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The Washington State Human Rights Commission uploaded several 2025 meeting recordings to YouTube this week, revealing conversations that preceded their April 2025 resolution on anti-Semitism.

Making the rounds is a March 2025 recording in which Human Rights Commissioner Luc Jasmin speculates that the commission is being asked to speak out against anti-Semitism “under duress.”

Here’s what he says:

Well, this word anti-Semitism has been around since the Jewish got trampled by Hitler, and it seems like the Jewish people keep on crying and crying and crying and crying and crying, always crying with that anti-Semitism, and and today there are many other groups who are subject to mistreatment way way or even subject to mistreatment by the Jewish, and they’re not crying so much…
There’s discrimination against every in every part of life you find discrimination, and why should we, I mean for everybody, and that’s where that’s where I feel that we are under duress and we are we are about to put the laws, special laws for special class of people, and above all, and I I don’t know, I you know you’re welcome to do what you want to do, but to me it’s kind of a weakness. To me, it’s weakness. Okay. I’m sorry if I say that.

Commissioners Jeff Sbaih and Han Tran delicately respond to Jasmin’s uncomfortable admission with reasons why the commission should take anti-Semitism seriously.

Tran responds:

No, let me let me clarify some things here. We’re not under duress or anything like that. I had put out the request and ask local Jewish scholars to provide input on how they frame anti-Semitism. And I think it’s important that we also acknowledge that yes, you’re right. A lot of people are being discriminated against today and there are biases against folks. I mean you’re you’re absolutely right in that sense. I think what makes this moment significant is that there is a rise in anti-Semitism and we want to acknowledge it. We also want to make sure that we understand what anti-Semitism really means.

It is notable that it takes someone like Jasmin to make Tran sound like the voice of reason.

Tran has a history of anti-Israel activism, including but not limited to publicly mourning the death of Yahya Sinwar on social media. (Tran’s Instagram account is now private.) She appears in many photos stylishly draped in a keffiyeh, including in the February 2024 Human Rights Commission meeting.

Sinwar, the architect of October 7th whose life was saved by an Israeli doctor in an Israeli prison, threw a pen at the drone in a final act of “resistance.”

Tran appears to be connected to many local anti-Israel activists, she raised money for the UNRWA Gaza 5K, and she follows some interesting characters here on Substack, like raging Australian anti-Semite Caitlin Johnstone. Tran had to recuse herself from a Human Rights Commission discrimination case involving the Lake Washington School District and LWSD parent Sara Duke for undisclosed personal reasons. Sara Duke is the woman holding the poster of injured children and screaming at me outside Town Hall:

Tran also serves on the North Shore School Board, where she and fellow board members are taking heat after cutting the school resource officer for ideological reasons.

So why does Tran appear to be in favor of investigating anti-Semitism and supporting the Jewish community, pushing back on Commissioner Jasmine?

Jasmine is so out to lunch, a kindergartner could make better points about inclusivity.
The Human Rights Commission can’t dismiss a protected minority group, no matter how annoying it finds it.
An anti-Semitism resolution could offer credible support for Jews while ensuring that the people who most commonly attack Jews are protected by free speech.

Recall Tran’s line: “We also want to make sure that we understand what anti-Semitism really means.” Tran is part of a political network trying very hard to sift out Good Jews from Bad Jews. Good Jews spurn affiliation with Israel; Bad Jews are Zionists. If you are reading this, you are probably a Bad Jew.

Didn’t wanna get attacked? Maybe shouldnve been a Zionist, eh?

Read last year’s coverage of the resolution here if you need a memory boost:

Tran followed a common trajectory toward activism, an “I was blind but now I see” epiphany that saved her from the evils of America. How could she have learned so much about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and so little about Islamophobia and the Nakba? Simple: American education has been influenced by Big Textbook, which has flooded the public education system with propaganda.

If only everyone would just stop fighting. And the way to do that? Stop the cycle of harm, perpetuated by…Jews:

I then understood that a traumatized people ended up targeting and harming others. And that antisemitism was being instrumentalized to justify the slaughter of Palestinians. Both the trauma and the instrumentalization exist at the same time, for different reasons, among different Jews.
Hurt people can hurt people. But hurt people can also heal people.

Hurt people hurt people…does this sound familiar? It’s what Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed said about the man who drove his car into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan:

Ayman Ghazali hurt people. There is no justification for what he did. It was and he should have done it. Hurt people. Hurt people. A week earlier, an airstrike killed his niece and nephew. Imagine if that had never happened. Imagine there was no war in Iran. Imagine if there were no airstrikes in Lebanon. Imagine if his family had never died. Imagine there was never an attack on Temple Israel. That’s the world that we want to live in. That’s the world we need to build for.
Violence always begets violence. Only peace can extinguish that. Because hurt people hurt people.

Actually, Ghazali’s brothers were active in Hezbollah and he was inspired to join them in martyrdom by blowing up a synagogue preschool. Hurt people don’t do that. Psychotic, possessed people do that.

Just how far back would el-Sayed go to find peace? If only there were no Israel. If only there were no Jews. If only there were no America. Then everyone would be able to live in peace, and nobody would ever load their cars with fertilizer and TNT and crash them into preschools.

But anyway, resistance is justified, glory to the martyrs!

Back to the commission.

Luc Jasmin’s term isn’t up until 2028. Han Tran’s term is up next week, on June 17th, but rumor has it that Governor Ferguson will reappoint her to another three-year term.

The job of the commission is to enforce state law to eliminate discrimination “in the areas of employment, places of public resort, accommodation, amusement in real estate transactions, and credit and insurance transactions based on race, creed, color, national origin, families with children, and such.”

After watching several of these meeting videos, it’s not clear to me that the commission does much of anything at all. But it’s certainly not helpful to have one leader who thinks a protected class of people facing historic levels of discrimination are a bunch of whiny brats, and another who seems to believe that a protected class needs to be sorted out into those who should be protected and those who probably have it coming.

How do these commissioners even get the job, you ask? Well, here’s where you come in. Anyone can apply or nominate someone to be on the Washington State Human Rights Commission.

Apply to be a human rights commissioner

And call/write/fax/send a Potato Parcel to Governor Ferguson urging him to remove problematic commissioners.

Send a potato to the governor

Tran’s school board term ends in 2027, and rising politicians often launch their careers from these smaller positions. Be vocal, educate, speak up, fight back on people who are bringing harmful political agendas into taxpayer-funded spaces.

Crying and crying and crying and crying...

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