Minister Pandora: South Africa is sleepwalking into a catastrophe

NOT content with promoting human rights (an objective which seems to change from country to country), South Africa has taken it upon itself to interdict a single party to a conflict whose seeming binary nature is the source of major global tensions. On the one side, a group of Jihadists whose charter outlines a ‘battle against the Jews’ over the final status of Jerusalem. On the other side, an embattled ‘democratic state’ whose claims of Jewishness and democracy is subject to dispute even amongst Jews.

It should not matter on which side one is here if the end goal is secularism, universal suffrage and human rights for all, but in this conflict nothing is as it appears. Take Gaza’s Anti-Secular allies — Iran is an Islamic Republic which prohibits trade unions (not to mention women’s rights and the death penalty for LGBT):

“Trade unions are not recognized in Iran.” says Kemal Özkan of IndustriALL Global Union

“The Iranian labour law currently forbids and prevents the formation of trade unions. In Iran only Islamic labour councils are accepted but they are not trade unions – they are tripartite organizations bringing together the Ministry of Labour, the employers and some selected workers based on their loyalties and religious affiliations to the government. As a result they are inappropriate and ill-equipped to deal with the demands and needs of Iranian workers.”

Or how about the real elephant in the room? Houthi Yemen, armed to the teeth, already participating in a regional conflict via its ongoing attacks against shipping in the Red Sea, ostensibly to effect a blockade of Israel. If the ongoing firing of rockets by either Houthis or the Gazans themselves isn’t something that gets newspaper headlines these days, then you will probably wonder why you missed this news item, the 2019 re-establishment of Slavery by the Houthis?

“Since their coup, the Houthis have sought to turn back the hands of time and take back Yemen to the era of the oppressive Imamate and all forms of slavery.

A civilian, who works for a pro-Houthi tribal leader in Saada, told Turkey’s Asharq Al-Awsat news outlet: “I have been working for years at the sheikh’s house without pay. I cannot go back to my family or do anything out of my own free will.”

“I do not know the meaning of freedom,” he said.

The United States literally fought a civil war over the issue of slavery without much objection to the loss of life on the Confederate side. This week the country tabled a bill to review its relationship with Pretoria.

Article 13 of South Africa’s Bill of Rights expressly forbids slavery, servitude and forced labour, Ours is one of the few constitutions in the world to declaim on this important issue, (not that we ever enforce such prohibitions, nor care about labour rights in the face of a seven day work week?)

Yet such are the blinkers provided by the likes of Minister Naledi Pandor, whose speech to a rousing audience of Pro-Palestine congregants at the Masjid al-Quds this week, painted a rather different picture. Wearing a hijab she claimed to not know who ISIS is despite the fact the SANDF are currently engaged in a SADC operation against ISIS in Mocambique? Later at SONA she claimed anyone opposing her views is an “Israeli agent”. She may as well be living on Pluto, since becoming a roving plutocrat?

I’ve written extensively about her many dropped narratives, half-truths, redacted quotations, outright lies and failure to defend the non-aligned movement of which Mandela, a bipartisan on the conflict, and founder of our country was very much a part. If you are not yet familiar, take a tour of this page: Everything You Know about Palestine is Wrong. Or read my unanswered letters here, and here.

The idea that South African solidarity transforms the intractable religious conflict into the 21 century equivalent of the anti-apartheid movement is magical-thinking at best.

Take any metric associated with human rights under Gaza’s Hamas regime: whether the rights of women, LGBT or the disabled, and one can only come to the conclusion — if the Jihadists were to win the war, the entire region would be universally, an area governed by autocrats, dictators, religious police and clerical militia. In short MENA would be bereft of Jews (as it already is) but without any of the necessary conditions for a sustainable, or moral existence as many at St Georges Cathedral would like to call it.

And let’s not neglect to consider what a future Pandora-sponsored, ICJ legal determination may bring, especially one that delivers us all the paradox of a “Protected Jihad” for a “Protected People” ?

In this situation under the general abrogation of religious freedom (freedom from the religion of others) effected via martyrdom and self-sacrifice, alongside the removal of core rights and fundamental freedoms we take for granted, (Yes those Zionists deserve their liberty as much as Palestinians) nobody will be allowed to oppose Houthi slavery, nor the Hamasist fantasy, that Palestinians (former citizens of British Palestine) are the ‘Chosen People’, in a weird inversion of the ancient texts associated with the Judeo-Christian canon?

That many contemporaries are rewriting the Holy Book, as if the Canaanites (who occupied all of what is now modern Syria) or the Philistines (who once occupied Gaza), having long since exited history, are the victors is abundantly clear. We would be better off if all religious texts were simple abolished and ‘G-d did not exist’ or ‘G-d is dead’, for all intents and purposes.

In such a battle of competing monotheisms, competing definitions of who is entitled to be a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim, and who is not under Pandora’s Grand Inquisition, there is only one winner, and that will be the group which succeeds in winning the battle over narrative.

Take note: I have merely the fate of my own humble byline to consider, rendered as it has been, by a Marxist Pretoria in ways that make the apartheid regime seem like quaint liberals compared to the machinations of the current bureaucrats in office. Freedom of the press in my country has long been ripped asunder by the Independent Group and its opposition to the outcome of WW2.

READ: Quo Vadis, whither South Africa’s Religious Freedom?

Quo Vadis: Whither South Africa’s religious freedom?

SOUTH AFRICA has a troubled history of religious freedom going back to the Protestant Reformation and the plight of Huguenot refugees fleeing religious persecution under Catholic France. ‘God Is Not a Christian’ claimed the late Desmond Tutu, who also said: “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray. ‘ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”

It was thus colonialism which brought religion to the continent, and for the better part of the 20th Century, the struggle was between theocrats in Pretoria — those who believed the Afrikaners were Africa’s equivalent of “God’s Chosen People”, armed with a Covenant literally signed in blood (at Blood river) — and those who believed in a more inclusive, secular national identity, one based upon the universal declaration of Human Rights, as illustrated by our Freedom Charter.

My own family history which spans the Huguenots, the Scottish Celts, and Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia (and even Basotho who fled Zulu militarism), struggled with these conflicts, based as they are on competing theologies, traditions, beliefs and practices. For the most part, the Latviks and Litvaks of Eastern Europe were socialists who practiced their religion in the face of the Enlightenment and Haskalah.

Persons such as Eli Weinberg, Esther & Hymie Barsel, Yetta Barenblatt and Baruch Hirson, were acknowledged for their contribution to the anti-apartheid movement on 1st March 2011, with a series of stamps released by members the African Union — the postal services of Liberia, Gambia and Sierra Leone

Zionism for these individuals had appeared wholly unnecessary until the events of the Holocaust and Farhud, the forced dispossession of Jews from MENA which preceded it. The trend of Medieval persecution and Czarist & Ottoman-Arab pogroms, resulting in wholesale slaughter, only got worse, effectively negating the emancipation of the Jews of Europe which had occurred under Napoleon.

In 1917 a mass expulsion of the Jews of Jerusalem was ordered by Djemal Pasha, though the outcome was narrowly averted due to the influence of the Prussian government, the eight thousand Jews of Jaffa nevertheless suffered deportation, and their property was seized as the region’s Jewish population was affected by the events of WW1, which included the Armenian Genocide. A report by a United States consul describing the Jaffa deportation was published in the June 3, 1917 edition of The New York Times.

A series of laws introduced by then Minister of the Interior D F Malan under the Smuts government during the 1930s was aimed at preventing Jewish immigration to our country, and introduction of the Nuremberg Laws created pseudo-scientific, racial and legal distinctions between Jews and Germans of ‘pure blood’ in Nazi Germany.

South Africa under the Nationalist government whose membership cards carried the Swastika, was soon to follow with its own system of race classification. (You can read my earlier writing on the subject here and here). Having gained the franchise, denied them under the Boer Republics, South African Jews were in danger of having their citizenship revoked by the Nationalists, as Malan’s brown shirts met boatloads of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in Table Bay Harbour with force.

Celebrated Weekly Mail editor Irwin Manoim in his book ‘Mavericks Inside the Tent, a history of the Progressive Jewish movement in South Africa and its impact on the wider community’ outlines many of the predicaments faced by South Africa’s Jewish community during the tragic period of apartheid: “Jews were disproportionately strongly represented among anti-apartheid activists, a point frequently made by hostile authorities,” he writes. “But the most outspoken, committed and courageous of the Jewish anti-apartheid activists were largely secular, operating outside the organised Jewish community.”

Manoim narrates the role played by Jewish clerics such as Rabbi Andre Ungar (deported by Min TE Donges) and Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris in opposing the regime. Donge’s order read: “I have to inform you that … you are hereby ordered to leave the Union of South Africa not later than the 15th of January 1957 … If you fail to comply with this notice, you will be guilty of an offense and liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding £100, or in default of payment of the fine, to imprisonment for a period not exceeding six months.”

Both individuals are air-brushed out of history by the likes of Naledi Pandor, whose followers on social media enjoy raising the issue of Percy Yutar the chief prosecutor at the Rivonia Trial. It is important to note that Mandela, a bipartisan on the Israel/Palestine issue, was arraigned alongside fellow Zionist Arthur Goldreich, and that Denis Goldberg, Lionel Bernstein, Robert Hepple, Harold Wolpe and James Kantor were all Jews.

It was thus that the issue of the Star of David became a point of order in the Johannesburg City Council this week. EFF councilors objected to city councilor Daniel Schay wearing a ‘Star of David’ on his tie.

“If they have issues with Jewish religious symbols they must come out and say it,” responded Schay.

“Freedom of religion is protected by the constitution. It is the first time in this Council’s chambers that somebody’s religion and expression of their religion is being questioned…This is unacceptable,” charged another councilor.

Paradox of the Gatekeepers of War

THE WORLD is embroiled in a conflict over the meaning of war, the right of self-defense, non-aggression and armed struggle, the very institutions of peace, justice and global harmony. Having taken Israel to the ICJ and gained interim measures, none of which involve a direct ceasefire order (the only tangible step, an order for the release of hostages — for Israel to report and abide by the convention), we are all stuck kicking a can of worms down the road.

Our country has failed to extract any compliance with the ICJ order from Hamas. Though Naledi Pandor has been robust in her criticism of Israel, urging the Security Council to enforce the convention, and South Africa may have some influence with the Palestinians, it has delivered nothing solid from any of the organizations whose beleaguered citizens it champions.

As Hamas leaders fly to Cairo to discuss a possible truce, and UN aid agency UNWRA is embroiled in a controversy surrounding the documented participation of its members in the tragic events of 7/10, we all become entangled in a power-play with Israel over the terms of the ‘Genocide Convention’ with world media attention turning to the plight of Jews within South Africa. Since the preliminary hearing, there have been several controversies involving a cricket captain, utterances by the Chief Rabbi, and even a debacle involving the wearing of a Star of David by a City of Johannesburg councilor.

If Pandor’s interpretation of the ICJ interim order means the Palestinian people are now a ‘protected group’, does it follow that their ongoing Jihad against Israel is similarly protected? Is the global Inquisition of Jewish Identity under the rubric of ‘Zionism vs Anti-Zionism’ even lawful, and is South Africa protecting its own citizens from religious-motivated attack?

The woke left have certainly not risen up to defend secular rights and freedoms for all, those who claim like the Proctors of Salem, to be able to tell a ‘Zionist from a Non-Zionist’, or a Witch from a Non-Witch, have not been forthcoming when it comes to protecting the universal rights of those under their immediate purview. To paraphrase, Sartre (after Voltaire), if the Zionist did not exist, the Anti-Zionist would have created him.

Any one of these subjects would ordinarily elicit a response, deserving of an essay or two. I hope they do. But for now, let me address this nugget:

An Almighty Rabble: Rabbi and Counter-Rabbi?

An organisation calling itself ‘South African Jews for a Free Palestine‘ released a statement this morning on Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein’s utterances throwing shade on the ANC, alleging ‘Iran is funding South Africa’s case and SA banks may be acting as conduits for terrorism’.

Jo Bluen posted “Rabbi Goldstein has acted as a gatekeeper of Judaism in South Africa. He has rejected the Jewish identity of people who belong to non-Orthodox Jewish communities and has been known to “encourage the institutionalisation of certain Ultra Orthodox customs within the community”.

The statement goes on to list a number of issues to do with language, colonialism and allegations of ‘lack of pluralism’. Is the Chief Rabbi whistling while Gaza is burning?

Unfortunately it is not simply the Chief Rabbi, but South Africa’s legal system which has issued similar determinations that otherise and exclude Jews outside the fold.

I for my part have been anathematized by a racist 2010 finding that since I am a “Jew in breach of my religion” I cannot claim anti-Semitism on the basis of an outrageous inquisition of identity by a party whose disciples see fit to define ‘who is and who is not a Jew’, who is authentically Jewish and who is not. Both Spinoza and Trotsky received similar treatment.

JFP claim: “Not only has Rabbi Goldstein himself refused to attend events that have platformed non-Orthodox rabbis and leaders but he has also implored other Orthodox Jewish leaders to do the same in the spirit of rejecting pluralistic attitudes. These include events with talks and panels on topics including Progressive Judaism, LGBTQ+ belonging in the context of Torah, and gender egalitarianism – which might be considered among the “liberal values” he claims that Apartheid Israel defends. Rabbi Goldstein’s reluctance to engage with these issues within the context of Orthodox Judaism, and his support for the active suppression of this engagement, only serves to uphold the legacy in many Orthodox Jewish communities of exclusion, queerphobia and misogyny. This environment has led to many queer Orthodox Jews having to leave their families to find belonging, and at least one recent case of death by suicide.

The criticism is certainly justified, but I suggest it would be better directed at our Judge President, the same justice system which upheld a 2009 order banning the Dalai Lama.

South Africa’s Cherry-picking Genocide case before the International Courts

IN 2016 South African Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Michael Masutha confirmed during a media briefing that South Africa had submitted to the United Nations (UN) its ‘notice of intention to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC)’

Readers should note here, the ICC decides cases involving individuals while the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hears cases between states.

The timing of the South African Government’s withdrawal decision may have been prompted by wanting to be the first country to withdraw from the International Court structure. “At the time, several states were considering doing so,” writes law scholar Jeremy Sarkin.

“Withdrawing could therefore have been done then as a means to show some leadership to other African countries (Burundi, Gambia) that were also considering this option.”

The ICC announcement followed an embarrassing episode in which the African Union found itself divided over the refusal or failure of “Uganda, Chad, Kenya, Djibouti, Malawi, Congo, South Africa, and Egypt to be involved in detaining and surrendering President Al Bashir to the ICC”. The court itself was accused of “hunting” African leaders “to the exclusion of any other head of state or government official elsewhere in the Global North.” The ICC categorically denied any accusations of “partiality”, arguing that the sum of African cases referred to the Court has “more to do with the Court’s jurisdiction being limited to states parties to the Rome Statute, and for crimes committed after 2002.”

In the end it took a High Court judgement to scupper such plans — delivered on 22 February 2017, the decision of the North Gauteng High Court criticised the Government’s conduct, declaring ‘unconstitutional and invalid’ the executive’s decision to deliver to the UN South Africa’s notice of withdrawal from the ICC, and ordered the Government to ‘rescind with immediate effect’ the said notice. “On 13 March 2017, the Justice Minister, in compliance with the court order, gave notice to Parliament that he was revoking the bill that, if signed into law, would have officially decreed the divorce, and severed the almost 20-year-old tie between South Africa and the ICC.”

Enter the SA-Israel-Gaza case

This week a team of South African jurists lead by Professor John Dugard, filed a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague alleging that Israeli action inside Gaza ‘amounted to the crime of genocide’. The application “concerns acts threatened, adopted, condoned, taken and being taken by the Government and military of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people, a distinct national, racial (sic) and ethnical (sic) group, in the wake of the attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023″

South Africa claims that it ‘unequivocally condemns all violations of international law by all parties, including the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and other nationals and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.” And “no armed attack on a State’s territory no matter how serious — even an attack involving atrocity crimes — can, however, provide any possible justification for, or defence to, breaches of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

It is an astonishing allegation considering the ongoing rocket attacks on Israeli civilian centres by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and the timing of the massacre, which occurred on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, on the religious holiday of Simchat Torah.

South Africa further claims a ‘moral duty’ to bring the application before the court (a duty entirely absent where the ANC is concerned when it came to actioning on an ICC warrant for the arrest of Omar al-Bashir, convicted for the 2009 Darfur Genocide), and proceeds to outline a tragedy involving the ensuing war and events of the past months. The litany of horror is indeed sobering and cause for alarm.

The application is historically significant since it effectively brings one of the oldest ongoing conflicts, under the auspices of international structures, institutions created in the aftermath of the Nuremberg Trials which followed World War Two and the creation of the United Nations. In this respect, any attempt, no matter how misguided, to resolve and mediate matters, providing a path to peace without resorting to outright war and murder of civilians, is worthy of support — unfortunately as already alluded to, the case is flawed for a number of reasons which will be outlined in brief below:

1. Nations are not races — neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians comprise a distinct racial group, as such — to put this another way, wearing a Keffiyeh or Yarmulke is no indication of one’s alleged ‘race’ — there are black and white Arabs on both sides to the conflict, and the issues at hand, especially with regard to the status of Jerusalem appear to be religious in nature. (please read my piece debunking racialisation of the conflict here)

2. While the case begins by condemning the actions of both parties, it then proceeds to outline what is in effect a casus belli in favour of the Palestinians and their own motivations for armed struggle. Thus the October Simchat Torah attacks are provided with a sheen of legitimacy via an historical association with South Africa’s armed struggle, albeit an expression of solidarity, if not outright support of Jihad. (One should note that Mandela was a bipartisan on the issue supporting the rights of both parties). The religious war is cast by Dugard et al as nothing more than self-defense, in the face of a secular Nakba (a nationalistic catastrophe not entirely of the Palestinian’s own making). In this view Israel’s reaction in whatever form, whether via a blockade of the Jihadists or bombing of Gaza and its tunnel networks, is condemned as entirely disproportionate — motivated by malice instead of rockets and pure survival.

3. Although the application is at pains to reiterate UN condemnation of the annexation of East Jerusalem and settlements following the 1967 war, it fails to acknowledge UN Resolution 181 which partitioned the former British territory and created Israel in the first instance, and thus both the UN and Mandela’s support of the status quo of Israel’s existence, which Hamas and the ‘Palestinians’ for the most part, oppose. This cherry-picking of issues and one-sided irredentist narrative, cast within legal terms, is pretty much par for the course amongst those who support the de facto return of the Palestine colony “from the River to the Sea” and who deny the events which lead up to the creation of the Israeli state.

4. More significantly, the application painfully ignores the role played by the ‘President of the All-Palestine Government in Gaza’ (1948-1956) Amin al-Husseini in promoting and furthering a policy known as the ‘Final Solution’, following his participation in the 1941 Farhud in MENA, which resulted in an actual genocide. One has merely to pose the question of what problem was the ‘Final Solution’ seeking to solve in order to discover the primary subject of the 1938 Evian Conference, a tragic moment in which world powers, and later South Africa under Jan Smuts, deliberated on the very issue of the flood of Jewish refugees flowing into British Palestine and elsewhere. As German philosopher Immanuel Kant had once put it, ‘there are Palestinians amongst us’, he was however referring to the ‘Jews of Europe’.

Set aside the tragic drama of the October ‘Simchat Torah attack’, the Israeli declaration of war, the professed motivations for self-defense by either party, the resulting military intervention, alongside the catastrophic, forced movement of the Gazan population, (which have included the bombing of civilian centres, and casualties which include journalists, medical staff, and children, all very real humanitarian issues) and one cannot help but come to the conclusion that the entire world, would have been in a better position if it had acted to prevent this disaster at the outset — if more care was taken to debating both sides instead of negating either party — and if South Africa had acted sooner by supporting the ICC in stopping prior acts of genocide in Darfur and elsewhere in Yemen and Syria.

In this respect our country deserves to be taken to task for an historical failure, the lack of will to support multilateral institutions, in particular the recent undermining of the UN with regard to the General Assembly censure of the Russia-Ukraine war. The South African case would be a lot firmer if our country were able to claim a moral high ground, on the basis of legal principle and foreign policy evenly applied. If we were able to lodge our opposition to war in all its forms and by implication a defense of our pacifist constitution, instead of cherry picking issues and taking sides, shifting with the tide of public opinion.

READ: ICJ Gaza genocide case: South Africa set to discover law of unintended consequences

READ: Why are we going to the International Court of Justice?

READ: Irwin Cotler: South Africa is inverting reality by accusing Israel of genocide

Min. Pandor, don’t call me an Infidel

Dear Minister Pandor,

Statement by DIRCO 30 October refers.

Judaism is a religion. It is also an ethnic and historical community. Our views as Jews are certainly not monolithic. There are many Jews who do not support war, or who find the politics of the Netanyahu administration reprehensible.

There are those who disagree with the status quo, and who nevertheless support the two state solution, those who support Israel and who also support Palestine, those who do not support either Israel or Palestine, and even those who may over-identify with the cause, and who are willing to support whatever occurs on account of their own claims against ‘Imperialism’ on behalf of the oppressed and so on. The saying goes, take two Jews and you will get three opinions.

It does not assist the situation to declare what South Africans must believe, whom we should support, and which organisation is representative of our views in this conflict.

And it certainly does not assist the cause of peace to platform the perspective of those who claim Jews are Infidels or Kufrs when they’re in the Middle East, and Haraam or forbidden when your department disagrees with their views?

Hard as this may seem, one cannot simply remove Zionists from the picture in the Middle East, and as a statement by your department released yesterday suggests.

Turning such persons as Zev Krengel of the Zionist Federation into Heretics, results in sanctions and censorship on the basis of ethno-religious identity, sanctions that are dangerously and scandalously progressing towards that of a modern religious inquisition — a persecution of belief, outlawed by our own secular constitution.

Let me be the first one to tell you that I find your department’s open threats of prosecution against those who support Israel’s ‘right to self-defense’ — a viewpoint held by the majority of leaders of the free world — in the absence of consensus on your own legal position — completely illogical given the circumstances of 7 October, and especially given the rights of free speech guaranteed by our constitution.

If persons such as Krengel have something to say, they should be allowed to say it in public. If their views are disagreeable, they should be debated and their views proven wrong, rather than closed down by government fiat or departmental proclamation.

Such an easy resort to a fatwa and threat of punishment are the hallmarks of totalitarian regimes, as they were the currency of the apartheid state and demonstrate quite amply why South Africans should be concerned about your recent trip to Iran and callous phone calls to various Iranian proxies in the Middle East.

Not only has your spokesperson made the astonishing claim of ‘repeated discredited information related to the beheading of children in Israel’ without bothering to attend the recent press briefing in which the first forensic reports were released to the public,(following Hamas live-streaming of its bloody mayhem), but you further confuse ’cause and effect’ by claiming: “This disinformation is part of the arsenal of dehumanisation tactics used to justify a ‘by any means necessary’ approach.”

Such a statement is immediately contradicted by the reality of Palestinian open support of ‘just war ‘ and ‘by any means necessary’ — policies long since advocated by Hamas, as a recent SABC programme aptly demonstrates.

The events disputed by your department are extremely troubling — the least of which is the lamentable loss of life experienced on both sides and especially the loss of life of innocent children, those who deserve our support.

Instead of compassion your spokesperson chose to weaponise the plight of Palestinian civilians — innocent persons who should not be political footballs nor sacrificial lambs. It is Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh who has openly demanded the blood of these children for his revolutionary cause in pursuit of his “Final Battle”, while holding hostages, and continuing rocket attacks against civilians — action that risks drawing all nations into another World War.

We are a nation at peace, and no South African wishes war to become the order of the day. The cause of the Palestinian people and the rest of the world, is not served by your department authoring cant and issuing propaganda over what has occurred.

Sincerely yours

David Robert Lewis

Opposition to War does not necessarily entail supporting either side to the Gaza-Israel conflict

SOUTH AFRICA has a long history of resistance to war. From objectors to the Anglo-Boer war during the 1900s to resistance to the SADF border war, the history of local pacifism and opposition to war is a rich and illustrious one.

The first ‘Stop the War’ committee was an anti-war organization that opposed the Second Boer War. It was formed by William Thomas Stead in 1889. It’s President was John Clifford and prominent members included Lloyd George.

Against the backdrop of a campaign surrounding the so-called Khaki election of 1900, ‘Stop the War’ distributed millions of posters, cartoons, and leaflets in London.

Moral and religious objection to war within South Africa and support for pacifism and opposition to militarism carried immense risks. “In this emotionally charged environment, the minority who publicly opposed the war, were labeled pro-Boers”, says Nigel Robson, an historian.

“Dissenters risked vilification or even violence if their views were made public, and during the seige of Mafikeng … people gathered menacingly outside the premises of a tradesman suspected of harbouring ‘pro-Boer’ views.”

During apartheid, white conscripts who refused the callup risked jail sentences with many serving time in prison. Notable conscientious objectors included Ivan Toms, Harold Winkler and Richard Steele.

A statement signed by Israeli author Yuvel Harari and 90 other signatories claims: “there is no contradiction between staunchly opposing the Israeli subjugation and occupation of Palestinians and unequivocally condemning brutal acts of violence against innocent civilians. In fact, every consistent leftist must hold both positions simultaneously.”

How did my country turn into a support club for Jihadists, rapists, child killers & gay bashers?

SOUTH AFRICAN politics has long seen itself as the moral equivalent of the civil rights movement, the inheritors of a long history that includes the battle for women’s rights, the suffrage, the Freedom Charter, majority rule, and progress towards economic freedom and other liberties such as LGBT, animal rights, earth rights and the liberation of humanity from all forms of oppression.

It thus sickened me to witness a deafening silence when it came to the terror attacks on Israeli civilians, in particular the deaths of 260+ attendees at an outdoor peace festival, this while our rulers rose to express solidarity with Palestine.

Instead of unequivocally condemning these atrocities, which included deaths of Arabs and Jews within Israel, our President simply bemoaned the ‘loss of life on both sides’, whilst appearing to deliver an endorsement of ‘just war’ — thus ‘similar acts’ of barbarism had occurred during our own liberation struggle, and were ‘to be expected’.

For many commentators, Israelis deserved what had occurred on the Jewish Holiday of Simchat Torah, 50 years to the day after the 1973 Yom Kippur War — 75 years of alleged ‘occupation’ of disputed territory, in a region with competing historical claims, meant ‘they had it coming.’

For Naomi Klein, celebrating the killings merely fuels militant Zionism.

Farid Esack, a theologian, alongside whom I had once campaigned to end apartheid and especially ‘environmental racism’, reiterated, these central anti-Zionist talking points — all equivocations on the tragedy — chicanery which has routinely flowed from Luthuli House, even directly in the runup to the massacre.

During a special SABC Sunday debate on humanitarian aid, Esack stated somewhat disingenuously “Hamas won more than 50% of the Palestinian people’s vote” … “let us not reduce the history of our liberation struggle to two three years of CODESA, we had an armed struggle, international solidarity throughout the world, Mandela didn’t go to jail for organising Sunday School picnics. Mandela went to jail because he was a terrorist.”

The audience appears oblivious to actual historical facts: “It was ANC policy – ever since the formation of MK in 1961 – to avoid unnecessary loss of life. The ANC … never permitted random attacks on civilian targets.” Of course these rules of engagement, codes of conduct for armed struggle were often breached, but were never officially condoned.

Perpetrators of the St James Church massacre were not granted amnesty by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Young Muslim members of the “Its Topical” audience expressed their open support for Jihad, with concepts such as ‘by any means necessary’ which in the context of Hamas, come across as supporting characters from a Hollywood horror movie — Freddie Krueger or Chuckie, are all misunderstood, politically-motivated child killers, deserving of our sympathy?

The Simchat Torah attack with it’s absolute depravity that included rape, mutilation and beheadings of Arabs and Jews, has more in common with Barend Strydom, ‘The Wit Wolf’, who rampaged through the streets of Pretoria in 1988, shooting anyone he hated.

Read the Savage Nihilism of Free Palestine.

A disgusting debate on baby beheadings ensued, one which has been labeled ‘atrocity denialism’. ‘ Does it make a difference if it was one beheading or forty? asked a Jewish participant.


Palestinian ‘cheerleaders’ wrong to conflate SA liberation struggle and Hamas ideology — Dawn Barkhuizen


This morning our President was walking back similar comments made on Saturday, after Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein called out government support of Hamas as ‘Pure Evil’.

In his Monday briefing Ramaphosa wrote: “We stand firm against violence directed at civilians; against the killing of children, the elderly, the infirm and non-combatants;”

The left have long campaigned against microagressions, and even pronouns, but this week, they hated Jews for being Jews.

UPDATE: The Gauteng ANC Women’s League spokesperson, Gabriella “Gabi” Farber – who is a Jewish South African – has resigned from the African National Congress in protest, terminating her membership and accusing the party of supporting Hamas.

Read Aayan Hirsi Ali: I was raised to curse Israel and pray for the destruction of Jews
and

Gaza could of been Singapore, Hamas turned it ISIS.

Open letter to IOL’s Lance Witten,

Dear Lance Witten,

Your Editorial refers

A delusion is an unshakeable belief in something that’s untrue. You could call the Israeli government right wing and even extremists, and the status quo highly problematic (and take a non-binary approach) but you cannot call, the rape and murder of over 260 innocent civilians at an outdoor dance party, and the taking of hostages at the Nova Peace Festival, on the Weekend, the result of a ‘just cause’. 

During apartheid, if there was any doubt as to the modus of our struggle, we could point to a Freedom Charter, a secular document outlining human rights as the basis for our resistance. There is no similar document in existence amongst any of the opposing parties — neither Fatah nor Hamas. At no point during our struggle did any cleric nor religious authority provide a blank cheque. The ends do not justify the means here, and one has got to question the credibility of the bald assumptions being made by people who should know better? 

It is not helpful to bemoan Islamic fundamentalism, but in the same breath to continue to pursue equivocation after equivocation, the likes of which are demonstrated by a Hamas spokesperson on Sky News claiming that ‘no civilians have been killed by Hamas’ over the Weekend because the organisation has redefined civilians as ‘enemy combatants’. 

Shani Louk, a German-Israeli tattoo artist, captured at the Nova Sukkot Peace Festival, whose body was paraded naked through the streets of Gaza, is an example of the depravity of a political movement which until 2017 saw its goal as the ”elimination of all Jews wherever they may be found, and subsequently ‘all Zionists’. The attack on an outdoor music festival has demonstrated this group are the equivalent of ISIS in outlook, banning electronic music festivals within Gaza, imprisoning LGBT, and reducing the status of women to mere objects. 

The distinction drawn between Zionist and Non-Zionist has turned out to be both unsustainable and discriminatory. My own choices in this matter have been removed by an ecclesiastical case, reducing my identity to nothing more than stereotype and caricature, my rights expunged by zealous moral policing by South Africa’s own corrupt legal authorities. It is not a trivial matter that judges such as Siraj Desai openly support Hamas.

My country is currently a member of an economic block that recently concluded an agreement with Iran, a state which desires nothing more than the removal of Israel from the map, alongside advocacy of the death penalty for LGBT and ‘moral opposition’ to electronic beat music. In the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution, the Iranian government ‘turned pop music into forbidden fruit, condemning it as indecent’.

I currently do not possess the right to a legal personality, based upon equality, privacy and freedom of religion, which in my case entails freedom from the religious views of others, this within the borders of South Africa, my home. I therefore challenge you to openly debate your perverse ‘just war’ thesis and especially the so-called apartheid analogy

DEBUNKED: Palestinians and Jews, each form a distinct race & the conflict is thus like apartheid

IT WAS South Africa’s Hendrick Verwoerd who first resorted to the apartheid analogy in 1961 when he dismissed an Israeli vote against South African apartheid at the United Nations, throwing blame and deflecting attention by saying, “Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude … they took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state. (1)

The primary objection to the apartheid analogy which may be raised is that Nations are not races. The result is what philosopher Gilbert Ryle referred to as a ‘category error’. A semantic or ontological error in which ‘things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category’. While ethnicity plays a part, there is no scientific nor any legal basis for making such a claim.(2) (3).

Attributing race to Jews in order to make a false comparison with apartheid is racism and anti-Semitism, and meets definitions of anti-Semitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

A 2020 academic paper on the question Is Replacement Theology Anti-Semitic? begins by defining anti-Semitism as “normally understood as prejudice or hatred against Jewish people as a race” before concluding that since Christianity doesn’t perceive the Jews as a race, Christian theology cannot, by definition be anti-Semitic.

Advocates of the analogy often refer to the infamous 1975 UN resolution 3379 ‘equating Zionism with racism‘ which was overturned by an overwhelming majority of nations in 1991. The same assertion was voted out of the final text of the controversial 2001 Durban Conference on Racism  and the text reaffirmed at Durban II

A highly flawed 2017 UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) report examining the policies of Israel within the context of a UN definition of apartheid, admits the error of race, proceeds to supply “reasons for the error of comparison” and states, there is ‘no single, authoritative, global definition of any race’ at the same time that it attributes race characteristics to Jews for the purposes of analysis.

The ESCWA report was withdrawn by UN Secretary-general Guterres in 2017, while the Goldstone report was similarly retracted in part. The same category error appears in an equally flawed 2009 local HSRC report written around the time of Durban II. 

While the policies of Israel may, for many of its critics, be reprehensible and morally indefensible, the root cause is not race, (a loaded term) but rather the confluence of religion and nationality and in particular, religious schism which results in nationality on the basis of religion, a fact common to many Middle Eastern countries.