By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – 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.”
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.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com