San Francisco Mayor London Breed condemned the Board of Supervisors’ recent resolution demanding a “ceasefire” in Gaza on Saturday, taking an extraordinary step to distance herself from a vote that divided the city and provoked international criticism.
Last Tuesday, as Breitbart News reported, the Board voted 8-3 to adopt a “ceasefire” resolution. Though it went further than other such resolutions in actually condemning the Hamas terror organization, it also created a false moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. Members of the Jewish community also said that the resolution reinforced fears of antisemitism within the city.
WATCH: Yesterday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a compromise resolution on Hamas and Israel, but the public comment period was filled with antisemitic vitriol, conspiracy theories, and harassment. pic.twitter.com/rWPXWX50ak
— JCRC Bay Area (@SFJCRC) January 10, 2024
Breitbart News noted:
The resolution was first introduced a month ago. In the interim, San Francisco has seen disruptive protests against Israel that targeted Christmas observances as well as court proceedings in the trials of several dozen activists who blocked the Bay Bridge.
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The resolution goes further than similar resolutions — such as the one passed recently in Oakland — in condemning Hamas. But its attempt to equate Israel and Hamas falls flat. Its claim, for example, that the “Netanyahu government” — in reality, a national unity government that includes the major opposition party — has killed “tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians” in Gaza fails to note that a significant proportion of the casualty figures reported by Hamas officials are, in fact, terrorists hiding among civilians.
There was a ceasefire in place on October 7, which Hamas violently broke. A ceasefire now would leave Hamas in power in Gaza.
Local conservative activist Richie Greenberg also told Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM Patriot 125 on Sunday that the resolution had been spearheaded by “democratic socialist” Dean Preston, who is the supervisor for District 5 — an area that includes the Tenderloin, one of the areas hardest hit by crime, drug abuse, and homelessness.
Mayor Breed spoke out on Sunday, she said, after she had been contacted by the mayor of the city of Haifa, in Israel, which is a sister city to San Francisco, and where residents were anguished at the Board of Supervisors’ resolution.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported:
“Like my recent predecessors in this office, I almost never comment or take action on nonbinding resolutions from the Board of Supervisors,” Breed said in a statement Saturday afternoon. “This one warrants an exception.”
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Breed said she was moved to condemn the supervisors’ resolution after receiving an anguished letter from her counterpart in Haifa, Israel’s third largest city. Breed met with Haifa Mayor Einat Kalisch-Rotem last year during a trip to Israel to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the cities’ sister-city relationship.
The “pain and confusion” Kalisch-Rotem expressed in her letter “shows the impact that our actions have, and the consideration required when taking up complex matters over which we have absolutely no jurisdiction,” Breed said.
Breed’s statement is likely to infuriate anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian activists, who have besieged civic institutions for the last several months.
However, it marks another departure from left-wing orthodoxy for the mayor, who dropped “defund the police” policies in ate 2021 and referred to soft-on-crime policies demanded by the Black Lives Matter movement as “bullsh*t.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
