Dan Shahin. Photo from LoCO Elections.

Dan Shahin, a local software engineer and Arcata City Council candidate, announced last night that he was dropping out of the race because he felt bad about calling someone fat a year ago.

The two public comment periods during the city council’s bimonthly meetings are occasionally a battleground between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel demagogues, and Shahin, the son of Palestinian immigrants from the West Bank, made a series of YouTube videos last year criticizing some of the pro-Israel faction’s statements. Several commenters denied that Israel was committing a genocide on the Palestinian people, or that many Palestinians are malnourished. One person claimed that many Palestinians are actually “among the most obese people on earth,” according to Shahin, and he couldn’t take it.

“Obesity is something this person must be an expert on,” Shahin said yesterday, paraphrasing himself, “because it looks like they have suffered from it.”

He hadn’t thought much about the videos since, which he posted before he announced his city council run in November. He’d browsed through them last week, happened upon the offending video, and became so angry at himself that he deleted it. No one else was pressuring him to quit, he claimed.

Shahin’s big on free speech. Last year, the Arcata City Council kicked around banning people from commenting virtually via Zoom. After facing mass opposition, they decided against the idea, but it incited Shahin’s decision to run. Seeing that tendency in himself to restrict other people’s freedom of speech wasn’t a conflict he could stomach, he told the Outpost today; it wasn’t the behavior of an ideal elected official. The comments he reacted to may have been “heinous,” but they were within the bounds of protected speech. The standards he holds himself to are higher than that.

“We shouldn’t be discouraging people from speaking their minds, no matter what their opinions are,” he said. “That’s not the job of the city council.”

Why was he publicly flogging himself for something no one else noticed, or seems to care about?

“I want to … own up to something that I did,” he explained. “And putting it out there — I wanted to put it out there because it was wrong. I think I’m taking accountability.”

“Sure, these are all my opinions,” he continued. “And I — my person, my anger, and my personal connection to the issue, cloud my judgment on how to communicate about it, and I just I felt so guilty. I just had such a bad weekend thinking about what I said, and how it would let down people who thought I was better than that. And I’m not.”

He apologized to his hopeful supporters and to anyone who felt insulted by his videos.

Shahin is glad that he said something about the obesity comment, even if it later forced him to quit the race. “In the end, it was silence for my entire life that helped take us to where we are right now on the issue of Palestine,” he said. “And in the end, I think I would rather have made a statement that I have to apologize for than to have said nothing.”

He’s the second Arcata City Council candidate to drop from the race. Incumbent Meredith Matthews did the same in August.

He thinks he let his emotions get the better of him, and it saddened and angered him that he let that happen. He was looking forward to serving on the council, but his presence would be a “distraction,” he said, and he doesn’t want to take focus away from the important work it does. “I got a big mouth,” he said. “What can I say?”

Although it’s too late to drop out of the race, Shahin’s quit campaigning, and if, by some “miracle” he wins, he won’t accept the position. Instead of focusing on “symbolic gestures,” he’s going to spend some time volunteering with Soup’s On! instead.