This weekend is the California Republican Party’s Biennial Organizational Convention in Sacramento. I have been a voting member of the State Committee since 1989, and my column tomorrow morning will be a run-down on what we can expect to happen, and not happen, as 1500 Central Committee members gather at the (non-union) Sacramento Hyatt Hotel across from the State Capitol.
But I just read a blog post over at the San Francisco Chronicle politics blog by ace reporter (and FR friend) Carla Marinucci, where she got a hold of a Facebook update from a local Republican Leader in San Bernardino County who outrageously has targeted a candidate for CRP statewide office with what I think is a totally racist slur. I will now quote directly from Marinucci’s story:
San Francisco attorney Harmeet Dhillon, who has won support from major party leaders in her drive to be the California GOP’s first female vice chair, has also become the target of a nasty racist effort to slur her as a Muslim terrorist sympathizer and a “Taj Mahal princess.”
Dhillon, currrently chair of the San Francisco GOP, immigrated from India as a child and is a devout Sikh. She’s wrapping up a campaign to become the party’s vice chair, an election which will be held Sunday as the state GOP wraps up its three day convention in Sacramento.
Vera Eyzedooren, the president of the San Bernardino County Federation of Republican Women — an official party group — slammed Dhillon in a recent Facebook post, which included a photo of an Islamic terrorist who beheaded two people.
“I was told by one of Harmeet’s friends that because of her religion, her loyalty is to the Muslim religion,” Ms. Eyzedooren wrote on Facebook. “So she will defend a Muslim beheading two men without any hesitation……she is not a Republican.”
At right is the shameful post, which has since been deleted:
Read the rest of the Chronicle blog post here. After the jump you can also read a statement from the President of the California Federation of Republican Women, who have endorsed Dhillon, on this issue.
Now I have not made a formal endorsement in the race for Vice Chairman of the Party.
But let me take the opportunity to condemn the statements by Vera Eyzendooren right out of the gate. To call them ignorant and mean-spirited would be to underplay how angry it made me to read this.
I can’t imagine anyone coming to the defense of what Eyzendooren said, but I think that conservative leaders actually need to be proactive in denouncing statements like this. Ms. Eyzendooren most certainly has won a nomination in next week’s FlashReport Idiot Of The Week column. Furthermore, she holds an elective office in a Republican volunteer organization. I would think that it would be quite disturbing to her peer-group that Eyzendooren holds views like this.
With that said, I’m looking forward to this weekend’s convention, this “incident” non-withstanding.