Rusty Kennedy Needs to Learn the Definition of Hate Speech

"Yeah, we're gonna talk about hate speech, right, Boys?"

"Right, Boss."



Last night in Anaheim, I attended an event that was advertised as a discussion of free speech vs hate speech. The event was hosted by Orange County Chair of the Board of Supervisors, Shawn Nelson and moderated by the head of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, Rusty Kennedy, a man who has darkened these pages often before. On the panel were Rabbi Rick Steinberg, Fullerton Police Chief Dan Hughes, ACLU attorney Bardis Vikili, Manoj Mate, Whittier College law professor, and  Michael Houston, Anaheim City Attorney. There were about 50-60 people in the audience including police officials and local Orange County city officials.

http://newanaheim.com/2013/11/13/presentation-on-free-speech-vs-hate-speech-set-for-dec-4-in-anaheim/




Rusty Kennedy (in blue shirt and crooked tie)


Contrary to its label, hate speech occupied very little time. About 90% of the time was devoted to discussion of how city council members could maintain order in their public meetings when certain members of the audience became disruptive or dominated the discussion- boring if you came expecting to hear a discussion on how free speech contrasted with hate speech. I videotaped the event, and you can see for yourself what a boring discussion it was.

Segment one

Segment two 

                                                                   Segment three

                                                             Segment four

                                                              
                                                                       Segment five

To make matters worse, it appeared toward the end that Kennedy was not going to entertain questions from the audience, rather he was going to let the esteemed panelists ask questions among themselves. I guess we were just supposed to sit there, listen, and applaud at the appropriate cues. Maybe they didn't want us to be "disruptive". At this point, I began to raise my hand and more or less keep it raised. At least the other people would realize that the audience was being shut out of the discussion. Finally, Kennedy began to take questions. The first went to none other than Todd Spitzer, one of the OC's biggest pols, a man who is always trying to climb higher in office-usually unsuccessfully.  Don't ask what his question was-you'll have to watch the video. Finally, I got my turn, and I brought up the issue of anti-Semitic hate speech at UC Irvine, my previous letter to Kennedy, his asinine response, and my frustration at the unwillingness of community and university leaders to confront it. (It all comes at the end of the 4th segment and beginning of the 5th segment.)

Rabbi Steinberg took the response, and you can watch his utterly lame answer on the tape. He even had the audacity to mention the Rose Project as an effort to combat the problems on campus. I wanted to gag. Steinberg, by the way, refused to allow an event to take place in his synagogue by the Zionist Organization of America in March 2011, which was dedicated to criticizing the UCI Olive Tree Initiative, which the Rose Project, a financial subsidiary of the hapless Jewish Federation of Orange County, has helped fund.

Kennedy did not respond to my charge.

At the conclusion, I was approached by a reporter from the Orange County Register, who asked me questions about my reaction to the event and the issues on the UCI campus. I also brought to her attention the on-going mess at San Francisco State University.

As with everything Trusty Rusty Kennedy is involved in, this event was a dud-basically a training seminar for city officials to keep order in their meetings and to justify the $300,000- now $250,000 a year budget of Orange County's biggest and most useless white elephant, the OC Human Relations Commission.