by davidrobertlewis -

The confused ‘wokeness’ that passes for online debate these days

IT ALL started with a thread on x.com about ‘how Cape Town was started’, and ‘who lived here before the settlers arrived’?  The platform has become a haven for fringe groups, including opposition parties.

Extremist politician Mehmet Dag, the man behind attempts to remove Green Point’s “Rainbow Crossing”, (whose one-man political party literally campaigned on a platform to implement the death penalty for LGBT, losing its deposit and failing to gain a single war), was one of the first to weigh in: “Mandela is a Xhosa man The individuals referred to as Khoisan (a name assigned by Afrikaners) I found it difficult to accept the existence of Khoisans in the Western Cape. They were, in fact, Xhosa individuals. The children of Dutch soldiers, known as Coloured people, were born of Xhosa mothers and Dutch fathers. Know your history.”

The conspiratorial tone continued ad nauseum with many claiming “There are no Khoisan” (Rather it was the Xhosa, or at least a ‘Xhosa-affiliated’ group who held territory before the Portuguese and later Dutch arrived, and thus simply telling the story ‘is all a plot to divide and conquer and, steal land.’

Some members of MKP posted essays sans any citations, claiming well-known members of the GNU were behind a bizarre campaign to revise history.

“The first time a European person spoke to Africans we lost our land culture dignity and sense of directions. Look like they coming for our history. We will never stop planning and plotting for your kind to go back to where you come from. We will never accept you, bloody swines.” wrote Seni

“Vasco da gama in 1510 fought Xhosas and was defeated by xhosas hence Portugal couldn’t colonize South Africa.” added ‘Mr Riley’

Some of the postings went so far as to assert Xhosa identity over the issue despite our own National Assembly passing legislation in 2017 recognising Khoi-san leadership. “Khoi-San communities in the North West Province had thus been “optimistic that the draft Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Bill will restore their dignity, and at the time urged “Parliament to revoke all the laws that refer to them as “coloured” people”

In 2024, the Annual Opening of the National House of Traditional and Khoi-San Leaders was celebrated.

But the merry crowd of smart-phone warriors, neighsayers, revisionists and flat-earth pundits on x.com were having none of it:

“Abathwa…That’s What The Tribe Is Called. The ONLY “Khoisans” that can be confirmed are those that ASSIMILATED to African tribes bcoz their clan names were preserved – e.g. Gqunukwebe (assimilated to amaXhosa in 17th century. AmaGqunukwebe became a royal house of amaXhosa under King Tshiwo who reigned between 1670–1702.” –

“Educate these fools who try and distraught history to make the Khoi’s coloureds, mojority Khois shared clans with amaXhosa but they want to make as if they know better than us.“

“You propagating lies, The BaThwa who are in Zim and the Pygmies in DRC are related to the !Xam and Khwe! Are you going to say they must leave because they are only native here?”

“All I know is San & Bantu tribes live about where they have for ages if they used to spread about more that was stopped by settlements of the settlers who wipe out nations and rewrote history to suite they’re narrative. Examples of what was done here are all over the world.” — Sphezi Mkhathi

“Can the settlers just stop it with their altered silly history of South Africa. Y’all need to focus on Europe and it’s history since y’all come from there. Leave Africa to Africans, y’all will never be Africans, no matter how hard you fight or change history. Pathetic c$nts“  — Bashene

Some comments that could constitute an ’emotional plague’

“Why are you commenting o the affairs of 1651 and before then No amount of historical alterations will cover the Pillage Murder Lies that settlers came with” — Boreka Motlanthe

“They want to use them as a vehicle to justify holding on to stolen land because they want to create a break away Country similarly to Israel, so they will need some Natives on board to cement that. — Musa

“Start with the origins of the name Khoisan. Once done, understand the closeness of the 3 Sotho languages. So close that Borwa and Barwa mean the same thing in the respective languages. However, Borwa and Barwa are absolutely not the same thing. Please, my brother. –Podu

“have seen mostly Tswana people, black Namibians and some Xhosa who actually speak some of the khoi languages as well. They are on tik tok if you search. You must actually visit North west, free state, Botswana and you will see they share similar culture and features with khoi –Ntombi Black

The approach this “khoisan” topic is happening is really weird and not productive. We see a lot of “coloured” people coming out and claiming this title. It’s weird and sad because unmixed “khoi” people exist, and I never see them coming out to do these claims. – – Ntombi Black

“Point of correction, my good brother. The Khoi (Khoikhoi in full) and The San, are two different “tribes” or “clans”. The Khoi were stable citizens while the San were Hunter Gatherers and had no place of settlement. The San are modern day Batswana, the Khoi mostly Xhosa. — Phillix M. Kokwele

“Why is a disgusting settler minding the business that does not concern him. Ypu should be worried that us natives still have intention to dubuli ibhunu for our land. One settler 10 blts. -seni

Correction the name & town yes didnt exit however the mountain ,the two oceans,the sunsets,the beaches  the whole land was always there millions of years before the fuc&*ken Portugese & fokken Voortrekkers

Eventually somebody posted a video of Julius Malema : “We call people Zimbabweans, Malawians, Makwerekwere When we are Makwerekwere as we come from where they come from None of us come from here, we came from the North & found the Koi & San in Southern Africa & settled here We must welcome others as well“

by davidrobertlewis -

Compassionate communication: Talk, talk must replace war, war

MY WISH for this year is that we all spend a little more time to engage each other and our respective communities with active peacebuilding and compassionate communication aka non-violent communication. Over New Year I spent some time reading Marshall Rosenberg’s classic ‘Non-Violent Communication: A Language of Life’. I do agree with many of his ideas about developing a compassionate understanding of language interaction, focusing on immediate needs rather than morality and passing judgement ‘observing instead of evaluating’,  but of course disagree completely with what some will term woke attempts to police so-called ‘microaggressions’.

Lack of compassion for others is indeed  at the heart of many of our conflicts, but attributing wrong-doing to those who speak harsh words, and reaching out for legal solutions for colorful speech, accomplishes exactly what Rosenberg eschews and rejects, which is to evaluate and pass judgement on others. Required reading for anyone wishing to adopt a more compassionate response to the many conflicts which have embroiled communities over the past year.

Rosenberg writes: “What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving from the heart” He outlines “a language of compassion” that ‘replaces our old patterns of defending, withdrawing, or attacking in the face of judgment and criticism, we come to perceive ourselves and others, as well as our intentions and relationships, in a new light. Resistance, defensiveness, and violent reactions are minimized. When we focus on clarifying what is being observed, felt, and needed rather than on diagnosing and judging, we discover the depth of our own compassion. Through its emphasis on deep listening— to ourselves as well as to others—Non Violent Communication (NVC) fosters respect, attentiveness, and empathy and engenders a mutual desire to give from the heart

I wish all my readers, a Peaceful, Fruitful and Prosperous 2025.

 

by davidrobertlewis -

Ramaphosa stuck in cloud-cuckooland as Pretoria buckles

FOR three decades South Africa has survived on an astonishing goodwill story —  victory against apartheid brought with it a peace dividend, a return to global trade, and cessation of international sanctions. But instead of embracing rapprochement with the West, the country chose a path marred by massive contradictions. Professing non-alignment on a variety of issues, Pretoria essentially orchestrated an alliance with every tin-pot dictatorship and authoritarian regime out there.

BRICS for want of a  better description, is nothing more than a boondoggle of corrupt regimes run by petty bureacrats and traitors to the cause of democracy. None of the constitutional emperatives outlined by our constitution and its so-called apex court in Braamfontein appear to have influenced the current administration and its bizarre policies that support the death penalty for LGBT in Iran, the end of multiparty democracy in Hong Kong and Asia, the elimination of women’s rights in Russia, and return to slavery in Houthi Yemen.

If South Africa were to be judged on its foreign policy alone, one could be forgiven for coming to the startling conclusion that when it comes to braaivleis, sunny skies , pap & boerevleis, we  lack any civil rights at home. Yet our country for all its failings has shown that our multiparty democracy is able to deliver stability and a status quo, that more often than not resembles freedom, if not a free press.

If Pretoria thought its ascendency to the G20 chair this year would somehow translate into business as usual, then economists had better take heed, because Pretoria’s leftist brown-nosing, deflecting serious criticism, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine,  has come to a grinding halt as Donald Trump was re-elected. The Republican-majority US Congress is already beying for our blood.

Key Republicans are already pressing the incoming Trump administration to kick South Africa out of lucrative trade arrangements, including AGOA – the African Growth and Opportunity Act – should the South African government ‘not change its position on Russia, China, Iran and Israel’.

Most at risk is South Africa’s duty-free exports to the U.S. of items such as cars and citrus fruit, and with it the potential loss of tens of thousands of African jobs. South Africa is likely to be under intense scrutiny from the incoming administration.

A publication from the Center for African Studies at Howard University, in 2023, warned that a country wanting AGOA’s preferential trade agreements “cannot act in a manner that undermines U.S. national security or foreign policy interests”.

This as our neighbour Mocambique is collapsing amidst a concerted effort by opposition groups including Jihadists to nulllify the results of the last election. Over Christmas a mass prison breakout saw over a hundred members of ISIS in Mocambique breaking out of max security prison. China itself is under pressure from a major deficit involving government overspending for decades, and is unlikely to be in a position to bail out its fellow BRICS nations.

Only time can tell whether Mocambique, and SADC regains its peacetime footing, but currently the region  resembles Syria rather than Singapore.

The prospect of  R20 to the Dollar should be more than a wake-up call.

READ: BRICS, a boondoggle of dictators, homophobes & outright misogynists

SEE: Hamas SA Support Network

SEE: South Africa is becoming another front in the war against Israel

SEE: South Africa is not pro-Palestinian its Pro-Hamas

SEE: Iran & Qatar have their fingerprints all over South Africa ICJ case

by davidrobertlewis -

Thoughts following Reconciliation Day

ON 16 December 1995, the first celebration of ‘Reconciliation Day” took place. It was timed to coincide with the inaugural meeting of the  ‘South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’. Convenor Desmond Tutu described the holiday as ‘serving the need of healing the wounds of Apartheid’. The holiday was meant to replace the ‘Day of the Covenant’, a controversial celebration bound up with apartheid ideology —  in particular Voortrekker pretensions towards a special connection when it came to God and religion. Having disposed of one of the key elements of apartheid theology, the commission quickly embarked upon several special hearings, including investigations into the media, as well as the role of religion.

Releasing the first five volumes of its final report on Oct. 29, 1998, (and the remaining two volumes of the report on March 21, 2003). The commission claimed to have uncovered ‘the truth about human rights violations’ that had occurred during the period of apartheid.  With a special emphasis on gathering evidence and uncovering information — from both victims and perpetrator — and not on prosecuting individuals for past crimes, the commission proclaimed its divergence from the Nürnberg trials that had prosecuted Nazis after World War II.

None of the commission’s findings were ever held up by a court of law, and the body of evidence relating to apartheid was simply cast aside in favour of a form of reconciliation, which boils down to “love thy neighbour”. If Reconciliation Day has become just another holiday on our nation’s calendar, analysts may be correct in stating: “The promises of 1994 have devolved into a strategic defeat”,  this whilst South Africa pursues the exact same Nurenberg stance it rejected when it comes to solving problems in the Middle East before the International Criminal Court (ICJ)?

I am constantly amazed by those who seek to compare the Israel-Palestine conflict to the history of my own country, yet refuse to take any lessons away from our 1994 negotiated peace settlement which came about **because we talked it out, instead of warring it out**.

Is it because the analogy with apartheid was never going to be sustained in an actual conversation between the two sides? Allowing this canard to continue unabated, without criticism, serves one aim alone, which is to cast an obvious religious conflict over the final status of Jerusalem, a Jihad by Jihadists armed with a Charter outlining their Jihadist goals, as the modern-day equivalent of the US civil rights movement.

I am greeted by a litany of militia-backed disasters in the region on my social media feed on a daily basis, all of which merely demonstrate that war is not a solution to a political and social problem involving three major religions. The tragic toll on the Gazan civilian population, and a war which has now extended into Lebanon and Syria, parts of which were once ‘Palestine’ prior to the British Mandate period, is not only a tragedy for all humanity but a massive disappointment for those who continue to advocate peace, and a form of active reconciliation, which boils down to ‘tikkun‘ a Hebrew word that means ‘repair or restoration of the world’ — an objective which seeks to accomplish more than merely ‘atoning for one’s sins’.

At some point both sides need to talk to each other, and this can never happen so long as “River to the Sea” eliminationist rhetoric is taken for normal discourse by people like our own President.

Likewise, at home, if we keep rejecting attempts to enforce the parameters of the TRC, in which those who failed to apply for amnesty were meant to suffer the consequences of civil and criminal prosecution before the courts, (what happened to the funds reserved for such prosecutions?) we end up with two diametrically opposed policies: one preaching reconciliation at all costs (with no tangible economic restoration nor any legal closure), the other, seeking to inculpate all and sundry when it comes to foreign policy before the International Criminal Court.

[AI rewrite published by The Star, 18 December 2024 without writers consent]

by davidrobertlewis -

They’re eating the Quds of the people that live there?

THIS week Kevin Bloom, a Daily Maverick associate editor waded into a controversy surrounding ‘Gift of the Givers’ (GOTG). The group faces allegations of channeling funds designated for humanitarian relief to organisations such as Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Hamas), who are listed as terrorist groups by a number of countries, including Australia, Canada, European Union, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States .

To date GOTG has refused to open its books to public scrutiny and vehemently deny any involvement in underhand activities.

Founder Imtiaz Sooliman claims his funding process is ‘fool-proof’ since any transfer of funds to projects overseas is ‘authorised by the Reserve Bank, and local politicians such as Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’

One would really need to be a fool to believe that since the funds are in Dollars, the process is obviously “Jew-friendly” and not related to any money-laundering involving Gulf States, Hezbollah or Iran? It says so in Sooliman’s self-penned autobiography, trust us?

“Strike terror into the hearts of your enemies and Allah’s enemies” are not exactly the words of a humanitarian, reaching out to reconcile either sides to a conflict? Sooliman’s statement appears to have been made at a Congress of Business and Economics (CBE) gala dinner event in Johannesburg on 23 November.

In a licentious piece, best summarised as: “I’m not that kind of a Jew, but of course, Imtiaz Sooliman is not that kind of Jihadist either”, (or “I’m a Great Journalist, believe me’) , Bloom fails to grapple with any of the central allegations raised by critics . Instead he quotes at length from the ‘Book of Sooliman’, in a process of obsessive, literary myth-making, redolent of a contemporary debate amongst scholars of the Koran. The Medina and Mecca periods in which followers of Muhammad went ‘from being a weak, persecuted minority in Mecca to a powerful force with allies in Medina,” displays two very different versions of the prophet.


I hesitate to even bring up the subject here, because, much like a modern review of Moses and the tabernacles, what one ends with, are two very different versions of events — one depicts a man of peace, the other a man of war, and Hollywood has always failed at presenting us with credible biopics when it comes to religious chronicles. It is a touchy subject, I know.

Which may explain why Bloom feels the needs to regale all and sundry on his conversion to latter-day agnosticism when it comes to the Middle East? I get the gist, the man was once a bible-scholar, escaped Sunday School or life in a Yeshiva and Seminary and lived to tell the tale? Still nothing like forcing those who happen to believe in such fairy-tales as scripture, to view the world, exactly like Bloom, on pain of facing a secular inquisition, in which the very definition of secularism is up for grabs, where you get cancelled if you don’t cough up the correct words? Or worse, a religious inquisition you get your head chopped off for not uttering the correct mantra?

Is Bloom serious when he claims he “wanted to know from [David ‘Kiffness’ Scott] … whether he confirmed or denied that his global hit had contributed to anti-immigrant and/or racist sentiment in the United States and beyond“?

Cherry-picking from an assortment of online tweets involving the meme musician, the Bloom appears to have relegated his target to the arena of matinee club theatrics (a billion fans would tend to disagree), without bothering to consider why those seeking to cancel Scott are in the same league as those wanting to rename Jerusalem and every other Hebrew city, with their former colonial Arabic names? This whilst seeking to persuade all and sundry that if the Jihad is for a just cause, and the money meant for disaster relief ended up funding a religious rally, which just happened to attack a music festival on a Jewish holiday (50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War), we should just look the other way?

Doing this has resulted in over 12 months of absolute bloody mayhem.

SEE: The Kiffness Refuses to be silenced after Sooliman Critique

by davidrobertlewis -

Logan Case: High Court upholds ‘petty apartheid’

THE SITUATION is all too familiar. A 25-year-old black man Thabiso Danca, found that he was welcome and able to enter a Cape Town pub whenever accompanied by white colleagues. But without the gift of whiteness, he wasn’t even recognized at the door. The situation escalated when Danca, upset at being denied entry on Friday 1 December 2022 appealed to fellow lifesaver, Christopher Logan for assistance. According to a statement by the Pub, “the door personnel requested Danca’s identification to verify his age”
Frank’s door policy, like most pubs, is not under 21, “he failed to produce a valid ID and was denied entry to the pub.” It is clear from photographs that not only was Danca an adult, but he looked like an adult. This is not exactly a case of a ‘baby-faced’ teen appearing at a City venue and being denied entry, or a 21-year-old being confused with a 20-year-old, but rather an adult being told to beat it, because, well he isn’t white.

Given the context of ongoing race-based discrimination, (yes for all practical intents and purposes structural apartheid didn’t end in 1994, it merely lost any legal basis for its existence), Danca was rightfully upset at being treated as a minor. The words patronising and patron both have a similar pedigree, deriving from the Latin Pater, meaning ‘Father’. So we all get the gist of the central complaint, and the sequence of events which resulted in Logan ticking off staff and management in front of social media the very next day. The incident resulted in an altercation in which Logan was accused of ‘being the instigator, and the side-bar drama of who videoed who, from what angle, is of little consequence and absolutely not the crux of the matter.
This week owners of Hank’s Olde Irish Pub in Bree Street were ‘awarded R1.25 million in damages by the Western Cape High Court for ‘false accusations of racism on social media’
In retrospect, given Hank’s Pub’s ability to muster legal forces, it might not have been a good idea for the two friends to confront the Irish establishment directly. But here’s the rub, the entire ‘anti-racist’ movement which characterized the nation’s campuses for the past decade has literally advocated ‘confronting racism wherever and whenever it occurs‘. Yet the wobbly left have been rather silent on this account because the man being accused of defamation isn’t black?
This is not a lesson in how to go about filling out a discrimination claim, but one would have expected there to have been some effort made at tackling the central case, in this respect the SAHRC failed miserably, as the entire matter ended up coming a cropper on the strange assumption that video material of the later Saturday confrontation, the second incident, was somehow ‘the evidence’ of the first and vice versa, and of course, a ‘white person cannot experience racism’. Clearly Logan wasn’t the one being discriminated against here, he was acting out of solidarity with his companion. The fact of the denial of entry is not in dispute.

I very much doubt if one could ever persuade a jury comprising 12 citizens that a Saturday was the Friday in question, but we shall never know? (see below)

So once again our justice system turns out to be nothing more than an obstinate legal bureaucracy, in which the only issue for consideration was whether or not a ‘right of admission policy’, trumped any objections raised about the arbitrary application of a rule according to race-based criteria? All this while our law has been hijacked by libel lawyers intent on expanding the definition of libel law to include influencers and political activity?

Social media influencers not subject to press freedom?

The court has perversely ordered Christopher Michael Logan to pay the damages because he “accused John Papadakis of racism and shared a video on social media, claiming that his friend, Thabiso Danca, was denied entry to the pub because of his race.”

The social media outrage, according to the court, “led to significant reputational harm, financial losses and emotional distress for the pub and its co-owners, the Papadakis brothers”. The damages were awarded to Latari House (the operating company for Hank’s Olde Irish Pub) and brothers Viron and John Papadakis who, at that stage, were co-owners of the pub.:”

Since I have been unable to find any reference on SAFLII to the case, I am unable to read the exact wording of the decision, (anyone willing to assist here?) but from my own experience of dealing with the Western Cape division, the context in which racism occurs in our country has turned out to be of little consequence. This is the self-same division which trashed the TRC Report in 2010 and again in 2018, in the process dumping our Preamble. The Constitution is only in force when it comes to the Constitutional Court, and available to citizens at great cost it seems? The portraits of Judge President’s reaching all the way back to the old Cape Colony still line the High Court’s vaulted halls. Clearly such portraits belong in a museum?

More concerning is the manner in which ‘Papadakis and Co’, (or at least their supporters), have run a campaign before the courts, objecting to the pair’s membership of various student political organisations. You read that correctly, the latest tweets on X.com go so far as calling Logan an “EFF plant”, when the facts are both were members of DASO on campus, and so what? Our Constitution protects the right to membership of political parties irrespective of one’s race or social status?

The resulting miscarriage of justice is all too reminiscent of the manner in which apartheid officials banned student organisations and their members en masse during the 80s, without any opportunity for appeal, as officials continue to defend petty apartheid in our City.

Yes, our justice system has once again demonstrated that it lacks capacity to assess the facts when it comes to capital crimes and defamation cases. Where the West has a jury system, our legal system abolished jury trial in 1969, citing international embarrassment at the appearance of black persons before all-white juries. Closing down public participation in the justice process, lay-assessors are rarely used, the more so when tricky issues such as racism arise. Our courts all too often resort to a strategy known as ‘obfuscation of law’. The Logan decision merely bolsters this perception.

Then again, most Fridays are already Saturday when it comes to the Cape Bar?

SEE: Legal Storm over Irish Pub Racist Saga set to continue

SEE: Police Investigation Clears Pub Owners of Racism

by davidrobertlewis -

Voetsek Ramaphosa’s BRICS anti-liberty brigade

IMAGINE a world in which women’s rights alongside LGBT rights have been abolished, as they are in Iran? South Africa’s constitution replaced overnight with a system based upon ‘supremacy of the ruling party’. The opposition rolled into a new “Government of National Solidarity” (GNS). Dissenters imprisoned, or relegated to political re-education camps? Our country is undergoing a massive economic shift under the influence of China and the new BRICS bloc.

A host of ‘special reforms’ ushered in, without so much as a referendum, at the behest of an unelected, trans-national, supra-government. Sound familiar? The result for those who live in a fashionable bubble praising ‘the great economic leap forward‘ — those not relegated to sweatshops or compulsory labour camps — who may already enjoy this shiny, ersatz lifestyle, are illustrated below, as our country resembles a giant shopping mall?

Yet this dystopian picture of a possible future, close to our own, demonstrates a strange dissonance compared to the mall-world of today.

In this scenario, yet to become our fate, there are noticeable differences: Gone are the brands once linked to Western influence. You won’t find Apple wristwatches nor Nike trainers. There are no KFC nor McDonald’s outlets. Everything is a generic brand supplied by an “Original BRICS Equipment Manufacturer”.

All goods in this dismal imaginary place derive from a single corporation, owned partly by the ruling party, as special “BRICS advisors” help with a range of engineering projects. Government subsidiaries are allowed a semblance of competition. To extract compliance, the daily press has been replaced by the official state propaganda mechanism, Tavda (Tshwane Propaganda). Any content not authorised by the state is henceforth forbidden. The Internet is behind a “National Firewall”. Citizens are compelled to watch the state-run channels on their screens as they do in Russia.

National health is in full swing, as private medical practices are constrained. Henceforth, independent trade unions are to be abolished as they already are in China, Russia and Iran. A single currency has replaced the Rand, let’s call it the new BRICS RIAL. The fantasy may be a lot closer than we think. Could LGBT, alongside minority groups and Zionists, be rounded up for processing as ‘social deviants’? In areas where it is convenient, slavery has returned, as it has in parts of Arabia. A military call-up is in place, as we commit troops to the defense of Russia?

Under Western sanctions, travel in this ‘Mecca of Merchandising’ has been restricted to the ‘BRICS Zone’. In any event, only those granted permission by the party, are allowed to travel. Our shift towards a totalitarian regime occurs just a few steps into our near future, under Ramaphosa’s Special Command Council. The “Third Republic” here is well underway. It draws experience from the previous ‘Coronavirus Command Council.

The laissez-faire, ‘neoliberal system’ characterized much of the 20th century. It was prevalent in the early part of the 21st century as well. This system has now given way to a brutal mix of “Socialism with South African characteristics“. In effect, one can attend rugby matches. Yet, there are no longer any regional teams. Exercising a range of individual rights is frowned upon.

If you think such a dystopian timeline is impossible given the broad, electoral support for the current constitution, think again. No less than John Hlophe, the parliamentary leader of MKP, the largest opposition grouping recently pronounced on what may be termed, a ‘plan to scrap the constitution’. This while President Ramaphosa has seen fit to dictate to his fellow South Africans, our country’s position within an emerging power block known as BRICS.

The BRICS summit held this month was thus an all-male affair held in Kazan Russia, without a single female leader, in other words, no representative of the fairer sex. The macho summit proceeded to rubber-stamp a range of essentially patriarchal policies. These included a major shift in the World Economic Order, at the behest of dictators Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. It marked the first such gathering after the group’s expansion without any mandate from those affected. The new members include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. These are alongside the original five members: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

The host, Putin, whose country is involved in a major war with Ukraine has said ‘more than 30 countries including North Korea have expressed a desire to join the BRICS’, which is far from being a political union, though there was little immediate clarity on how an economic expansion would work.

North Korea appears to be stepping up efforts to join the BRICS bloc.

by davidrobertlewis -

President Ramaphosa’s deplorable 7/10 address

“TODAY marks one year since the start of an onslaught against the Palestinian people” reads President Ramaphosa’s perverse statement released to mark the anniversary of the 7/10 attack on the Nova Music festival and Kibbutz Be’eri alongside other communities in Southern Israel, which claimed the lives of 1200 civilians with some 250 being taken hostage.

The event which occurred on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, one of the holiest days of the Jewish calendar, was launched to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Both dates are religious holidays equivalent to Eid al-Adha in Islam or Easter in Christianity . The perpetrators could not have picked a worse time to commit their heinous crime, and the result has been bloody mayhem ever since.

The casualties included Joshua Mollel and Clemence Felix Mtengaa, both Tanzanian students, and at least two South Africans who died, amongst many foreigners taken into captivity by Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah, an Islamic Jihadist movement (abbreviated as Hamas), and its Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades.

Disabled hostages were quickly slain for ‘being too much trouble’ by Hamas. One a girl with autism, another with cerebral palsy in a wheel chair. It should be noted, South Africa is signatory to the Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

Though Ramaphosa’s statement goes on to deplore the slaughter of civilians on either side, he deserves condemnation for the capricious manner in which he seeks to invert the historical record, appearing to make out a case that the attack was merely a legitimate strike against an oppressive regime, thus Israel is the one who attacked a music festival in Gaza?

This absurd rhetoric is typical of those who deny Resolution 181, passed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1947 — the resolution called for the partition of British Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with the city of Jerusalem as a corpus separatum (Latin: “separate entity”) to be governed by a special international regime.

UN181, which is the basis for the failed 2007 Olmert Plan — was rejected by the Arab community— and immediately resulted in violence, and the status quo we have today.

For those whose political world view is skewed by the so-called ‘Nakba‘, itself a revisionist dogma — the subsequent Arab-Israel war of 1948, the Six Day War, and Yom Kippur War, are all justifiable acts taken in the defense of Arab sovereignty. Nakba theology painfully ignores the plight of over 800 000 Mizrahi Jews similarly dispossessed of their land in MENA and the earlier Farhud, a “violent dispossession” that was carried out against the Jewish population of Baghdad, Iraq, on 1–2 June 1941.

No doubt President Ramaphosa would have supported Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Ottoman Empire during World War 1, as he appears to unconditionally support Jihad and the tactics of martyrdom, alongside German and Arab Imperialism?

Statements such as “we have condemned the atrocities committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October 2023, as we have denounced the killing of civilians in any context” ring hollow, since they are all issued in the past tense, with the President refusing to regret his earlier failure to condemn the massacre. It took 10 days for the President’s office to issue a statement, a point made by members of the local Jewish community.

If the deaths of our own compatriots and fellow Africans on Oct 7 pales in comparison with the loss of life in the aftermath, one can only hope our President comes to his senses and condemns both parties to the conflict, one which I perceive as a tragic case of ‘injustice vs injustice?” At very least efforts at reconciling the parties should not be abandoned.

One could go further and ask why our President lacks the courage to abandon war, as a means to resolve conflict? As the wisdom from Isaiah goes: “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Instead, what is demonstrated here are empty calls for ‘justice and peace’ by an executive unable to tell truth from fiction in its eagerness to satisfy the Palestinian lobby.

READ: RAMAPHOSA GAFFE: A River too Far?

READ: DA goes woke, as President Ramaphosa gets into Messiah mode.

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by davidrobertlewis -

Replacement theology at heart of Middle East conflict

OUR COUNTRY to its credit has enacted legislation to suppress both apartheid and racism. Proposals by the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) for introduction of a bill which will ‘domesticate’ the 1973 United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, alongside the creation of ‘apartheid-free zones’ and the criminalization of Zionism, confront us with an absurdity: it is as if apartheid never happened within South Africa, since it appears no laws were adopted referencing the UN convention?

If our 1994 dispensation appears in danger of being replaced by a formidable global campaign connected to a maximalist view of Palestinian territory, associated with the former British Colony, then you may be correct: “From the River to the Sea” is the oft heard rallying cry alongside “Death to Israel and America”, as anyone with a different viewpoint is shouted down. Yet the ‘rainbow-coloured’ demonstrators have not translated into ‘rainbow ideas’ in the Middle East?

This is because replacement theology is at the heart of the conflict. A 2020 academic paper by Philip Du Toit 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.

In ‘Revisiting the Charge of Taḥrīf: The Question of Supersessionism in Early Islam and the Qurʾān’ Sandra Keiting argues that Islam was supersessionist from its inception, advocating the view that the ‘Quranic revelations’ would “replace the corrupted scriptures possessed by other communities”.

Jonathon Feldstein observes the popular ‘Dome of the Rock’ in East Jerusalem has perhaps become “the cornerstone of Islamic replacement theology” alongside a new tradition that undermines both Judaism and Christianity. “Today, it’s commonplace to hear Palestinians and other Muslims deny any Jewish — and therefore Christian — history to the Temple Mount, Jerusalem and the Land of Israel.”

Feldstein’s views are supported by a videographer who prompted Arab Palestinians to explain the plethora of Jewish archeological sites in the region — their answers invariably involve a denial of history, for them, the scientific evidence is a religious ‘falsehood’ to be discarded and ignored, replaced by another narrative, one which seeks to overcome and replace proven historical facts.

Even the Koran references the land of Israel. Al Baqara 2.47 ; Al Maida 5.21; Al Aaraf 7.137; Yunus 10.93; Al Israa 17.2-104;Ta Ha 20.80; Al Mumim 40.53; Al Dukhan 44.32; Al Jathiya 45.16, all refer to Israel as the land of the Jews.

The absurdity of importing apartheid laws to South Africa

The latest PSC dogma and its imported weltanshauung not only seeks to make Jews responsible for apartheid, it criminalises those who profess their religion on the basis of the biblical idea of Zion, in the process relocating South African history to the Middle East.

Furthermore, it provides a canon that replaces the narrative of the Hebrews with that of Arab Palestinians, many of whom were migrants from across the former British and Ottoman Empires. One has merely to examine the history of the Ottoman Railway Company to see why this statement is true. Beginning in 1900, the main line from Damascus to Haifa, allowed mass migration to the new economy surrounding the Zionist endeavor, and the claim is supported by the census data.

Replacement theology as it is constructed in recent times, may be understood as the basis for the apartheid analogy, a process whereby the history of our own country, is similarly replaced and discarded in the furtherance of a strategy which has been termed supersessionism.

It is therefore significant that the UN apartheid convention targets crimes against humanity “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” [my bold]

Perversely, the phrase ‘one racial group over any other racial group or groups‘ is routinely omitted by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and PSC, in order to redact the convention to instances of state oppression of minorities, a lamentable situation not uncommon in our world today and certainly not unique to the state of Israel and its neighbors, all of whom should take the blame for the current escalation.

The apartheid convention was enacted in the 1970s primarily to deal with apartheid as it was then constructed within South Africa’s borders — a racist segregationist policy associated with a white Christian minority regime of PW Botha et al — absolutely nothing to do with Jews, who under apartheid were disproportionately jailed compared to their white Christian compatriots, with outspoken Rabbis deported by the regime.

The only genuine question raised by the PSC proposal, (whatever the merits), is whether or not our foreign policy should reflect our constitutional values? At the face of it, foreign policy is best served by an outlook which boldly supports our constitution —  its democratic values — it cannot be that we as a nation are compelled to support those like Hamas or Hezbollah, who are avowedly opposed to secularism, democratic centralism, women’s rights, LGBT rights, independent trade unions, and other rights.

In doing so, we risk rewriting and fabricating our own history.

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