For those feeling a little more patriotic—a little more proud to be American—having cast your vote in last month's national election, please, don't read this. Cooper City, Florida, a town in Broward County of about 31,000 folks, whose motto is "Someplace Special", has had some ugliness—ugliness in the form of anti-Semitism—directed at its mayor and her staff this year. Hopefully, the folks at Family Circle magazine will catch wind of this story and re-assess whether Cooper City really is worthy of its Top 10 Best Towns for Families, unless of course the author of that list, Michael J. Weiss, wishes to specify that the list is for non-Jewish families. Oh, it's not that the good people of Cooper City haven't tried to beat down the hateful beast of anti-Semitism, they have. The problem, they've concluded, is that fighting their local anti-Semitism is simply too financially draining.
On January 19, 2008, the campaign manager for the town's Jewish mayor, Debby Eisinger, had a swastika scratched onto her vehicle. Eisinger’s campaign manager, Lori Green, who is also Jewish, said her car was parked beside her house in Embassy Lakes when the anti-Semitic act occurred. Green, whose husband's relatives are Holocaust survivors, reported the swastika to law enforcement when Lori discovered it, and the Broward County Sheriff's Office has since labeled the incident a hate crime.
That same month the Broward County Sheriff's Office started looking for evidence leading to those responsible for anti-Semitic postings about mayor Eisinger on the now-defunct website www.savecoopercity.blogspot.com, a hate blogsite that was registered to Cooper City Commissioner John Sims. The Sheriff's office considers those postings to also constitute a hate crime. In addition to local law enforcement, the townspeople also took action on the matter. According to South Florida Sun-Sentinel reporter, Elizabeth Baier, more than 1,900 Cooper City residents (10 percent of the city's registered voters) signed a petition for a special recall vote of Commissioner Sims, who has claimed no responsibility for the anti-Semitic postings at his (now dead) registered blogsite. However, as Ms. Baier reported in May, 2008 City Clerk Susan Bernard said the recall vote to remove Sims would require two special elections with a total price tag of $110,000. That amount proved too much to press for the recall vote. Ms. Baier quotes former Cooper City Commissioner, Elliot Kleiman, the man who spear-headed the recall committee and worked his butt off to collect the 1,900-plus signatures to move the recall vote forward, as saying, "Based on the economy and all the problems with city budgets, we just determined that it just wasn't worth it." This statement was made months before the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, the Wall Street bailout, and the plummeting stockmarkets; so, if Cooper City didn't have enough cash back in May for a recall vote, they certainly don't have it now.
Well, at least there is an active criminal investigation into the hate crime blog postings, right? Uh, no. According to Ms. Baier's article, the Broward County Sheriff's Office "have suspended the investigation until they get more information." The thing about police investigations is this: you don't get more information about a crime when you suspend the criminal investigation. Perhaps keeping the investigation active was also proving too costly.
For his part, Commissioner John Sims has been quoted as saying the recall petition effort "was a big joke," and he's started another blogsite where, speaking of himself in the third-person, he says, "John has the hands on experience to effectively address and resolve the current moral, legal and political issues facing Cooper City, and to make Cooper City more than 'Someplace Special' to live for our present residents and our future generations." Anti-Semitism, we hope Mr. Sims will agree, is no laughing matter for this generation or the next ones.
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