"The Most Antisemitic Mayor Ever"
Why Tiburon Councilmember Holly Thier's Bridge-and-Tunnel Trip to Richmond Was Reported on CBS News But Not Anywhere in Marin's Local Papers
A regular bike commuter on the Richmond San Rafael Bridge is witness to unusual sights that faster vehicles often miss: A cormorant trapped in the bridge’s architecture that needs only a human hand to free it back into flight. Once, in the waters below, two teenagers whose death-defying idea of "fun" was to leap from their kayaks onto a shipping lane buoy.
But on October 24, 2023, one might have noticed another, even more unusual sight: a Tiburon City Councilmember driving across that crumbling-but-still-magnificent silver bridge to attend a Richmond City Council meeting. What on earth could have occasioned such an excursion?
Richmond is the most diverse city in California, which puts it in stark contrast to Tiburon, which is one of the wealthiest, whitest towns – nestled in the southern half of one of the wealthiest, whitest, and most racially segregated counties in the entire United States.
While Tiburon is home to hedge fund managers and their courtly retinue, Richmond is home to the Chevron Corporation, which refines the gasoline that fuels the Range Rovers and private jets used by the wealthy residents of Tiburon – a process which has long poisoned Richmond and spared Tiburon. In other words, Richmond is the place to which Marin County outsources much of the pollution required to fuel its jet-setting, "Marvelous Marin" lifestyle.
What had occasioned this visit from platinum-blonde Tiburon Councilmember Thier to the almost entirely brunetto Richmond City Council? It was a historic resolution – proposed by the first Latino Mayor of Richmond, expressing support for the Palestinian people. At the time of the resolution, Gaza had already suffered 6,000 civilian casualties due to Israel's retaliatory bombing for the vicious Hamas attack that cost 1,400 Israeli lives. (As of this date, November 6, 2023 the Palestinian casualties resulting from Israel's US-funded bombardment are confirmed at above 10,000, with approximately 3,600 of the casualties children.)
Meet Eduardo Martinez
Richmond's Mayor, Eduardo Martinez, grew up in Dumas, Texas, in a Mexican family that lived in Texas well before that Mexican territory was ceded to the United States in 1848. This particular aspect of Texas history limns an interesting parallel to the 1948 expulsion of approximately 700,000 Arab Palestinians to create of the State of Israel, but when I caught up with Mayor Martinez, he said that wasn't on his mind when he proposed the resolution. What was on his mind were the concerns of the diverse community he represents in Richmond.
Around the issues of social and environmental justice, Eduardo Martinez has been highly active, first as a schoolteacher, then as a Council member, and finally as Mayor. This takes some courage when you live in the shadow of Chevron's refinery. (Chevron's retaliation against attorney Steven Donziger is a particularly sobering example.) As a City Council member, Martinez brought a sea-level rise lawsuit against Chevron to the attention of the city, and the City joined the suit.
While Martinez has previously spoken of the need to dismantle Chevron, he supports its workers, having walked the picket line with Chevron employees in their recent strike. When one of Chevron's workers was fired for organizing, Martinez reportedly hired him as staff. Why not? If you find the rare person with the courage to lead a strike against the all-powerful Chevron, don't lose them.
Global Events Have A New Habit of Crashing Into American Lives
It wasn't hard to understand Israel’s woefully self-destructive response to the October 7 Hamas attacks. The Hamas attacks weren't just horrifying and cruel – they exposed Israel's military, intelligence, and surveillance apparatus to be entirely inept. And so the bombs were dropped by Israel onto the beleaguered civilian population of Gaza, purportedly in an attempt to wipe out Hamas, but mostly to distract from the failures of the Netanyahu-led government.
At a moment when we Americans are finally subject, via social media, to images of what massive bombing campaigns actually do, Marin County's white Democratic Party electeds, including Jared Huffman, proclaimed robotically, "I stand with Israel" amid longer messages that seemed to conflate the State of Israel with Jewish people in general. None seemed to consider that their position might alienate the Democratic base, or put US citizens, including Jewish people, at any risk of blowback.
Those who peacefully marched in the tens of thousands (and in some places hundreds of thousands) were not just younger and farther to the left of the elected Democratic and Republican congress. Many of the pro-Palestinian protests are being led by Arab and Palestinian organizers; while other pro-Palestinian protests have been organized by Jewish Americans long shunned for speaking out against Israel’s human rights violations. The diverse pro-Palestinian movement has also struck a deep chord amongst Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latino Americans, and while one can cite esteemed writers like Michelle Alexander and Ta Nehisi- Coates, it is the solidarity of so many workingclass “minorities” that seems most passionate in this moment.
Thus, it should not be surprising that in Richmond, the most diverse city in California, a fiercely progressive City Council would pass a resolution in support of the Palestinian people. And that is what they did on October 24, becoming the first city in the US to do so.
Holly Thier Comes to Richmond
Holly Thier, a Tiburon City council member, took issue with the resolution. It is highly unusual for any elected official in Marin to attend a Richmond City Council meeting, but Ms. Thier made the trip on October 24, only to find the room already filled to capacity. (While it is rare for issues in Marin County to involve massive public participation, it is more common in the politically engaged East Bay.)
I watched much of the October 24, 2023 Richmond City Council meeting over the weekend, and found it heartbreaking. Several attendees had lost family members due to Israel's retaliatory bombing of civilians; one who spoke listed the many names of those family members who had been killed by Israeli missiles. Jewish attendees spoke both in favor of, and against, the resolution.
There were technical difficulties due to the number of people who crowded into the council chambers and onto zoom, but these appear to have been well-managed by the Council and City staff. I was impressed with the professionalism of the Council, and the civility of the attendees, which put many Marin County councils to shame. (An article in jweekly.com which describes the meeting as chaotic does not accord with the actual recording.)
Due to the large number of people who wished to comment (with most in favor of the resolution), Council had to ask those who had already commented to leave the crowded chambers in order to make space for additional people who wished to speak. The meeting went on until 1 am, and the resolution passed 5-1.
It appears that only CBS News reported Councilmember Thier's attendance. No Marin County-based media reported her attendance, nor did any Marin County-based reporter cover the resolution.
Per CBS News, Thier was upset that she wasn't permitted to speak. But when I asked Mayor Martinez about this, he stated that no one was restricted from speaking, which is why the meeting ran on until one o'clock in the morning. This implies that Thier had simply chosen to leave without speaking because she didn't want to wait that long. I tried to contact Councilmember Thier about this, and while she sent me a few friendly messages, she did not provide any additional information beyond the statements she had already made to CBS News.
What Councilmember Thier did say on CBS News was striking: "Eduardo Martinez will go down in history as the most anti-Semitic mayor ever. And he has divided not only his community, but he has made his own residents feel unsafe and unwelcome."
The Most Whaaat Mayor?
It is clear from watching the recording that Martinez and the entire council went out of their way to accommodate all of the speakers, and were not partial to one side or another. It is unclear how Martinez was "antisemitic" in the least, nor was it apparent that he had made his own residents feel "unsafe and unwelcome."
The only “controversial” aspect of the resolution is its insistence on addressing the specific problems and sufferings of the long-disenfranchised Palestinian people, who are currently under bombardment by Israel, to which our country gives over $3 billion a year in funding, with an additional $14 billion announced this past October.
Line after line of the resolution specifies very disturbing but clearly established facts about the conditions imposed on Gaza's Palestinians by Israel. And I urge you to read the resolution in its entirety because it is not so much an indictment of Israel — but of us as Americans, who have blithely gone on about our lives with no idea what our tax dollars have funded in Israel and the occupied territories.
Since the Richmond resolution is explicit in its opposition to antisemitism and any form of ethnonationalism, it is unclear why Councilmember Thier, a former San Francisco Deputy City Attorney, would make a statement about Mayor Martinez that clearly seems to be 1. totally unsupported by the facts, and 2. potentially defamatory/libelous. Thier did not explain why she thought Mayor Martinez was "the most anti-semitic mayor ever", nor was she prompted to explain that statement by the CBS News reporter. For the record, concerns about safety were more deeply felt by the staff at the City of Richmond, who reported receiving threatening and racist letters from opponents of the resolution.
There is some truth to Thier's statement that the resolution created division in the community, but in sum the resolution appears to have created more unity than division. The speakers were overwhelmingly in favor of the resolution, mirroring what we have seen nationally: younger and more diverse populations strongly support the Palestinian civilians currently under assault by Israel's US-backed military. (There are precedents for this: The Chicano Moratorium and opposition from the Black Panthers and MLK Jr. to the US-Vietnam War, among others.)
Why Wasn't Thier's Trip Covered in Marin County's Local Media?
You might think that when a Tiburon Town Council Member makes the unusual step of attending a Richmond City Council meeting, then claims to CBS News that she was prevented from speaking, and makes what could be construed defamatory and libelous statements about Richmond's first-ever Latino mayor, then local media might take note.
But Thier's claims were not covered in The Marin Independent Journal, The Pacific Sun, The Ark, or seemingly any other local Marin publication of note.
Why not? Let's look those three publications.
The Ark Newspaper
The Ark Newspaper covers Tiburon and Belvedere specifically (reportedly, there are Tiburon residents whose only newspaper is The Ark.) The substantive part of the Ark's friendly and prompt reply to my query:
"We were aware of the Richmond meeting but not of Thier's presence or comments until they were published online – too late for us to examine anything for this week's edition – but plan to make it a part of our team discussion this week."
That straightforward sentence also seems to indicate that Thier did not contact them about her "presence or comments".
Worth noting that The Ark ran a story early (October 18) about an Oct 10 solidarity event organized by Chabad of Tiburon that was specifically in support of Israel but "which also recognized Palestinian civilians." After a quote from Rabbi Levi Mintz about the importance of doing good works, The Ark included a list of responsible organizations (some outspoken in defense of Palestinians, such as Doctors Without Borders) doing relief work in Israel and/or Gaza.
The Marin Independent-Journal
The IJ's Giuseppe Ricapito wrote an early article for the Marin IJ (October 10) headlined, "Marin community leaders lament violence in Middle East" which quotes at least five Jewish leaders and only one Arab leader. This mirrors an established trend of under-representation of Palestinian voices; as VOA reports: "One 2019 study analyzed 50 years of news headlines on the Israel-Palestine conflict and found that US newspapers are more than twice as likely to cite Israeli sources than Palestinian ones."
It's not Ricapito's most even-handed article to put it mildly, but it was also likely written in haste, and was published only a few days after the initial Hamas attack.
After that, it appears that every subsequent news report on Israel/Gaza published in the IJ came from AP or Bay Area News Group. But there were two Marin opinion pieces, e.g., A Bank of Marin officer penned a "Marin Voice" column arguing against an immediate ceasefire and blaming Hamas alone for conditions in Gaza, which requires forgetting that Palestinians were remanded into Gaza by Israel, and disregarding all of the conditions included in the City of Richmond resolution.) Columnist Dick Spotswood, a man who has publicly bragged about his slave-owning Southern forebears, wrote in praise of Jared Huffman's "I Stand With Israel" line. In no part of any of these articles appear the words: apartheid system, genocide, or Israeli war crimes.
But as I continued to search for IJ articles on the topic, I found an October 18 article in Axios, which reports that all US newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital were required to run the same editorial on October 18. The editorial, which ran in the (Alden-owned) Marin Independent-Journal, seems straightforward enough for most US readers: "Hamas attack should be recognized as an act of terrorism."
No big deal, right? It's like saying water is wet. So why would Alden need to mandate that for all its newspapers?
Three reasons:
1. By mid-October, when the mandated editorial ran, Israel's airstrikes against Gaza had already killed at least 3,300 Palestinian civilians (approximately 1/3 of whom were children), which was more than double the number of Israelis killed by Hamas. Thus, running a nonsense editorial which was essentially "Hamas = Terrorist!" helped to distract from the fact that Israel was, within less than two weeks after the Hamas attacks, already engaged in severely disproportionate retaliation against a trapped civilian population, which is a war crime.
2. To push back against the Associated Press’s ongoing refusal to label the Hamas attacks as terrorist. To simplify AP's reasoning: if Hamas' brutal killing of 1,200 Israelis constitutes a terrorist attack, how is Israel's retaliatory bombing (which has killed ten times as many people in the open-air prison of Gaza) not also an act of terrorism, albeit more sustained?
3. Alden Global Capital has no respect for supposedly independent newspapers, (which is why it's sucking money out of newspapers and funneling the money into Alden's real estate holdings), and it enjoys any opportunity to strip editorial boards of their ability to think and act independently.
The Marin Independent-Journal is the local paper of record, but it has delivered next-to-zero information about Israel's genocidal bombing of Palestinian civilians. Nor has it acknowledged how many journalists have been killed in Israeli airstrikes in the last 30 days. This may feel acceptable for an older, wealthier, whiter population. The rest of us are reading our news elsewhere, from The Financial Times, which demanded a ceasefire at least a week ago, to Al-Jazeera, to Palestinians trapped in Gaza who managed to get their messages out on social media before they were killed.
The Pacific Sun:
I reached out to Peter Byrne who writes for The Pacific Sun. Byrne penned an October 15 article about a pro- Palestinian protest in San Francisco. His article did not make it into the print edition, and was not that easy to locate online. Comments to his article were closed, which he stated was not anything he had requested as he generally enjoys reader comments.
It did not surprise me that his article was given what appears to be second-class treatment in The Pacific Sun, given that the position he takes in it is far more critical of the US and Israel than would be appreciated by The Pacific Sun's funding sources. These funding sources include the County government, which is handing some portion of a $40,000 "drug awareness" media buy to the historically law-enforcement-friendly weekly; and the blue-no-matter-who individual donors to the publication. Byrne's article appears to be the only article on or related to the topic of Israel/ Palestine in The Pacific Sun since the Hamas attacks of October 7.
The Pacific Sun's Curious "Freedom of the Press!" Contradiction
Worth noting that The Pacific Sun's Nikki Silverstein wrote approximately a half-dozen articles about an incident in which a commercial photographer/videographer with ties to SRPD was improperly, illegally, and unfairly abused and arrested by a Sausalito Police officer in 2021. The case resulted in the photographer and his wife suing the City of Sausalito for $21 million. Meanwhile, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 37 journalists and media workers (mostly Palestinian) have been outright killed since October 7, a period of 29 days. The vast majority of these journalists were killed by Israeli missiles/airstrikes, which means they were killed by a military that we Americans fund with billions of dollars every year. And yet there has been total silence on this concentrated attack on journalists in The Pacific Sun.
I couldn't tell you why a publication that purports to care so much about "Freedom of the Press!"™️ has said nothing about the dozens of journalists killed by Israeli airstrikes in a mere 29-day period. To anyone who says that this is international and not local news, that distinction was flattened along with the blowback of the World Trade Center Tower attacks.
The relatively abstract issue that motivated Bin Laden to plot his attack was minor compared to the immediacy of images now flooding the internet showing civilians, especially children and infants, killed by Israel using bombs that President Biden brags were made right here in the US.
It is our tax dollars that fund Israel’s targeted slaughter of journalists. (One of the local youth organizers in support of the Richmond pro-Palestinian resolution claimed that California has sent, so far, over $600 million in weapons to Israel in 2023, of which, she calculated, there were $1.4 million Richmond taxpayer dollars.)
It's all the more reason why local press should not look away. Who are the new tech and military industrial complex-linked investors in Marin County currently making a fortune off of the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza? Shouldn't local media at least ask that question?
©️2023 Eva Chrysanthe