Asheville city council lets Islamophobia and racism run amok as they refuse to even consider a ceasefire resolution and treat a broad community movement with open contempt

Above: Asheville city hall in the dark. File photo by Max Cooper

Blade reporter Matilda Bliss contributed to this piece

[This piece deals directly with virulent Islamophobia and racism against Arabs and Palestinians, as well as some aspects of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.]

I have covered Asheville City Council for nearly two decades. In that time I have witnessed no shortage of awful things. This is not a coincidence: during the same era life in our town has grown drastically worse for most of the people living here. The decisions made by city government are a major reason why.

But their last meeting, March 12, was one for the history books in the worst possible way. While I’ve witnessed plenty of hatred and cowardice in my time investigating city hall this was, hands down, among the worst. City council refused to rein in or even minimally condemn blatant, ugly Islamophobia and racism directed at Arabs and Palestinians.

To top it all off Mayor Esther Manheimer, who presides over public comment, falsely claimed that it was pro-Palestinian liberation terms that were a threat. She then said that council would not even consider a ceasefire resolution supported by a broad and growing public coalition.

Every meeting of city council over the past few months has seen pro-ceasefire speakers pack the chambers. The “No preference” option in the recent Democratic primary, used as a way to condemn the Biden administration for its unconditional support of the Israeli government, garnered a higher percentage of the vote here than any other major urban county in North Carolina.

As of this writing a petition demanding council pass a ceasefire resolution has garnered over 2,000 signatures and is supported by a wide range of civic groups including the Racial Justice Coalition, WNC 4 Peace and the Burton Street Peace Gardens.

[Editor’s note: the Blade signed this petition as an organizational supporter after being asked to by some of our readers. We did not have any role in its writing and have not been involved in any of the organizing pushing for its adoption at council meetings. We did so to support the goal of an immediate ceasefire and to oppose city hall shutting out locals from speaking simply because they didn’t like facing criticism. We remain, as ever, independent from any outside organization.]

Council member Kim Roney, supposedly the main dissenter among the elected officials, also wasn’t pressing for a resolution, claiming that it was enough that she’d signed a pro-ceasefire petition back in October.

A ceasefire resolution is an incredibly basic action in opposing a rapidly-escalating genocide by the Israeli regime. Far more can and must happen. Asheville wouldn’t even be the first city in North Carolina to do so. Carrboro passed such a measure all the way back in November. Durham did so last month.

But council had been completely silent for months, other than occasionally chiding those calling for a ceasefire for making them feel uncomfortable.

By now the Israeli regime has slaughtered well over 30,000 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians. That is certainly a vast undercount, as their military’s non-stop attacks on hospitals and basic infrastructure makes it nearly impossible for public health agencies to accurately count the dead. Over a third of those killed are children. Right now over 1 million people are at immediate risk of starvation.

“Palestinians in Gaza are enduring horrifying levels of hunger and suffering,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declared in a March 18 social media statement. “This is the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security Classification system—anywhere, any time.”

Israeli government officials have openly called for genocide and compared Palestinians to animals. This is, as an array of humans rights groups across the world have repeatedly declared, an apartheid regime engaged in a brutal, escalating genocide.

On Feb. 27, after months of city council using arbitrarily enforced or outright invented restrictions on public comment to curb pro-ceasefire speakers, locals in the audience ended the meeting by chanting “Free Palestine” loudly until council adjourned.

On March 12 developer David Moritz took 10 minutes during city council’s open public comment period to go on what can only be described as a feverishly racist rant. He dropped the pretense of this being about any particular militant organization to make bigoted remarks about an entire ethnic group, yelling about “Arabs killing Jews” and approvingly quoting racist 1920s articles claiming Palestinians were “savage.” He accused Palestinians of working with the Nazis and excused the genocide as “a holy war that the Arabs started.”

This had, by this point, crossed council’s own rules, which say the mayor should halt comments “intended to harass any person or group of people.”

But Manheimer didn’t strike her gavel at any point during Moritz’s tirade. She’s done so for such things as applause for speakers critical of city hall and for ceasefire supporters silently standing to show support (she even made up a non-existent rule to do that one).

Blatant Islamophobia and racism against Arabs and Palestinians apparently gets no such sanction.
Those who ceded their time so Moritz could do this (speakers only get 10 minutes if doing so on behalf of a group) included planning board member Jared Wheatley, realtor Monica Buckley and former Asheville-Buncombe Community Christian Ministries treasurer Andrea Carver, a registered Republican. While the push for a ceasefire is backed by a wide range of locals, support for the Israeli regime’s atrocities is concentrated among far-right gentry.

Indeed the vast majority of Zionists in the U.S. are not Jewish, but Christian fundamentalists.

In 2022 city council approved $500,000 in tax incentives for Moritz’s 231-unit downtown “micro-housing” development at 46 Aston. “Micro-housing” means overpriced dorm rooms — rent on the 16 “affordable units” still clocked in over $1,000 a month — without basic kitchen facilities. On top of all that tenants will clearly have to survive a bigoted landlord.

But while council stayed silent in the face of this racism, locals did not. Melissa Weiss, a self-employed Jewish artist, condemned the open hatred.

“I want us to value the lives of Palestinian children as much as we value our own,” Weiss said. “The Islamophobia being spouted in this room is truly shameful.”

“I see the extremely similar ideations from the Jim Crow South or from manifest destiny being used against Palestinians,” Kiah Dale told council.

“We as humanity cannot accept this, we cannot accept genocide of any people, because if it’s ok to happen against Palestinians it can be justified against any of us,” Gabriel Nassar-McMillan, a Palestinian-American local, said. “We’re here for humanity. Stop the senseless killing. Ceasefire now, please.”

“We are your constituents, your community,” Noor Abdelfattah said. “I cannot describe to you what it feels like, as an Asheville resident, that not only will you not put this resolution on the table, you won’t even honor the confirmed over 31,000 murdered Palestinians and counting.”

“We have a local Palestinian community as well as local Arab folks and a local Muslim community,” Nicole Lopez reminded council. “We need to be able to affirm their safety and their humanity and that their lives matter as well amidst this dehumanization.”

“My love for my Jewish community and our sense of safety as Jewish people is not threatened by this ceasefire, however the safety of the Palestinian people is threatened every day without it,” Mattie Caufield said.

Manheimer and city council had capped public comment at an hour. The mayor also made a point of trying to select speakers from “both sides” as on March 12, at previous meetings, pro-ceasefire locals heavily outnumbered those against. While these are technically powers that city council has, they’ve almost never been used — until it came time to curtail the push for a ceasefire resolution.

“Please don’t take our lack of considering a resolution to mean that we don’t care deeply about this issue,” Manheimer said after the public comment period had ended.

That is, of course, exactly what it means.

This is, after all, the same elected official who broke state law to vote, by phone, to turn the Flat Iron building into a hotel. In the past council’s moved quickly to rewrite rules around hotels and airbnbs to allow far more of them.

The mayor and most of city council are currently pushing forward a scheme by the chamber of commerce to impose a tax on everyone downtown and turn the cash over to a Business Improvement District. The BID would be controlled by a board of wealthy landowners chosen in secret by the chamber. They would then hire their own private security to harass anyone they don’t like. Council hopes to have this done by July.

So if they care about something — usually giving the cops even more cash or the wealthy more power — they’re perfectly capable of doing so with haste.

“We don’t, and I don’t foresee that we will have, a resolution that council will be considering on this issue,” the mayor continued. She claimed the sticking point in the lack of a resolution was that there “wasn’t language both sides could agree on.”

Given that one side’s belief is that Arab people are inhuman monsters and the other’s is that the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians is evil and must be stopped, that isn’t particularly surprising. It’s honestly horrific to believe there should be a compromise between such positions.

Manheimer added that she was “not surprised, given this conflict has thousands of years of history to it.”

This is a common talking point to excuse inaction against the actions of the Israeli government, so much so that a recent two-part podcast series Matt Lieb and Palestinian journalist Shereen Lani Younes included it on a list of such. Like the other excuses, it’s also false: the roots of the current conflict are firmly within modern times.

“You being here tonight tells me Asheville is the place I know it to be, which is a deeply caring community and I think that everyone in this room, if they’re told their words harm someone else, is somewhat shocked and surprised,” Manheimer continued.

She did, at no point, explain how a 10-minute tirade calling Arabs and Muslims “savage” should be heard any other way.

Manheimer followed this up by noting that “we condemn hate speech as a council,” including Islamophobia, though she’d done nothing to stop it when she could have. Indeed, she reserved her only specific condemnation not for Moritz’s open racism but for the term “intifada,” used by some supporters of Palestinian liberation, falsely claiming it was “a call to violence on a community. It’s not acceptable.”

Council member Kim Roney then added: “I appreciate what you’ve offered, mayor, and also the invitation for us to speak up. I hear the deep fear and I’m grieving with our community. Of course I’ve already signed a ceasefire letter with elected officials across the country.”

It should be remembered that Roney could do far more than sign a petition. She’s one of seven elected officials who has a direct role in what city government does or doesn’t do. If she wanted to she could have spoken up months ago and called attention to the absence of a ceasefire resolution at every single meeting since.

She could have pressed the mayor, during the meetings, to rule the openly Islamophobic and racist remarks out of order and to not violate the First Amendment protections of ceasefire supporters. She could have used any number of actions — like requiring a separate vote on every single consent agenda item — to slow council proceedings to a crawl until a ceasefire resolution at least got a firm up or down vote.

Moritz is set to get tax incentives for years to come from city hall and Wheatley is still on the planning board. Following their support for open bigotry at the last meeting Roney could have demanded the end of those incentives and Wheatley’s removal under the city’s non-discrimination ordinance.

None of these are particularly radical or brave; they’re things a politician can easily do if they actually want to push a measure forward. But she hasn’t done any of that, because her record makes it clear that Roney sees social justice not as a struggle to defeat oppressions but as checking a series of boxes to reassure others that she’s a good person.

No other member of council even said a word.

If Manheimer’s open opposition is part of what’s blocking a ceasefire resolution, so is Roney’s cowardice and the silence from everyone else on the dais.

As the genocide in Palestine has escalated over the past months the facade that this is anything other than an incredibly violent ethnic cleansing has grown ever harder to maintain. So the excuses of the regime’s supporters have increasingly descended in two directions. The first, as we saw with Moritz’s statements and the group that backed him, is just open bigotry. The other is an absurd insistence that every slogan or expression used by pro-ceasefire speakers, including the many Jewish ones, is antisemitic.

So it’s worth debunking some very obvious lies.

No, “Free Palestine” is not antisemitic. This one is so absurd it shouldn’t even need to be said, but here we are. The very idea that freedom for an oppressed group is automatically an evil threat is the lie of segregationist regimes from Jim Crow to Johannesburg and should be dismissed outright for the fascist garbage it is.

No, “From the river to the sea” is not antisemitic. Writing in Jewish Currents in 2021, Yousef Munayyer powerfully summarized what the chant actually means:

“’From the river to the sea’ is a rejoinder to the fragmentation of Palestinian land and people by Israeli occupation and discrimination. Palestinians have been divided in a myriad of ways by Israeli policy. There are Palestinian refugees denied repatriation because of discriminatory Israeli laws. There are Palestinians denied equal rights living within Israel’s internationally recognized territory as second-class citizens. There are Palestinians living with no citizenship rights under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. There are Palestinians in legal limbo in occupied Jerusalem and facing expulsion. There are Palestinians in Gaza living under an Israeli siege. All of them suffer from a range of policies in a singular system of discrimination and apartheid—a system that can only be challenged by their unified opposition. All of them have a right to live freely in the land from the river to the sea.”

And no, “Intifada” is not an antisemitic. In the Los Angeles Times late last year Palestinian journalist Daoud Kattab, who covered both Intifadas in-depth and was one of the first to translate the term for international news coverage, delved into its history and meaning:

“To equate the call for an end to the Israeli occupation with a call for the genocide of Jews is a bizarre reversal that turns victims into aggressors…the term has never meant genocide, and its target is not Jews but Israel’s illegal occupation — ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of land by war,’ as U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, adopted in 1967, puts it.”

Intifada means anti-occupation organizing and revolt. This has historically included civil disobedience, boycotts, strikes, street demonstrations and, yes, especially after protests “were violently and fatally put down” by the Israeli regime, armed resistance.

“’Intifada’ simply means ‘shaking off’ in Arabic and has the same connotation as ‘uprising’ or ‘rebellion,’” June Nemon, a Jewish activist from Asheville who opposes the occupation, tells the Blade. “As a Jew, to claim that ‘Intifada’ is an antisemitic threat dishonors the long history of Jewish rebellion against occupation and reveals a deep racism towards Arab people which itself must be condemned.”

“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of the most important events in contemporary Jewish history. Tens of thousands of Jews living in an open-air prison defied the occupying force methodically killing them. They secretly collected arms, illegally trained for combat, and might have done more damage had the Nazis not engulfed them in flames from a distance,” Nemon says. “How can we, rightfully, praise the heroism of the ghetto fighters while simultaneously condemning Palestinian rebels operating in very similar conditions?”

Indeed, in claiming that the word is antisemitic Manheimer was picking up a talking point recently popularized by far-right Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik.

It also wasn’t the first time the mayor has used similar smears against multi-racial movements for justice. In 2020 she falsely claimed that a paper mache tombstone placed on her lawn — and those of several other city council members — was a threat against her. This was a lie. The art displayed the names of Black people killed by cops along with a list of demands that included a police oversight committee and unarmed crisis teams. This was clearly meant to shame the mayor and other elected officials for their own bigotry, inaction against police brutality and city hall’s tear gas-laden repression of anti-racist demonstrations.

At the same time she also backed far-right harasser Chad Nesbitt’s lie that he’d been “violently injured” by protesters in September 2020. In fact video footage clearly showed that one of his belligerent armed “security” guards had stumbled into him, causing him to fall and hit his head on a parking meter.

Antisemitism is a very real evil. Like all bigotry it can and must be confronted anywhere it emerges. That does not mean taking bad faith propaganda seriously. Jewish locals and groups have been front and center in organizing Asheville’s ceasefire movement since the start. In city hall’s comment periods over the past few months bigotry has exclusively come from the ranks of those backing the Israeli regime.

As evident from the quotes above plenty of Jewish thinkers, activists and entire communities have opposed Zionism since its inception, especially the apartheid and ethnic cleansing inflicted by multiple Israeli governments. Indeed it is bigotry of the worst kind to conflate the regime of a single nation-state with an entire religion and people, to assert that it exclusively speaks for them or that they have an automatic obligation to back it. It is not a coincidence that, especially among Christian Zionists, the reaction to Jewish voices critical of the Israeli government quickly turns to open antisemitism.

As a journalist who’s covered Manheimer’s entire political career, including an abundance of outrage about her actions, I have seen an antisemitic remark about her outside the far-right only once, on a large social media group over a decade ago. The bigot in question was harshly condemned and immediately, permanently banned.

What primarily drives anger at the mayor and city council is the fact they’re petty tyrants who use their power to make other people’s lives hell, treat demands from the public to do literally anything else as a personal insult and respond with a ton of aggrieved entitlement any time they’re confronted on it.

The push for a ceasefire resolution, while far from the first time that’s happened, has once again made those dynamics crystal clear. During the March 12 meeting one local said that witnessing the occupation of the West Bank up close gave them a greater awareness of colonization and racism here. Indeed the same conservatives pushing for more crackdowns on the poor, more racist policing and more rampant gentrification are also some of the staunchest supporters of the Israeli regime.

That is one reason why the fight for a ceasefire, in city hall and outside of it, has drawn such widespread local support. There is an increasing realization that genocidal police states must be opposed everywhere, that as the old saying goes “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Such coalitions across lines of race, ethnicity and religion, terrify the hell out of the powers that be. They did in 2020 and they do now.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that this issue isn’t going away, no matter how much officials might want it to. As a saying from the original anti-apartheid struggles reminds us, “the people’s patience is not endless.”

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Blade editor David Forbes is an Asheville journalist with over 18 years experience. She writes about history, life and, of course, fighting city hall. They live in downtown, where they drink too much tea and scheme for anarchy.

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