The attempt by Santa Ana Councilmembers Johnathan Hernandez and Ben Vazquez to enlist their council colleagues in supporting a cease-fire in the Gaza war between Israel and Hamas fizzled deservedly last week.
Israel is waging a war of self-defense to destroy Hamas once and for all in the wake of the murderous pogrom launched on October 7 by the Islamist terrorist organization, in which they deliberately murdered 1,200 Israeli civilians of all ages in the most depraved and cold-blooded ways possible, while also using the mass rape of Israeli females as a terror tactic.
Hernandez and Vasquez want Israel to end this war of self-defense – permanently. And they mobilized dozens of radical pro-Palestinians activists to speak in support at the December 5 council meeting. These activists ignored the Hamas’ atrocities and instead pushed their favored narrative of Palestinian oppression – as if the October 7 massacre had never happened.
This indifference to Hamas’ genocidal, anti-Jewish rampage was unintoentionaly caputred in the comments of activist Ayah David comment that “We’re not going to keep harping on October 7” – as if the issue were some embarrassing anti-Semitic insult from a Hamas leader that distracted from the real issue of “settler colonialism” by the Israeli “apartheid state.”
Unsurprisingly, the pro-Palestine activists were loud and disruptive, forcing Mayor Valerie Amezcua to briefly adjourn the meeting to restore order. The mayo ultimately had to direct police officers to escort a number of them from the chamber and station themselves between flanking the public comments podium.
Ward 3 resident and former council candidate Jeffrey Katz address part of his comments to Councilmember Thai Phan.
“I know you’re struggling with the language of this resolution. So did the Democratic Party of Orange County and it rejected the resolution last night,” said Katz. “You will attempt to contort yourself and logic to appease everyone but you cannot.”
Sure enough, that’s exactly what Phan did, in cahoots with Councilmember Jessie Lopez, when they attempted to introduce a resolution that was less inflammatory than the Vasquez-Hernandez cease-fire resolution, but committed the same error of moral equivalency.
“The world has watched in horror as two militaries have prioritized their authority and their might over the peace and safety of civilians in Israel and the Gaza Strip,” said Phan.
Huh? Hamas has deliberately targeted innocent civilians for mass murder while Israel gone to done its bst to minimize civilian casualties. That’s just fact.
“I condemn the terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli American and Thai civilians,” said Phan. “I condemn the retaliatory retaliatory violence committed by the State of Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu against garden civilians in response to the October 7 attack.”
Phan is engaging in the same appalling moral equivalency as Vazquez and Hernandez. Her tone is different and she doesn’t ignore the Hamas’ atrocities to which her two radical council colleagues paid mere lip service. But she’s basically saying there is no moral distinction to be made between Hamas’ deliberate massacre of innocent civilians and Israel’s war of self-defense in which civilians casualties are unavoidable.
However, Phan and Lopez were unable to garner enough support for their resolution because Hernandez would only sign on if it included support for a cease-fire – which Phan opposes.
In the end, both resolutions fizzled out.
A number of Jewish residents of Santa Ana also attended the council meeting to voice their opposition to the cease-fire resolution that Ward 3 resident Mark Thompson rightly called a “radical document.”
And probably the single-most truthful and eloquent statement of the stakes came from Rabbi Gersh Zylberman, a resident of Santa Ana:
“I’d like to…speak out for an unequivocal ceasefire. And for the end to genocide. The way we get a ceasefire in Gaza is simply for Hamas to come out of its terror tunnels under hospitals, under schools – under all kinds of basic infrastructure that people need to survive. Come out with their hands up and their weapons down. Release all of the hostages so brutally taken from their homes.”
“That is how to have a ceasefire and to stop genocide.”
“Those vicious thousands of Hamas terrorists who entered Israel on October 7 were looking for Jews to slaughter them. That is just a taste of what they want to do to Jews throughout the land of Israel, to which we have been indigenous to for over 3000 years. They want to have that genocide throughout Israel and throughout the world and I’m against that genocide.”
Rabbi Zylberman offered a few minutes of clear moral expression during a long council meeting that was otherwise pernicious exercise in radical virtue-signaling.
