A man running for Hilton Head mayor held up a swastika at an election event. It got ugly
As Rabbi Brad Bloom spoke at the end of a highly emotional, two-hour Hilton Head mayoral candidate forum on hate speech Tuesday, one candidate tried to walk out.
But some of the people in the standing-room-only crowd wouldn’t let him.
They formed a human shield—standing shoulder-to-shoulder—and quietly told self-proclaimed Holocaust revisionist Michael Santomauro, who is among six people running in the Nov. 6 mayoral race, to sit down and listen.
Just four days earlier, 11 members of a Pittsburgh synagogue had been killed in a hate crime. Those murders made the Hilton Head event — and Santomauro’s presence — even more emotionally charged.
The Lowcountry Coalition Against Hate, which sponsored the event, was created in response to Santomauro’s Holocaust statements and ones made by candidate Rochelle Williams, who told the Post and Courier of Charleston she admired some things about Adolf Hitler.
And while the forum’s purpose was to promote unity and tolerance, the event devolved quickly into a reckoning between Santomauro and a crowd of more than 70 people.
Santomauro felt the crowd’s quest for tolerance should extend to him. He scrambled and yelled to make that point. He taunted the shocked audience with the cover of his self-published book, which displays a swastika.
The room gasped, and people yelled out “put the swastika away!” and “that’s offensive!”
The crowd, for its part, felt Santomauro was misrepresenting Hilton Head, and they wanted him to know he does not speak for them.
It was a highly unusual and, at times, unbelievable candidate forum.
And the only way to capture all that the forum was is to look at the good, the bad and the ugly things that happened there.
The good
High school students gave us hope for the future
The tension arose immediately. The room was not meant for a crowd this size. It was hot. And none of the microphones worked, making it hard for most people to hear unless the candidates were screaming.
A group of teenagers saved the mood.
Five high school students calmly told the room full of adults why they should care about hate speech and why not speaking out against it makes their world a more dangerous place. They pointed to Pittsburgh.
Through tears, one student, Rebecca, who lost relatives to the Holocaust, said she refuses to accept a leader who ignores the suffering of her relatives.
The bad
Santomauro did what Santomauro wanted to do
Santomauro rarely answered any of the questions during the two minutes allotted to him for each round. He used the time to push his agenda, using a variety of props.
While other candidates tied their answers directly to their role as mayor, Santomauro fixated on a South Carolina law prohibiting anti-Semitic speech on college campuses, a law that the mayor of Hilton Head would have little say in changing.
One of the moderators, Carlton Dallas, who spoke gracefully about civil discourse and being united as Americans at the beginning of the forum, was not having this.
“Mr. Santomauro, do you want to be mayor of this damn town?” he yelled as he stood up.
It was a question we were all wondering.
The ugly
‘People are attracted to me’
After saying he “never discriminates,” Santomauro said he “probably” looked “more Jewish than anybody in the room.”
He said he meant it as a compliment.
The audience didn’t take it that way.
“What does that mean, sir?” someone asked.
He said he has a “Mediterranean look” that “people are attracted to.”
He also spoke of dating.
“I know how it feels to be discriminated against,” he said. “I’ve actually, you know I date women of color and sometimes women of color don’t wanna date me because I’m white. I actually feel an impact about that.”
The crowd groaned.
Attacks on Rabbi Bloom
Santomauro personally attacked the rabbi, the organizer of the Lowcountry Coalition Against Hate, who was quietly standing in the audience. Bloom writes a religion column in the Island Packet where he has talked about Santomauro.
Santomauro appeared more bothered by Bloom, who didn’t speak until the end of the forum, than anyone else in the room.
Bloom never said Santomauro’s name when he gave his concluding remarks.
Instead of trying to gather his things and rush out the door as Bloom spoke, Santomauro should have stopped to listen.
“Lives matter,” Bloom said. “Words matter. Elections matter.”
His voice was as quiet as Santomauro’s was loud.
This is an opinion piece originally posted in the Island Packet newspaper.
This story was originally published November 2, 2018 at 11:22 AM with the headline "A man running for Hilton Head mayor held up a swastika at an election event. It got ugly."