “included role-playing intended to help participating officers learn how to project empathy toward the people they encounter, suspend judgment and try to see the ‘truth’ in what the people they encounter tell them. They learned what to say in order to demonstrate attentiveness and how to transmit a correct message via a look, a nod of the head, posture and tone. They were taught about biases and stereotypes, about working with minority and other specific populations and about methods for building trust.”
Weisburd’s and Rosenfeld’s comments both were reported in an article on U.S.-Israel police and law enforcement training that appears on the website of the Jewish Virtual Library. The groups sponsoring the U.S.-Israel police exchange include the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, and the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE).
On August 25, 2020, in a Facebook address to the Democratic party, Afshan differentiated “anti-Zionism” from “anti-Semitism.” She wrote “Please stop allowing the conflation of these two distinct ideologies from colliding and thus collapsing them into one another. Our Jewish siblings deserve to be heard, as they call out an end to ethnic cleansing and occupation. We, as Americans, can no longer support the Apartheid state continuing the oppression of Palestinians and still claim to be pro-human rights. If you are against the separation of families within our borderlands and beyond and against the for-profit detention centers making money from those detained within, then you must once and for all stand for human rights both here as well as Palestine. Because, in fact, the two are connected by U.S. taxpayer dollars and policy. Even the militarization of our U.S. law enforcement over the past decades has been through the training of and by IDF soldiers.”
Calling Israel an “apartheid” state is an incorrect and politically-charged comment. Under apartheid in South Africa, there was strict separation of the races, with Black Africans forced to live in specially reserved areas, and having no rights whatsoever to hold political office. In Israel, to the contrary, Arabs and Jews live, work, and govern together in a multiracial society. There are Arab members of the Knesset, Arab judges in various courts including the Israeli Supreme Court, and Arabs in Israel’s diplomatic corps.
Indeed, there are also separation fences and inspection stations for people traveling between the semi-autonomous Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank. The security measures have been put into place to ward off suicide bombers. Critics of Israel rarely admit that the Jewish state is constantly under military attack from Gaza, which regularly launches missiles against Israel; Lebanon, which has a large stockpile of missiles supplied by Iran; and from West Bank affiliates of Hamas and other anti-Israel terrorist groups – all of which require defensive security measures that would be unnecessary in times of peace.
On Dec. 20, 2020, Afshan endorsed on Facebook a demand by community activist and one-time San Diego mayoral candidate Tasha Williamson that yearly trips to Israel by law enforcement be halted and that the money spent on them be diverted to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) groups.
On Feb 8, 2021, Afshan approvingly reprinted on her Facebook page a report that 60 social justice organizations have launched a ”Drop the ADL” campaign.
While opposing Afshan’s election to the La Mesa City Council, San Diegans Against Hate has not endorsed any of her four opponents in the Nov. 8 election for two council seats: Kathleen Brand, Patricia N. Dillard, Laura Lothian, and Tony Orlando. Sclar explained that among the four there are several candidates who are acceptable to the political action group.
Afshan has been endorsed by the San Diego County Democratic Central Committee, the San Diego Labor Council, and by various officeholders including Congresswoman Sara Jacobs, a member of the Jewish community.
Sclar said while his group opposes Afshan, he recognizes that the sentiment is not unanimous in the Jewish community, as few issues ever are.
Besides the La Mesa City Council race, San Diegans Against Hate has sent contributions to candidates in other local races, especially those for school boards. Among candidates it supports are Julie Bronstein, an incumbent on the San Dieguito Union High School District and a member of the Jewish community; Andrew Hayes, president of the Lakeside Union School Board, and Jane Lea Smith and Ringa Viskanta, both candidates for the San Dieguito Union School District; and Michelle Ward, a candidate for the Carlsbad School Board.
Comments
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)
I was slightly wrong when I said BDS targeted only goods produced by criminal Jews in the Palestinian Authority/West Bank. Actually BDS targets also any Israeli company involved ILLEGALLY there; e.g., supplying materials to those manufacturing, etc. But BDS does NOT target Israeli companies and goods TOTALLY developed/produced in Israel proper.
One can find more on BDS at: https://bdsmovement.net
And one list of companies being boycotted at: https://bdsmovement.net/get-involved/what-to-boycott
@ genecarp
Palestinians who are Israeli citizens have the right to vote; but given they are ca. 21% of population, in a pure democracy, simply tyranny of the majority, even counting a small percentage of Israeli Jews support them.
A pure democracy allows for tyranny of the majority, which is why we have a Bill of Rights, though before the Civil War and 14th Amendment they only applied to the Federal government, so, among other things, each state had an official religion, often not allowing other religious people to vote, serve on juries, hold office and they were sometimes subjected to brutal beatings, etc.
But even today the US is NOT a democracy:
1. Electoral college
2. Gerrymandering
3. Voter suppression
4. Huge amounts of money poured into elections.
5. Senate where state with 600,000 has same votes as state with almost 40 million. To add insult to injury we have the filibuster where potentially 15% or less can block things.
Then we are only democracy where party who lost stays in power for almost two months, resulting in Supreme Court justices, and other laws.
There is an excellent book by Sanford Levinson "The Undemocratic Constitution". I highly recommend it.
Finally, even if we had a perfectly designed political system, many voters decide based on limited biased lnformation. For our current election I devoted around 10 hours to reading carefully the various proposals, including searching the internet for diverse positions. Still, I left a number of blanks, especially for judge candidates.
As an example of the narrow mindedness of some Americans, many rural Whites vote for candidates who have as policy to reduce Medicaid, not aware that Medicaid funds most rural hospitals that are closing at increasing rates, so, in essence, they are harming themselves
Correct, the US is not a democracy.
@ genecarp and others
An excellent short YouTube video on Israeli apartheid, etc:
Is Israel Guilty Of Apartheid Against Palestinians? YEP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MknerYjob0w
@ Dr. Joel A. Harrison
Thank you for your enlightening and obviously first hand experiences around Israel. I am most interested in the rights that Palestinians have to vote in Israel, or not. Particularly because voting rights are always at the forefront of debate here in the United States and how being allowed to vote is fundamental to any, so called, Democracy.
Can We Link George Floyd’s Death to Israeli Training of American
A difficult question to answer, especially given the long history of American police brutality against Blacks. However, I decided to research the question and found a number of credible articles. There is evidence that knee-on-neck technique may have originated in Israel and clear evidence that Israeli training of American police included more “militarized” approaches/techniques.
“These trainings put Baltimore police and other U.S. law enforcement
employees in the hands of military, security and police systems that have
racked up documented human rights violations for years. Amnesty
International, other human rights organizations and even the U.S.
Department of State have cited Israeli police for carrying out extrajudicial
executions and other unlawful killings, using ill treatment and torture (even
against children), suppression of freedom of expression/association
including through government surveillance, and excessive use of force against peaceful protesters (Amnesty International, 2016).”
“The NYPD has been training in Israel for years now. It’s where the infamous knee-on-neck move originated (Hanson, 2020).”
“The Israeli police force has tried to distance itself from any perceived similarities, issuing statements denouncing what happened and stating that its officers are not trained to use knee-to-neck techniques. But photographs taken as recently was March have shown Israeli forces using the same restraint on unarmed protesters just yards from the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City . . . [George Floyd] all four officers had been employed by the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD), which participated in a 2012 training conference in Minneapolis that was held by the FBI and Chicago's Israeli consulate. . . Days after Floyd was killed, Mohammad al-Qadi, a Palestinian marathon runner from the occupied West Bank, posted several pictures depicting uniformed Israelis arresting Palestinians by using knee-to-throat techniques similar to the one that resulted in Floyd's death (Khalel, 2022).”
References:
Note. I actually found a dozen articles and decide to stop search, could probably have found more
Amnesty International (2016 Aug 25). Where Do Many Police Departments Train? In Israel.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-tra...
Hanson (2020 Aug 7). Inhuman and Brutalizing: Israeli Training of US Law Enforcement. National Vanguard.
https://nationalvanguard.org/2020/08/inhuman-and-brutalizing-israeli-tra...
Khalel (2022 Jun 22). US police departments under pressure to end training programmes with Israel. Middle East Eye.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-us-police-training-end-knee-ne...
It is time to Dismantle Apartheid
https://youtu.be/p8aD4p3Z1XQ
https://www.amnestyusa.org/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-tra...
@ carsonwalker619
carsonwalker619: "“Ms. Afshan blames Israel for the killing of George Floyd, insisting that institutional racism in the United States has only become worse since Israel was founded in 1948.” HOW IS THIS NOT ANTISEMETIC? Blaming the Jewish state for the murder of George Floyd and for American racism is clearly antisemetic."
First, if she claimed "institutional racism in the US has only worsened since Israel was founded in 1948" she is wrong. The US has been a brutally racist nation for most of its history, so if she attributed the murder of George Floyd to Israel, she was wrong; but I'd like to find the direct quote from her, not what someone else claims.
However, did she say that institutional racism in US attributed to Jews? Nope, Israel. Do you understand the difference between an ethnic group and a nation state??? NOPE! So, if she made the claim about George Floyd, it wasn't anti-semitic.
No, the government is not the people,
That's a response to
Anti-Israel is NOT Anti-semitism
@ Mejgan Afshan
I am Jewish. Growing up during the 1940s and 1950s I learned about the Holocaust. Among other things we had barbecues where I noticed numbers tattooed on the forearms of some family friends. My parents tried to explain. I got books from the library. I lived in Gothenburg, Sweden for 10 years. They had a small Jewish community of about 2,000, half were sole survivors of the Holocaust. I became close friends with several of the families, always welcome to Sabbath dinners and holidays. And I lived in Israel for six months back in 1970s. I have read dozens of books on Holocaust, seen most documentaries, and literally met 100s of sole family survivors.
However, it is NOT anti-semitic to attack the State of Israel, guilty of untold international crimes and crimes against humanity. There are numerous Jewish settlements in the Palestinian authority, formerly the West Bank. Totally illegal under international law. In addition, Jews are moving into East Jerusalem, again, totally illegal under international law. Basically, Israel, in the Palestinian authority, has the goal of forcing Palestinians into small enclaves just as South Africa did to blacks. In fact, during the height of South African apartheid, Israel was a friend, exchanging arms, etc.
As for “Ms. Afshan is a known leader of the local BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction) movement which aims to eliminate Israel from existence.” Absolute lie. The BDS movement is to not purchase goods produced by the criminal Jewish settlers in the Palestinian authority, not goods produced in Israel proper.
In Israel proper, Palestinians are citizens; yet, schools in Palestinian areas/villages receiving much lower funding per pupil than Jewish schools. Infrastructure funding is much lower and permits, for instance, to add another story to a home are difficult for Palestinians to obtain. Yes, Palestinian Israeli citizens, though refused often apartments in Jewish areas, do have “rights” and do have some representation in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament; but so what? Tokenism at best. Recently, some Palestinians Israelis have collaborated with Jewish political parties; but every group in the world have sell-outs.
Israel has in custody hundred of Palestinians under administrative detention, some for years, without charges or convictions, even detaining Palestinian children. And Jewish settlers in Palestinian authority have assaulted Palestinians, and set fire to mosques, etc. Never punished. Israeli military has killed numerous Palestinians, many totally innocent, others children throwing rocks.
When I lived in Israel I attended meetings of Jews and Palestinians who wanted one secular nation with equality for all citizens. I found out later that a number of the participants were Shin Beth, Israeli secret service, so somewhere in their archives I’m probably listed. As an undergraduate I had friends who were Palestinians and Israeli, so when in Israel I visited them, one was a professor at Bir Zeit University, near Ramala.
In 1948 Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish noble who had rescued several thousand Jews during the Holocaust , was chosen by the UN to be the mediator in Palestine. Bernadotte refused body guards because he assumed that the Jews would know he had risked his life during World War II to save Jews. While driving through the Jewish held areas, he stopped his car so a French lieutenant sitting in the front seat could come into the back seat to thank him for saving his wife. Several cars arrived, blocked Bernadottes car, a man walked up and shot dead Bernadotte and the French lieutenant. Israel’s leader, David Ben Gurion, promised to track the killer down. Never did because the killer was his personal friend and body guard. So, from the gitgo Israel didn’t want a fair compromise. In fact, Jews terrorized Palestinians. The most famous was the Deir Yassin massacre of between 300 and 500 defenseless Palestinians in a village near Jerusalem. This was only one of several such massacres and in other instances Jews went into Palestinian villages and warned them the same would happen if they didn’t leave, which they did.
Historically, Jews have portrayed themselves as having a covenant as a light unto the nations. Basically as role models for compassion, decency, charity, etc. In the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, it states: “Be kind to the strangers in your midst for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt”. Similar passages exist in the rest of the Old Testament and the Jewish Talmud, Rabbis discussing and clarifying the Bible have made it clear that the stranger is the non-Jew. So, if one believes that Jews are supposed to be a light unto the nations, then Israel is a betrayal of Judaism. There is an excellent paper that summarizes the Biblical and Talmudic discussions of how Jews should treat non-Jews, includes that killing of a non-Jew is also called murder, plain and simple:
Rabbi Reuven Hammer (2016 Apr 21). The Status of Non-Jews in Jewish Law and Lore Today. https://majshavot.org/includes/uploads/articulos/a957a-el-estatus-de-los...
And, yep, some Palestinian terrorists have killed Jews; but Israeli retaliation in Gaza has killed far more innocent Palestinians and Israeli control over Gaza has resulted in shortages of water, food, and energy. However, just to be clear, I don’t support groups such as Hamas. I have read the Quran and biography of Mohammed, plus other books on Islam. The Quran makes clear that “there shall be NO compulsion in religion”, that Jews and Christians are people of the book and protected class, that women should dress modestly, a head scarf as many Orthodox Jewish women wear as well as Amish, etc. and that women can not be forced into marriage, etc. In essence, if one follows the Quran, it would be great and many Moslems do; but ISIS, etc. are as much a betrayal of the Quran as the KKK is of Christianity.
Just to summarize: Criticizing Israel is not the same as being anti-semitic. Israel is a nation state, a criminal nation state; yet, many Jews living in Israel proper, not the Palestinian territory or East Jerusalem, are good decent people; but, unfortunately, many are not.
53RD CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE SARA JACOBS
She Endorsed Mejgan!
On the day of our interview, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution which rejected the Trump Administration’s stand that the creation of Jewish communities in the West Bank (also known as Judea and Samaria) is not in violation of international law.
“I support that resolution,” Jacobs told me. “I believe that annexation is a clear red line. .. I think personally that the biggest existential threat to Israel security is the lack of resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that the window for two states may be closing faster than we would like for logistical reasons. I think all U.S. assistance needs to be viewed through the lens of ‘does it move things closer to peace?’ and annexation absolutely does not. I believe the Trump administration’s decision on settlement expansion also is not helpful in bringing us closer to peace.”
She was also critical of Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. “Again,” she said, “I don’t think the U.S. should be doing anything that gets in the way of a comprehensive, diplomatically negotiated settlement that creates two states for two people. I believe the status of Jerusalem has to be a final-status negotiated issue. I think moving the embassy to Jerusalem is unhelpful and makes it harder for us to be able to play the kind of mediating role and leadership role that I think is important for the U.S. to play in resolving this conflict.”
Jacobs did not agree with U.S. recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights (formerly part of Syria) nor Trump’s order that the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington D.C. be closed.
“Annexation is a red line,” she said. As for the PLO office, “I think that the only way we will be able to have two states via a negotiated settlement is to have a functioning Palestinian Authority and that requires the U.S. to provide assistance in state building,” she said. “The more we push them away, the harder it is for us to be able to play that leadership role again and be able to help resolve the conflict.”
Does she believe that there is a “peace partner” for Israel among the Palestinians? And, if so, who? Jacobs was asked.
She pointed out that President Richard M. Nixon, a hardline anti-Communist, went to China to negotiate with the Communist government there, “so it is the people who you least expect.” On the Israeli side, “Yitzhak Rabin was another one; it might be a far-right Likud guy.” On the Palestinian side, “it could be someone surprising us in the leadership that there is now, or it could be someone new who is charismatic and can bring people along, and I will look forward to that.”
The candidate said she is opposed to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign because “I don’t believe it is helpful in resolving the conflict. I think we’ve seen that a lot of the leadership of BDS has strains of anti-Semitism. At the end of the day, its effect has been more to hurt Israeli students and, frankly, Palestinians who work in Israeli companies than to change policy in any way.”
“That being said,” she added, “I don’t believe it is appropriate or right to pass legislation that makes BDS illegal because I believe that it is a First Amendment right to be able to protest.”
Concerning domestic anti-Semitism, Jacobs commented: “I think that firstly we need to be standing up against leaders who use anti-Semitic tropes and who specifically play to white nationalist sentiment to hold their base of power both here in the United States and around the world. We are also seeing it in places like Hungary. I think we also need to do a lot of educating around anti-Semitism, around the history that the Jews have gone through.”
Jacobs said she thinks the Jewish community must distinguish between anti-Semitism and “legitimate criticism of the policies of the Bibi Netanyahu government which in many cases do not represent the values of many, especially young, Jewish people.”
AIPAC Spent Millions to Defeat Andy Levine
J Street went on to highlight AIPAC’s endorsement and funding of “109 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election on January 6th, promoters of the Big Lie like Jim Jordan, Scott Perry, andmore — while attacking candidates like Andy Levin… as extremists.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/08/03/aipacs-millions-help-unseat...
Afshan is correct,