Wanted: Brave Leaders

Cheers to Senator Bernie Sanders and San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston. Sanders sponsored a resolution that would have compelled the State Department to inspect Israel's dismal human rights record -- and the U.S. role in Israel's actions. (The U.S. is by far the largest funder of military assistance to Israel.) Sanders's resolution was voted down by the Senate. But with at least 25,000 Palestinians now killed by the IDF in Gaza -- most of them women and children -- the Israel lobby's stranglehold on Washington is starting to fray, with several Democratic senators voting for Sanders's proposal.

Here in San Francisco, Supervisor Dean Preston successfully engineered an 8-3 board vote calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, humanitarian aid to the people there, and a return of the surviving hostages held by Hamas.

The fact that both Sanders and Preston are Jews and have Holocaust victims and survivors in their families give their actions moral strength.

According to a powerful essay in the Sunday Opinion section of the New York Times by Megan Stack, a former Middle East correspondent, South Africa's genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice "is strong." As Stack concludes, with Israeli attacks on civilians making nowhere in the Gaza Strip safe -- even hospitals and places of worship -- we are witnessing genocide in progress.

Considering Israel's ongoing atrocities, San Francisco Mayor London Breed's denunciation of the Board of Supervisors' ceasefire vote is shameful. In a rare condemnation of the board, Breed had the nerve to say the vote "did not reflect our values."

Excuse me? The failing mayor of a failing city gives herself the right to define our community values? To accuse the Board of Supervisors of being out of touch? (For the record, the San Francisco vote also condemned anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.)

In her six years as mayor, Breed has presided over the sharp decline of a once-great city. The downtown area is still boarded up after the Covid pandemic -- as well as many stores in the neighborhoods -- because she banked on the endless rise of the tech industry. Homeless camps still dot the city because there is no housing to put these people in. Breed is good at cleaning out city blocks for conventioneers who matter, and playing to the wealthy and powerful. But she has no people's touch. She cares only about her political career. Following the public outcry over George Floyd's murder, she was for police reform. Now she's against it. She was for safe injection sites -- the single quickest way to prevent drug deaths-- but now she opposes them. As a result, there has been a record number of drug overdoses on her watch.

Breed decides who she is from day to day by holding her finger in the political wind.

Who will rid us of this terrible mayor? To date the only political rivals to Breed in the November election are a supervisor to her RIGHT (yep) and a hapless rich kid who has raised money for charity or something. No serious candidate to Breed's left has emerged.

Are the heroic days of San Francisco that I wrote about in Season of the Witch -- the grit that my son Joe Talbot dramatized in The Last Black Man in San Francisco -- truly over?

I refuse to think so. Somewhere out there is a leader. Somewhere out there is a hero.

San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston