Denouncing San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston

UPDATED Below: Oct. 9, 2023 3:30pm

At every opportunity, San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston boasts of his membership in, and endorsement by, the San Francisco chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Preston, 53, the son of Holocaust survivors who fled Germany, is Jewish. He is the supervisor (city councilman) of District 5 in San Francisco, and he seeks reelection next year. He is widely considered the most radical of all eleven city supervisors, often casting the sole vote against approval of legislation, dissenting with his city hall legislator colleagues purely over ideology. He is a pariah, some say. And therein lies the glaring fact: He supports a most radical socialist organization to the core, which now sides with Hamas, the terrorist militant group in Gaza that burst into Israel and perpetrated the most deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

Dean Preston is now in big trouble. And he’s mostly been silent (so far) on this issue. Since this past Saturday’s breaking news of the launching of a sneak attack firing missiles coupled with militants entering by para-gliders, pickup trucks and scooters, the extent of the horrors perpetrated pogrom-style against Jews young and elderly is being broadcast via news, social media nonstop. The evidence is overwhelming. The images and videos are sickening, chronicling stories of butchering and kidnapping whole families and children.

Yet, even with this wave of inhumane tragedy and death at the hands of a known, listed terror organization, Hamas, back here in the United States, the national Democratic Socialists leaders thought it the right time to hold protests and rallies around the country. Sunday, October 9th, 2023, the DSA announced to its members big pro-Palestinian gatherings in New York’s Time Square as well as in San Francisco, outside the Israeli Consulate. Dean Preston is therefore intimately connected, by literal membership, to DSA policy, their platform and their activism. The protests did indeed go on as planned, with masked protesters waving Palestine flags, anti-American and Anti-Israel banners, shouts of profanity and screams of death to Jews. This was repeated in other countries including a particularly disturbing near-riot in Sydney, Australia. Local Jews there were advised by police to remain in their homes for their own safety, while pro-Hamas protesters burned Israeli flags and hurled road flares on the waterfront’s famous Opera House.

Dean Preston’s association to the DSA’s condoning of antisemitism, anti-Israel, inhumane action is unequivocal. As a result, Preston must do the following: Denounce the Democratic Socialists of America; cancel his membership; demand refunds of any dues and donations he made; refuse their recent endorsement of his candidacy for reelection. In other words, Preston must make a complete and total disconnection and disassociation with the DSA. Sever all ties.

At the New York City protest yesterday, DSA members and those who support Hamas openly celebrated the murder of Jews, of torture, barbarism and bloodshed committed against innocent civilians, of whole families. Over two-hundred fifty young concert goers at a weekend techno music festival were killed by Hamas terrorists in an early-morning raid, the largest body count in one place. Americans, Canadians, Germans, Thai, Mexicans, Nepalese and more, are counted among the victims in the Israeli massacre.

Chants at yesterday’s NYC protest of “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free”, alludes to a genocidal, cleansing mantra for the eradication of Jews from Israel’s eastern border of the Jordan River, to the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Make no mistake, there are many, many who seek destruction of the State of Israel.  And Dean Preston, son of Holocaust survivors, people who themselves experienced the horrors of a movement of one collective people with a deranged sickness attempting to eradicate another, must be ashamed of himself. There is nothing complicated here. He must unequivocally condemn the mass slaughter of Jewish civilians, and the celebrating of it by DSA, now.

UPDATE:

After publication of this exposé of Dean Preston’s ties to DSA and their stance on the barbaric harms to Israel’s people by Hamas, he published a statement firmly siding with the Palestinian fight against the Jewish people. Not only is this an appalling revelation directly from Preston, it solidifies what we have come to suspect: he is a dangerous, deranged individual espousing antisemitic and potentially genocidal ideology. The people of the city of San Francisco will respond accordingly.