Tiburon council is targeted by antisemitic ‘Zoom-bombing’

It was 30 minutes into the Tiburon Town Council’s Sept. 20 meeting, and the open public-comment period had come and gone without a hitch. Using their three-minute allotments, one resident spoke about the need for bus-stop improvements near The Hilarita apartments. Another pleaded for an approach to enforcing smoking bans in multifamily housing.

The meeting continued, with Councilmember-elect Isaac Nikfar sworn into office, moving from the audience to the dais. Then, after a presentation on the countywide electric-vehicle strategy, Mayor Jack Ryan reopened public comment, which included those joining remotely by Zoom.

That’s when the meeting was “Zoom-bombed,” a hijacking of teleconferencing sessions that has plagued schools and businesses that adopted the technology during the pandemic. More recently, it’s been used on local governments willingly inviting people to speak, sending officials scrambling to shut it down in the moment while exploring ways to stop it in the future — without trampling on the First Amendment.

For the Tiburon council it was a climate-change denier who, with his video off, launched into an antisemitic rant that denied the Holocaust as well.

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