Tiburon council is targeted by antisemitic ‘Zoom-bombing’

Editor’s note — This article won third place for best localized national news story in the National Newspaper Association’s 2024 Better Newspapers Contest.

It was 30 minutes into the Tiburon Town Council’s Sept. 20 meeting, and the open public-comment period had come and gone without a hitch. Using their three-minute allotments, one resident spoke about the need for bus-stop improvements near The Hilarita apartments. Another pleaded for an approach to enforcing smoking bans in multifamily housing.

The meeting continued, with Councilmember-elect Isaac Nikfar sworn into office, moving from the audience to the dais. Then, after a presentation on the countywide electric-vehicle strategy, Mayor Jack Ryan reopened public comment, which included those joining remotely by Zoom.

That’s when the meeting was “Zoom-bombed,” a hijacking of teleconferencing sessions that has plagued schools and businesses that adopted the technology during the pandemic. More recently, it’s been used on local governments willingly inviting people to speak, sending officials scrambling to shut it down in the moment while exploring ways to stop it in the future — without trampling on the First Amendment.

For the Tiburon council it was a climate-change denier who, with his video off, launched into an antisemitic rant that denied the Holocaust as well.

As Nikfar threw up his hands, Ryan and Councilmember Holli Thier, who is Jewish, broke in: “This is not part of the public-comment period,” Ryan said. “This is not related to the item,” Thier added.

When the caller signed off, Ryan turned to Thier in an aside caught by the mic: “Sorry, that’s outright offensive.”

As councilmembers waited for the next caller to join, Thier used the brief silence to gather her thoughts and spoke up.

“In Tiburon, we don’t tolerate antisemitism, we don’t tolerate racism and we don’t tolerate that kind of hate speech,” she told the audience. “So I’m going to come out strong on this tonight, and I’m going to say that we’re a community that accepts everybody, and we don’t care what religion you practice, we don’t care your orientation, we don’t care about anything else, except (that) you’re welcome here in Tiburon, and we’re not going to allow people to shut down our meeting. So to the caller that just talked, you’re out of order, you’re inappropriate and this kind of speech is not welcome in Tiburon.”

Things seemed to be back on track, as the next speaker joined by video and used her three minutes to express her support for the electric-vehicle strategy. But things turned ugly again when another man, video off, was given the room and launched into a vulgar, antisemitic rant of his own.

“Cut him off,” Ryan said. “Cut him off. That’s inappropriate,” Thier added.

Ryan asked for a five-minute recess, calling the environment toxic, but as staff discussed the procedure, the caller was able to unmute himself and repeatedly shouted antisemitic and racist slurs that echoed through council chambers.

“It’s just so shocking to come to a meeting with people and processes you respect to be interrupted by such discordant hate out of left field,” Ryan said after the meeting.

Tiburon has faced a number of antisemitic incidents in recent years, with graffiti found in the Maritime Center parking lot and at Bel Aire Elementary School in 2018, the latter just five days after the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that killed 11. Those incidents led to a Town Council resolution condemning hate speech and a 100-person march down Tiburon Boulevard, both spearheaded by Thier, a member of the Bay Area Network of Jewish Officials who has served on the Jewish Community Relations Council in San Francisco.

A swastika and Nazi imagery were found at Westminster Presbyterian Church a few months later and, early last year, a white-nationalist group leafleted at least 60 Tiburon homes with antisemitic messages.

The Zoom-bombing was a first for Tiburon, but the same night in Larkspur, two public commenters also called in with racist and antisemitic slurs, which officials said was the city’s third incident.

A week earlier, Sonoma County supervisors were targeted with slurs at consecutive meetings. In June, a Walnut Creek councilmember wrote an op-ed for J., the Jewish News of Northern California, about incidents in his city. And there have been other reports throughout the Bay Area this summer, including in Contra Costa County, Sacramento and at the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

Under California’s open-meetings laws, collectively known as the Ralph M. Brown Act, public agencies must allow time for open public comment on any matter under the body’s jurisdiction, as well as dedicated comment time for items on the meeting agenda.

According to Tiburon’s town attorney, Ben Stock, hate speech is generally protected by the First Amendment, unless it contains specific threats of violence or incites imminent criminal activity. The U.S. Supreme Court famously protected the free-speech and assembly rights of American Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, in the late 1970s. More recently, the court affirmed this by protecting the hateful speech of the Westboro Baptist Church in 2006.

Stock said, however, that in limited public forums — such as Town Council meetings — the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in 1990 in White v. City of Norwalk that a person may be cut off or removed if they disrupt proceedings, as the speech could prevent a public body from conducting business or interfere with the speech rights of others.

The Ninth Circuit backed this again in 2015, in Reza v. Pearce. With those rulings in place, Gov. Gavin Newsom last year signed Senate Bill 1100, which specifically allows legislative bodies to remove “disruptive” people if they’ve been warned but don’t get back on track.

“If it’s disruptive, the town is entitled to impose rules to deal with that disruption,” Stock said.

San Rafael’s city attorney, Rob Epstein, has provided written guidance to the council there, saying hate speech should be terminated and the law explained by staff, with the council chair commenting on the dangers of hate speech.

“Deciding when to cut off the speaker can be confusing because the legal standard is nebulous,” Epstein said. “We just need to use our best reasonable judgment in the moment.”

During the Sept. 27 meeting of the Marin County Council of Mayors and Councilmembers in Fairfax, former Assemblymember Marc Levine of San Rafael, now the Central Pacific regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, and member Rachel Kertz, a San Rafael councilmember and North Bay chair of the Bay Area Network of Jewish Officials, addressed the group to provide resources and tools for councils to consider and implement.

The Anti-Defamation League tracked about 518 reports of antisemitism across California in 2022, a 41% increase from the previous year and a 196% increase from the 175 incidents reported in 2015.

Levine provided the league guidance, which starts with a review of formal procedural rules that neutrally apply “time, place and manner” restrictions, which are allowed as long as they don’t discriminate against viewpoints and are enforced evenly.

These included in-person and online sign-in lists for those wishing to speak and requiring speakers to identify themselves and their home towns — though in Tiburon, both callers were in the Zoom queue with presumably false names. The league also suggested time limits, though again, Tiburon already limits each speaker to three minutes. It also suggested boards encourage written comments and consider formal rules for disruptive behavior.

With little ability to stop hateful comments before they begin, board members were encouraged to be familiar with code phrases, symbols and signs, and to immediately condemn hateful speech the moment it occurs, as Thier did during the Tiburon incident.

The Anti-Defamation League also encouraged agencies to make public statements denouncing hateful language and incidents, being mindful to not amplify the messages of hate groups, sensitive to those targeted and making commitments to community values, possibly including anti-bias education.

With Kertz, Thier provided guidance from the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Bay Area Network of Jewish Officials. That includes adopting a resolution encouraging civility during public comment; opening and closing comments with a statement of values; creating an optional agenda item on confronting hate speech that can be elevated if an incident occurs; staff training; having the chair call a recess, as Ryan did in Tiburon; and having board members turn their backs on hateful in-person speakers to show opposition.

Other suggestions, however, seek to deliberately limit opportunity, which could also limit legitimate discourse. That includes moving the open public-comment period to the end of meeting agendas — though in Tiburon’s case, that’s not when the incidents occurred — and eliminating the opportunity to provide virtual public comment altogether.

After last week’s meeting of the county’s mayors and councilmembers, Ryan said he wanted to consult more with Stock, the town attorney, about what else the council might want to implement, but that it’s important to thread the needle to protect residents’ First Amendment rights.

He and Thier both said they didn’t want to end the online commenting option.

“We have a lot of members of the public that are participating via Zoom,” Thier said. “However, if it gets to the point where we cannot ever hold a meeting, I don’t know what the Town Council will decide if it comes to that point. I do think there’s a lot of strategies before we get to that point.”

She suggested the town could consider moving open public comment to the end, while Ryan wondered aloud if it’s possible to split the open-comment period, allowing those attending in person to speak at the beginning of the meeting and then reopening comment at the end for teleconference participants.

“I don’t know if we can do that. … Otherwise, I totally agree that it disturbs potentially as many people as it serves,” he said. “We get three people at the meetings as it is. I don’t want to cut off the other three people who show up online.”

But, he said, word had gotten out about the incident, and residents have been supportive of the council’s actions in the moment.

“I don’t see who’s an online participant, but I got a bunch of emails the next day from people that I had no idea ever even looked at council meetings saying, ‘That was terrible. I’m glad you guys did what you did.’”

Tiburon reporter Francisco Martinez contributed to this report. Reach Executive Editor Kevin Hessel at 415-435-2652.