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Dear Mayor Brockett and Council members Marquis, Benjamin, Schuchard, Winer, Wallach and Speer.
FYI, attached are 3 WANTED posters being circulated on social media. One includes a video. It’s your call whether you consider these threatening or inciting. Please be careful.
Additionally, as these posters and the video demonstrate, your continued normalization of antiZionist rhetoric at Council meetings – permitted by the First Amendment but not immune from condemnation by you – is normalizing antisemitism in the face of your Declaration against antisemitism. The whole town knows that you banned people for holding signs too high; but you did not publicly condemn the antisemitic content of their speech. Don’t you have First Amendment rights, too? Certainly, you would not let hate speech go uncondemned in the strongest possible terms against any other group.
Most of you apparently don’t understand the falseness of the claimed distinction between antiZionism and antisemitism in the 21st century. But we Jews know and so do the people using “antiZionism” terminology as a shield, and a loud but inconsequential number of Jewish outliers don’t change that fact.
One of the WANTED posters is being circulated by BNSCP board member Martha McPherson, who, like fellow Council chambers inciter Essrea Cherin, trades in the fiction that by not identifying herself as such, she and by extension BNSCP remain compliant with Res 631 and the Commitments. McPherson is savvy enough to have left out the “genocide” and “Zionism is centered” rhetoric in her poster and instead accuses you of being “shills” (top line). Shills for whom, for what?
Related: it’s been in nearly a year since your BNSCP liaison Adams, in response to a slew of violations by BNSCP identified by me, informed me that the entire Sister City program was going to be evaluated for compliance. Any progress on that?
Related: During a meeting that Rachel Amaru and I had with Mayor Brockett on September 15, 2024 at Spruce Confections on Pearl, we asked the Mayor to remove Adams as the BNSCP liaison – the reasons for which should be obvious and at the very least amount to the appearance of gross conflict of interest. (Do any of you ever look at her IG accounts?) Mayor Brockett’s reply: doing so would “tear the City Council apart.”
Bruce Shaffer
Boulder USA
Jerusalem IL
