From Sde Teiman To The Bay: Petaluma CM Cader Thompson’s Largely Undisclosed SF JCRC-Funded Trip to Israel

Also: What happens at Camp Newman stays at Camp Newman! But maybe especially if it's between Rob Epstein, the FBI's San Francisco Field Office, and the US Attorney's Office?

Above: Ceasefire advocates at the January 8, 2024 Petaluma City Council meeting had not been informed that City Councilmember Janice Cader Thompson had accepted a JCRC-paid $7,600 trip to Israel in March, 2023. Photo credit: Anonymous.

Editor’s Note: “Marin County Confidential” was in Sacramento early this week to watch the progress of four separate bills designed to restrict free speech and constrain ethnic studies, although none are advertised as such. These deceptive bills are supported by the Jewish Public Affairs Committee, the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, and related pro-Israel groups, which packed Monday’s Senate hearing with paid staffers, and lobbied the legislators.

Yet with almost no budget and far less notice, at least three other groups (Jewish Voice for Peace, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Arab Resource and Organizing Center) still managed to summon approximately 40 unpaid volunteers for their own day of organizing and meetings on Tuesday. I got to tag along, and recorded a brief interview with Assemblyman Muratsuchi (AD-66) about his JCRC-funded trip to Israel last February (still undisclosed on his official website), which I hope to share in this weekend’s write-up.

But for now, let’s examine yet another SF JCRC-funded trip for an elected official that wasn’t properly disclosed to the public, and which I only learned of last week. This discovery occurred as multiple news outlets began reporting the alarming detail that Israel is currently debating whether IDF soldiers have the right to continue to gang-rape and torture Palestinian detainees to death at Sde Teiman and other detention centers. News of the abuses brought to mind Iris Chang’s groundbreaking history The Rape of Nanking, which documents the Japanese military’s 1937-38 massacre and mass rape of civilians in Nanjing (fatalities for which hover close to estimates for 2023-24 Palestinian civilian casualties in Gaza.)

One of Chang’s revelations is how Japanese propaganda was used against its own soldiers to trick them into believing that the lives of non-Japanese civilians were worth less than a cat or a dog or a rat. Absent the steady stream of such propaganda, Chang’s work seems to demand, would the genocidal assault on Nanking have been possible? And implicit in that question is one for us: how do we recognize and resist propaganda by our own government, or proxies thereof?

It is not such a foreign idea – absent US propaganda, would American soldiers have “followed orders” at My Lai? Similarly: have the Israeli soldiers engaged in the mass rape of Palestinian detainees not also been essentially brainwashed by Israel’s decades-long anti-Palestinian propaganda? What of the Israeli soldiers who defile the homes of the people they have killed, and then laughingly post the videos to TikTok? Or who record themselves blowing up water supplies when they know the water scarcity has now resulted in a polio outbreak? Israeli soldiers, like Hirohito’s conscripts, have been told for decades that their country and their people were the only victims, and that they are the only ones who were vulnerable. What is the logical conclusion of such constant dehumanization of other human beings?

From Israel to Petaluma

In the run-up to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, the record indicates that Bay Area elected officials were also being subjected to propaganda by local pro-Israel NPO and lobbying groups. This propaganda was of a type more subtle than that once imposed on Japanese soldiers, but still powerful. The central message of this pro-Israel propaganda is similar: that Israeli lives matter, while Palestinian lives do not.

An everyday example of this propaganda are the pages upon pages of emails sent to elected officials by groups like JPAC and JCRC extolling Israel’s “war effort” and insisting that Palestinian casualties are either necessary or unimportant. But one of the most effective vehicles for this particular propaganda is the all-expenses-paid trip to Israel, courtesy of the SF JCRC. And post-trip, our electeds have coincidentally acted to quash political protest of Israel’s genocidal assault.

Moreover, JCRC’s propaganda helps our elected officials promote anti-free speech policies that target vulnerable minorities. These policies in turn facilitate the production of additional propaganda to further restrict free speech.

Open Wide, This Won’t Hurt A Bit

All this brings us to Janice Cader Thompson, a retired dental hygienist who now serves on Petaluma City Council. Cader Thompson makes a memorably ridiculous appearance in a damning article covering how an attempt at a ceasefire resolution at Petaluma City Council was thwarted by the SF JCRC. The article, by investigative journalist Peter Byrne, takes you backward and forward — from 1940’s Jewish chicken ranchers in Petaluma (both zionist and antizionist, as their chronicler Kenneth Kann relates in another must-read article) to today’s organized pressure campaign by the JCRC. I regret not having read Byrne’s article earlier, but as soon as I did, I wondered if Councilmember Cader Thompson had also taken one of the SF JCRC trips.

Because downloading Form 700’s through the FPPC website is again non-operational (a fact confirmed by tech specialists at the Apple Store as recently as August 4), I searched for Thompson’s Form 700 on the Petaluma City website. But that site was also not permitting download, for reasons explained later by the Petaluma City Clerk. In the meantime, I called Cader Thompson directly and introduced myself as someone investigating the JCRC-funded Israel trips. I explained that I was having difficulty accessing her Form 700’s on the city website, and was thus obliged to call her directly. Cader Thompson subsequently spent three minutes berating me for asking her, claiming repeatedly that “It’s your job as a reporter to read the Form 700s” and “You’re not doing your job as a reporter.”

I patiently explained that I was, in fact, doing my job as a reporter, as I was going directly to her, an elected public official, to ask a perfectly valid question, which was: “Did you accept any gifts from the SF JCRC for travel to Israel?” The fact that the question could be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” only enraged Cader Thompson more.

I further explained that a source had suggested to me that she had possibly traveled to Israel in 2024, and not 2023. Thus, I was still going to have to call her, since her 2024 Form 700 was not due until April 2025. I noted that the public had a right to know now, given that Israel’s assault on Gaza was exploding into a wider regional conflict with US troops en route. After much argumentation that involved Cader Thompson insisting that I needed to “Call Sacramento and ask them for it!” (meaning to contact the FPPC for her Form 700), she ended the call.

Eventually, I was able to reach the Petaluma City Clerk, who patiently described the website’s limitations on mobile devices that use Safari, and then graciously sent me a PDF of Cader Thompson’s amended Form 700 for 2023. Apparently, Cader Thompson had forgotten to include a $7,600 (that’s right, seventy-six hundred big ones!) SF JCRC-paid trip to Israel in March 2023 on her original Form 700. But there it was reported on her amended Schedule E:

What does it say about Cader Thompson that in a period of three minutes she declined to provide any transparency about her 10-day, $7,600 trip to Israel paid for by the SF JCRC? This lack of transparency is particularly frustrating given that, when I reviewed her councilmember comments in the two meetings immediately following her JCRC-paid trip to Israel, she made absolutely zero mention of the trip. In the meeting April 3, appproximately a week after she returned from the JCRC-paid trip to Israel, she mentions a meeting with the Airport Commission; the importance of having an airport (this could have been a perfect time to slip in that she flew to Israel but she did not!); and missing the food at The Petaluma Women’s Club.

Thus, aside from the Form 700, which the general public would have to have known about in order to search for the amended form, the public would have had no idea about Cader Thompson’s JCRC-funded trip to Israel at all. As reporter Peter Byrne explained in a subsequent call I made to his office, if the public had known about Cader Thompson’s JCRC-funded trip, then she might have had to recuse herself from weighing in against the ceasefire resolution at Petaluma City Council.

I don’t want to spend too much time on this because it’s Petaluma and not Marin, but mostly because Peter Byrne’s article is so rich, and I’ve only added a tiny piece of the puzzle with the discovery of the JCRC-funded trip to Israel.

But here’s what interests me from a Marin perspective: Note that on the Cader Thompson’s Form 700, on the right hand side, there is an additional $180 gift from the SF JCRC. It’s for an overnight at Camp Newman, from September 8, 2023 to September 9, 2023. Did that same trip include San Rafael City Attorney Rob Epstein?

Newwwwmannnn!!!

Camp Newman is a summer camp and retreat center that’s part of the Union for Reform Judaism “family of camps and youth programs”, and it does appear to feature as a highlight a significant number of Israeli staff. Given Israel’s universal conscription, that means plenty of former soldiers who served in the IDF, the very military now implicated in war crimes hearings at the International Court of Justice. (Summer camp overseen by IDF soldiers? Yikes!)

But look at this linkedin post from the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, which does not have a date-stamp, but reads only “11 months ago” about an event at Camp Newman:

“Over the weekend, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Benjamin Kingsley and David DeVito, alongside our Federal Bureau of Investigation (FB) partners, spoke to the JCRC Bay Area’s Bay Area Network of Elected Jewish Officials about hate crimes, hate speech, and antisemitism. This event is an example of our districtwide efforts in support of U.S Attorney Ismail Ramsey’s United Against Hate Initiative....”

That seems to coincide with the timing for Cader Thompson's trip. And the US Attorney post was cross-posted by SF JCRC, “11 months ago”, in the following manner:

“This past weekend, JCRC Bay Area hosted the first ever “#BANJO Camp” at URJ Camp Newman in Santa Rosa. The BANJO (Bay Area Network of Jewish Officials) retreat brought together Jewish Bay Area elected officials for a weekend of community building, learning best practices, and celebrating Judaism all while having a bit of camp fun. Thank you to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California and San Francisco FBI office for joining our event and leading an important panel on hate crimes and antisemitism.”

Now look at the additional photos in the US Attorney linkedin post: Is that Rob Epstein in the gray polo shirt?

To confirm, I tried contacting Epstein multiple times this past week to no avail. When I contacted Cader Thompson today with a follow-up question about her trip to Camp Newman, and whether it also involved Rob Epstein, the FBI, and the two US Attorneys, she yelled at me all over again. Unfortunately, she hadn’t bothered to hear my question, and thus kept repeating that I had to “Go and ask Sacramento!”

Good times!

There is no indication that this “important panel on hate crimes and antisemitism” invited any Black, Asian, Latino, Muslim, Arab or Indigenous guests; in fact, the attendees appear to have been all or mostly white. But shouldn't “an important panel on hate crimes” include the principal targets of hate crimes?

Meanwhile, it’s worth asking why the FBI and US Attorney Office are working with JCRC instead of investigating why the SF JCRC is not registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act — given that it functions much more as a lobbying group for Israel than anything else. Unable to reach Epstein or Cader Thompson, I contacted the US Attorney’s office to ask US Attorney Benjamin Kingsley, named in the post, but was informed he was no longer working for the US Attorney’s office.

“Where did he go?” I asked.

“I am not privy to that information,” the receptionist replied, cagily.

What happens at Camp Newman stays at Camp Newman! But seriously, revelations about the JCRC enjoining both the FBI and the US Attorneys Office (two institutions not generally known for enforcing the law equitably) at Camp Newman appear to be part of a larger trend of pro-Israel lobbying groups forging somewhat exclusionary relationships with law enforcement. It is a trend that shows up in some of the legislation we saw this past week in Sacramento, which I hope to finish writing about this weekend, along with an account of the activists and educators who met to plead against the bills.

©️2024 Eva Chrysanthe