Fear and loathing at Town Meeting
It would be tedious and boring if it weren’t so dangerous.
Another anti-Israel article will appear on Monday’s Annual Town Meeting warrant as a result of a citizens’ petition. It’s the third consecutive Wakefield Town Meeting that such an article has appeared on the warrant. 
The first one appeared on last year’s Annual Town Meeting warrant. It was back again on the Regular Town Meeting warrant last fall. Neither measure passed, but voters were forced to sit through excruciating presentations full of Hamas talking points and anti-Israel propaganda.
Which I suppose is the point.
The local Friends of Hamas know they have zero chance of getting these measures passed, just as their heroes in Gaza know they have no chance of defeating Israel. But the latter keep lobbing rockets and launching Oct. 7-type attacks anyway. And we keep getting these Town Meeting articles.
In both cases, the expectation isn’t to win. The goal is to spread hate, menace and torment.
As frustrating and disappointing as these warrant articles are, they should come as no surprise.
Our local guardians of human rights have been utterly silent for 18 months about the unprovoked Oct. 7, 2023 invasion of Israel in which Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 Israelis and raped, tortured and kidnapped many more, all the while gleefully filming their barbarous actions and proudly posting their heinous deeds online. Their silence about Oct. 7 would be one thing if the Wakefield Human Rights Commission had not held vigils on the Common in the wake of other mass murders in other far-flung parts of the world.
Nor has the WHRC condemned the anti-Israel Town Meeting articles.
Is it any wonder that members of the local Hamas Fan Club feel emboldened to keep bringing their toxic hate to Town Meeting?
None of the language of Town Meeting Article 19 is original. It is boilerplate “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” talking points, copied and pasted directly from the Palestinian-led BDS movement. The article asks Wakefield voters to issue the exact same demands being made by the antisemitic mobs running around American college campuses.
Article 19 is the very last article on the May 5 Town Meeting warrant, so the decent people of Wakefield will have to hang in there to the bitter end to defeat this loathsome measure.
And defeat it they will.
In the process, the proponents and signers of the petition that resulted in this article deserve every bit of shame and opprobrium that Town Meeting attendees can heap upon them.
[This column originally appeared in the May 1, 2025 Wakefield Daily Item.]
Filed under: Columns & Essays, News, Opinion, Politics, Wakefield | 2 Comments
Tags: antisemitism, BDS, boycott, citizens petition, divestment, Gaza, Hamas, hate, Israel, Israelis, Mark Sardella, Middle East, October 7, Opinion, Palestine, Politics, propaganda, sanctions, terrorists, Town Meeting, Wakefield Daily Item, Wakefield Human Rights Commission, Wakefield MA, warrant
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Mark Sardella 
How can it be even possible to get an issue on the Town Warrant that has absolutely NOTHING to do with Wakefield? Whether it has to do with adding a new head to Mt. Rushmore, renaming Yellowstone Park or proudly announcing our idiot antisemitic views to the world – how could any these things be allowed to even come up for a vote?
“…voters were forced to sit through excruciating presentations full of Hamas talking points and anti-Israel propaganda.” Why??? The solution is to move to table indefinitely — you stand up and say “I move to table this to a time indefinite” and have your buddies shout “second.” (Only one second is needed, but a couple dozen is always more impressive.) Under most versions of Roberts this is debatable, and debate can involve the merits of the main motion, but that is different from having to sit through the presentation. If you want to get devious, you can always move to amend the motion or to substitute a new motion, i.e. change it to read “Nuke Gaza.”
Think of this as “cutting and pasting” — you move to strike (remove) all the language you don’t like and replace it with language you do like, e.g. asking the USAF to detonate a sufficient number of thermonuclear weapons to reduce all of Gaza to a patch of glowing radioactive glass. It’s technically something known as reductio ad absurdum (reduction to absurdity) but that’s your intent — everyone (OK, most everyone) knows that you really don’t want to see Gaza nuked, that you actually are commenting on the Hamas motion and are replacing it with one equally absurd. Beyond this it gets technical, but if you have a 2/3 vote, it is usually possible to end town meeting (not just adjourn but end it) without addressing everything on the agenda, and that may be why this was put last. So sorry, we’re done… And then there is always debating these schmucks on the merits — raping hippies and beheading babies is both reprehensible and rather indefensible, not to mention way outside the norms of the Geneva Conventions. There are organizations such as CAMERA that can be very helpful in providing specific facts with which to counter the lies.