By Donald H. Harrison in San Diego
INTERNATIONAL
The Independent of Great Britain reports that Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, resigned Friday after law enforcement officials searched his office and residence as part of their ongoing investigation into corruption at the highest government levels.
Earlier this month, Yermak was in Geneva, Switzerland, negotiating with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio the terms of a proposed peace pact between Ukraine and Russia.
Commenting on the raid, Yermak said, “They were given full access to the apartment, my layers are on site, interacting with law enforcement officers. For my part, I fully cooperate.”
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NATIONAL
Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that Julie Menin, a Democrat, has claimed she will have 36 votes in January from the 51-member New York City Council to be that body’s first Jewish Speaker. Her pro-Israel views contrast with the anti-Israel views of Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani.
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Shira Perlmutter, head of the U.S. copyright office, won’t know at least until January whether she still has a job. She appealed President Trump’s decision to fire her, saying that as a branch of the Library of Congress, the copyright office is not within the President’s jurisdiction. The San Diego Union-Tribune published a report by The New York Times that a divided appellate court agreed with her and that this week, the U.S. Supreme Court said it wouldn’t rule on the matter until it hears two other cases involving the firing of personnel at independent government agencies.
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Federal Judge Paul A. Engelmeyer ordered the Justice Department to specify which Jeffrey Epstein documents it wishes to unseal in the continuing inquiry into the deceased sex offender’s activities. In response, according to the Associated Press, government attorneys listed “search warrants, financial records, survivor interview notes, electronic device data and material from earlier Epstein investigations in Florida.” Meanwhile, in a related case, Federal Judge Richard M. Berman gave the DOJ until Monday, Dec. 1, to provide a similar list related to records in the 2019 sex trafficking case.
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STATE AND LOCAL
In a column for Times of San Diego, Tad Seth Parzen, president and CEO of the Burnham Center for Community Advancement, accuses profit-driven “social media and skewed infotainment” of driving us apart. To counter it, he recommends emphasizing bipartisanship and civic involvement.
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San Diego City Councilman Sean Elo-Rivera, in an interview on KNSD’s “Politically Speaking” program, said that he absolutely will oppose “San Diego residents paying for parking at the beaches and the bays.” Such fees should be charged to visitors utilizing the city’s resources, he told host Joey Safchik.
“There are beaches in other parts of the county of San Diego that ask San Diego residents to pay a non-resident fee. I think it’s only fair for us to make sure we’re adequately resourced.”
On his proposal to tax corporations like Airbnb, Elo-Rivera said short-term rentals “are part of the reason why housing is so expensive here in San Diego. They’re making a lot of money, pulling money out of San Diego. We’d like them to pay their fair share.
“So, I think by having powerful corporations pay their fair share, by having tourists who are here on vacation pay their fair share, we can have a better city for everyone and not do it on the backs of everyday San Diegans.”
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MY PERSONAL OPINION
There’s a parallel between the governmental reactions to the 1938 murder of German consular official Ernst vom Rath in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan and the 2025 murder of West Virginia National Guard soldier Sarah Beckstrom and wounding of Andrew Wolfe in Washington D.C. allegedly by Afghan immigrant Rahmanullah Lakanwal.
Grynszpan’s individual action gave Adolf Hitler’s Nazi government in Germany a pretext for unleashing a night of violence (Kristallnacht) against all of Grynszpan’s fellow Jews.
Lakanwal’s alleged individual action gave U.S. President Donald Trump the pretext to put a hold on every Afghan’s immigration application and to order a permanent pause on immigration from all Third World countries.
I agree with AfghanEvac President Shawn VanDiver who told the San Diego Union-Tribune that Lakanwal’s “bad behavior does not reflect on the entire Afghan community.”
Kristallnacht, obviously, was a far greater abuse of power because the Nazis used extra-legal means—violence, arson, and killings – to accomplish their goals, whereas President Trump is using the machinery of government to carry out his program to curb legal immigration to this country and in the case of immigrants who arrived or stayed here illegally, to turn them back.
Nevertheless, in both 1938 and 2025, collective punishments were ordered for entire ethnic groups of people in retaliation for the actions of a lone offender. That’s simply not right.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.