San Jose Candidate's Aid Quits Over Bogus PLO Claim

posted on: Sep 25, 2014

San Jose City Council candidate Paul Fong accepted his campaign manager’s resignation Wednesday after a fundraising e-mail asserting that his opponent’s adviser was a former member of the Palestine Liberation Organization turned out to be untrue.

The e-mail, sent out to potential donors Monday, described Charles “Chappie” Jones’ campaign consultant, Victor Ajlouny, as “a top Republican consultant and Palestinian activist, who served as a high-ranking member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1990s.”

But Ajlouny, an American of Palestinian descent, said he was never a member of the PLO. Fong’s campaign manager, Dennis Chiu, wrote and sent the e-mail Monday, according to the campaign, and later sent a correction to the same mailing list.

Fong said in a statement that he had accepted Chiu’s resignation “to be sensitive to the concerns expressed over the last couple days by members of the Palestinian and other Middle Eastern communities.”

But that was insufficient for Ajlouny and other critics, including San Jose’s mayor, who said the e-mail’s real fault was bringing ethnic prejudices into the local election.

“This was done to raise money from anti-Arab donors. It’s abhorrent and it’s beneath somebody running for office in San Jose,” Ajlouny said. “What does my nationality have to do with Chappie Jones’ qualifications to be a council member?”

Chiu’s correction said Ajlouny had been an American adviser to the chairman of the PLO,and cited as his source a San Jose Mercury News article from 2009. Ajlouny said that, too, was wrong, though he served as a member of the Palestinian delegation in peace talks in Washington, D.C., in the early 1990s.

Mayor Chuck Reed, who used Ajlouny as a consultant in his 2006 campaign, said Chiu’s resignation was an insufficient response.

Fong “should take responsibility for actions of his campaign, not just fry the campaign manager,” Reed said. “The whole point of the e-mail was to play on people’s fears of Arabs and terrorists. The big issue here is the use of race to elicit campaign support.”