A meeting of the Kingston Common Council was thrown into chaos Tuesday night after multiple online participants disrupted the meeting’s public speaking portion with anti-Semitic hate speech. The outbursts occurred before a crowded Council Chamber, where dozens had turned out to speak for and against a potential memorializing resolution calling for an end to the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

The incident occurred during the routine public speaking period that precedes every regular meeting of the Kingston Common Council. During in-person public speaking, a number of city residents spoke for and against the Gaza ceasefire resolution, including one who blamed the recent rise in anti-Semitism on Israel and its supporters.

Then, Common Council President Andrea Shaut began calling on speakers who had dialed in to make their comments remotely. One speaker, using what appeared to be an exaggerated New York accent, identified himself as Samuel Weissman, a Sixth Ward resident, landlord and member of the apparently nonexistent “New York Jewish Landlords Federation” and “Chabad Lubavich.” The caller began speaking against the new proposed Good Cause Eviction law before taking aim at the Gaza resolution with a series of Islamophobic tropes, causing Shaut to direct City Clerk Elisa Tinti to disconnect the call.

A second troll identified themselves as Jude Enraus, an apparent play on the German phrase Juden Raus or “Jews Out” commonly associated with the Nazis. The male caller began by discussing the 1967 attack by Israeli fighter jets on the American spy ship USS Liberty. He was cut off after he began discussing Jewish circumcision practices. Another caller who identified themselves as “Jim Connolly” was cut off after calling the “terror state of Israel” a “cancer on the world. Another going by the name “Andy Obren” was disconnected after he said that to understand the violence in Gaza, people should look to the Jewish holy book the Talmud.

Finally the meeting devolved into chaos as callers waiting in the queue to speak remotely unmuted themselves and began a cacophony of obscene racist and antisemitic invective. The shouting involved at least three people, including one female voice and ended with a male shouting “Angry goyim have hijacked this meeting!”

After cutting off the final caller, Shaut called for a five-minute recess. When the council returned, no lawmaker moved to extend the public comment period.

“We’re all still shaken about this,” Shaut said Wednesday. “It’s City Hall and [Council Chambers] should be a safe space. Yes, people are passionate and people bring their anger and emotions to us, but something like that the public shouldn’t endure and the council and staff shouldn’t have to endure. It was ugly.”

Video of the meeting was not posted to the city’s YouTube channel as is usual practice. City Hall spokeswoman Summer Smith said that the video was withheld to avoid violating the platform’s hate speech policy. An edited version with the offensive language removed would be posted at a later date, Smith said.

Meanwhile, Shaut said, there was little she could do to prevent a repeat of Tuesday’s incident, short of ending remote public speaking — something she said the council might consider. To enter the queue to speak via Zoom, participants simply dial into a number provided in the meeting agenda posted online and wait to be called. Shaut said there was no practical way to vet the callers or identify them after the fact.

“We had no way to know that they were trolls until they started speaking,” said Shaut.

Smith told Kingston Wire that a look at the meeting’s Zoom logs shows the offending callers were not from the area.

This was not the first time trolls have used remote speaking to disrupt a city meeting. In December 2021, as the council gathered in a special session to vote on raises for city workers, an unknown group managed to take control of the video feed to broadcast video of a violent assault while shouting racial slurs.

The mass-trolling incident comes at a time of rising anti-Semitism locally and around the world related to the ongoing fighting in Gaza. Last month, Kingston resident Caleb Rochester was arrested in connection with a March incident in which he allegedly glued a poster reading “F--k Israel” onto the wall of an Albany Avenue synagogue. Rochester, who posted virulently anti-Semitic content on the social media platform X, is charged with felony counts of criminal mischief and aggravated harassment as hate crimes.