“Even if we agree to disagree, we can at least respect each other for provocative views and through open dialogue. We just hope that the open dialogue is educational, like people do their research before speaking.”
— Ward 7 Kingston alder Drew Andrews
Outside agitators called in to Sieg heil! on Zoom and said much worse during the public-comment period of the City of Kingston Common Council meeting on June 4. If the gambit’s purpose was to engender outrage, it worked. Despite numerous members of the public still waiting to speak on the topic of the city’s second attempt at crafting a memorializing resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza, the council elected not to extend the public-speaking segment of the evening.
“What happened was highly, highly offensive,” said alder Drew Andrews of Ward 7. “When hate speech poses a threat to the well-being of our community, then we take it seriously. But we also have to find ways to navigate this space without violating anyone’s constitutional right.”
Hot-button issues often attract large crowds of individuals eager to join the public discourse. While speech grows testy at times, most issues are no comparison to the discourse generated by a war 5635 miles away.
The first large-scale protests began to decry the Israeli military response in Gaza in December. Members of activist groups like For the Many, Citizen Action and the Mid-Hudson DSA expanded their attention to include the plight of the Palestinians. Their efforts in calling for a ceasefire joined those of such groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine.
The pro-Israeli military side of the debate in Kingston is organized by the Ulster County Jewish Federation (UCJF), which when its website is not raising money to contribute to the war effort searches for expressions of anti-Jewish racial antipathy.
The leadership of the groups understand how to crystallize a position, craft slogans, invent rallying cries, and motivate the turnout of those sympathetic to their message. Employed by non-profits, working the front lines, they are paid and unpaid professional organizers.
Since the council’s first attempt in January to introduce a memorializing resolution supporting a ceasefire in Gaza, these activists have kept up a steady presence at common-council meetings. Counter-protestors who express solidarity with the state of Israel point to the murders of Israeli citizens on October 7 as justification for the ongoing Israeli military response and their opposition to a memorializing ceasefire resolution.
Within this mish-mash of advocates on both sides of the debate are individuals traveling along the emotional avenues of love, fear, hope and hate.
A careful orchestration
This then was the composition of the room when four racists communicating over Zoom set out to insult and menace Jewish identity. Their words were amplified through PA speakers into the room.
Those gathered were unready to hear them. The variety of attacks suggested a careful orchestration among the speakers.
The exact quotes will not be reprinted here. The verbiage was calibrated to injure and inspire fear. Though the speech was hateful, vicious and repulsive, it was worth paying attention to learn how the speakers went about causing maximum damage.
The first speaker claimed to support the ceasefire before using the Jewish religious text to defend antisemitism. The next speaker claimed to be a Jewish landlord careless of the plight of those of his tenants who supported the war. The third speaker engaged in conspiracies and took issue with specific Jewish traditions. The final speaker used the Jewish religion to explain the violence against the Palestinians before turning his venom against the black members of the common council and city administration.
Elisa Tinti, the member of the city administration tasked with monitoring the proceedings, struggled to mute the polluted stream of commentary.
“It seemed like an eternity,” said Michele Hirsch, alder for Ward 9, “sitting there waiting for that [last] person to stop. When I heard it, I wasn’t thinking about myself. I was thinking about, ‘Oh, my God,’ the emotional safety of everybody in this room. And the Jewish population that was out there, wanting us to vote ‘no’ on the resolution or not take the resolution under consideration. I believe my first thought was that this has got to be so horrible. And as it continued I realized I wanted to vomit.”
After the final tirade had been muted, council president Andrea Shaut called for a recess to give time to calm everyone’s emotions.
“Then when we came back maybe ten minutes later,” recalled Shaut. “I asked if there was a motion to extend the public speaking, and there was no motion. So we followed our proper protocol.” Alder Michael Tierney said he found the Neo-Nazis’ professed solidarity with the call for a ceasefire to be disingenuous.
“We got hundreds of them”
Hours before the common council meeting, at 4:43, an email, ostensibly sent by Karen Krakower from karenca8@yahoo.com, arrived in the inboxes of all nine ward alders and the council president.
The message was a form letter which began “We represent Americans across the nation, including Palestinian and Israeli peace activists, who are asking you to vote no on a ceasefire resolution in Kingston, New York.” The remainder of the letter goes on at some length.
Curious. Pro-peace activists calling for a vote against a ceasefire?
A few minutes later, another email arrived in all ten in-boxes, again with the same form letter but from a different email address. For the next 48 hours, the emails, all with the same form letter in the body, would keep coming to all ten council members, sometimes in as little as a minute apart and always from a different email address.
“That night for a few hours,” said Hirsch, “they were coming in by the minute, and then it did slow down, but there was still a lot coming in. We got hundreds of them.” She read the times off her email account for Wednesday morning, long after the council meeting had concluded: “8:53 a.m., 8:56 a.m., 9:08 a.m., 9:10 a.m., 9:15 a.m., 9:17 a.m. Like I just didn’t think there was that many people actually writing these things, you know?” Hirsch said, pausing. “My thought was that even the callers were like some kind of psi-op thing.”
Blocking the messages
Hirsch finds the four speakers’ knowledge and pronunciation of the Hebrew language and religious text highly suggestive. “I’m Jewish,” said Hirsch, “and these people, white supremacists, let’s call them, calling in have a much firmer grasp on Judaism than I do. It’s like some insider baseball.”
Had city director of information technology Kyle McIntosh tried to trace the IP addresses of the Zoom racists? Did he think the 48 hours of emails the council members receive was a coordinated spamming blast intended as part of a deliberate operation to overwhelm and intimidate the council? Questions directed to his email have so far gone unanswered.
Questions emailed to Karen Krakower regarding her involvement as the first email address in a 48-hour email spamming operation have also gone unanswered.
“As of [Friday] morning, they started dying down,” reported Hirsch. “I guess they got blocked. I’m seeing an email that [the council president} got Kyle McIntosh, our IT person, to block them.”
No place for hate speech
The internet’s ability to facilitate the participation of those citizens who wish to take part in the public conversation but are unable to physically attend a public meeting offers a conundrum to government: How can it monitor the wild possibilities which free speech presents for anyone looking to disrupt the smooth functioning of government without ever having to enter the room?
Whether the callers were sincere in their racism, whether they were insinuating their allegiance to a cause for the purpose of discrediting it, whether they were providing the semblance of a resurgent Nazi threat to make an embargo on any criticism of the of the Israeli government more poignant, the net effect of the caller’s racist diatribes was to silence the speech of members of the public who still wished to speak, regardless of what side of the debate they were on. In the short term, the trolls won.
Council president Shaut finds it likely that this sort of strategy employed to disrupt controversial business will grow more common. She intends to solicit ideas from the council as to what measures should be taken to anticipate situations like this and what protocols should be followed.
“We want to support and protect all people in our beautiful city,” said alder Andrews. “At the council we advocate for the respect and understanding of other people as well in our community. So we all denounce any form of racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, homophobic, discriminatory speech. In Kingston, there’s no place for that.”
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