by davidrobertlewis -

Trump: ‘White Genocide’, straw-man or scare-crow?

A STRAW-MAN argument is a logical fallacy that involves misrepresenting an opponent’s position in a way that is easier to attack. Instead of addressing the actual argument, the arguer distorts it, often exaggerating or simplifying it, and then attacks the distorted version. As Alphabet’s Gemini puts it: “This is like arguing with a “straw man” or scarecrow, which is easy to knock down because it’s not a real person.”

After literally arguing with a machine by attacking xAI’s ‘Grok” for an incident in which it began interjecting normal conversation with weird comments about South Africa’s alleged ‘White Genocide” (see here), and failing to report the truth of the matter, the press moved on to misrepresenting, and practically reinventing a meeting between Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa, perhaps in the belief, the public are idiots?

This was no ambush as moral watchdogs and thought leaders put it, in instantly propagating news feeds but rather an intervention. With cloned, ready-to-consume buzz points, the world was asked to ignore the evidence, and disbelieve their eyes.

As anyone watching the event, would have noted, it was a simple question by a member of the press which started the ball rolling. Were claims of a ‘white genocide’ true? Ramaphosa’s awkward response was revealing — the claims couldn’t possibly be correct — had he not arrived in Washington with a cabinet member and leader of the opposition John Steenhuisen, who apparently is white?

If this were the case, he suggested, wouldn’t John be dead alongside, two champion golfers Retief Goosen and Ernie Els, in addition to apartheid financier, Johann Rupert, all white?

Trump had prepared his response to this dramatic moment, given the controversy which had erupted following the proclamation that Afrikaners, in particular farmers, would be granted refugee status. Neither the proclamation nor the earlier Presidential order suspending aid programmes with our country, mention the term ‘genocide’ in relation to the Afrikaners.

The press are lying to you

“The only time the word appears”, tweeted, Breitbart’s Joel Pollak, “is in relation to the ICJ case”, and claims of a genocide in South Africa, he says, ‘are premature’.

On Wednesday Trump openly stated, his mind ‘wasn’t decided on the matter’, rather, his administration was being inundated with requests for asylum, alongside pages and pages of documented deaths of farmers (472 attacks in 2020 alone), and he wanted our President to watch a video.

The lights in his office were dimmed, and the world was met with a montage of genocidal statements by far-left MP Julius Malema, an entire stadium chanting “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer”. Another segment, a procession of vehicles traveling on a road marked with crosses, one for every farm murder, a well-known demonstration was shown.

At first, Ramaphosa, grinned, attempting to laugh off the multimedia presentation. Then when the crosses segment arrived, he practically fell off his seat, dropping his composure. ‘Where is this?’ He asked, feigning disbelief, ‘perhaps I better investigate?

Trump had already explained his intervention — getting this out in the open, will allow South Africa to resolve the problem, ‘we all want the killings to end’.

That problem word, Genocide.

The crime of genocide, which arose in the aftermath of the Holocaust, has nothing to do with numbers. The magnitude of the event is relatively unimportant, and it is a common fallacy that a genocide must run its course, in order for the parties to be interdicted.

Where suicide is the intention to kill oneself, (regicide the intention to murder a King, fratricide,the intention to kill ones brothers and sisters), genocide is the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group’. What is important here is the intention to commit genocide, dolus specialis, which makes it an international crime.

The objective is what makes it a unique crime distinct from national crime statistics like homicide rates, road fatalities and deaths by disease etc. Resorting to overall homicide rates here is a sad attempt to obfuscate murders within a trade or profession. The obvious hate crimes which often precede land invasions, replete with bloodied messaging, are disguised and dressed up as mere criminality by the regime.

The central claim made by groups such as Afriforum is that farm murders are being ignored by South Africa’s authorities, who turn a blind eye, by allowing both land invasions, and horrific incidents of slaughter to go unchecked. Instead of investigating, the claims are instantly dismissed as the ravings of white supremacists, and yet every farm murder is a loss to the country’s productive capacity.

The European Union’s Centre for Information Policy and Security (ECIPS) Ricardo Baretzky issued a statement this week asserting “violence against white farmers in South Africa is a verified fact and not misleading. He emphasized that ECIPS’s intelligence confirms the existence of racially motivated attacks and that the phrase “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” is more than just rhetoric — it represents a real and dangerous threat.

Think of the outcry if 7 CEOs were murdered in as many months?

The signing into law of an ‘expropriation with nil compensation’ amendment, alongside the condonation of fringe slogans such as ‘One Settler on Bullet’ and ‘Kill the Boer’ by South Africa’s apex court, (surely these slogans do not represent our nation’s collective opposition to apartheid, have no place in the 21st century?) signals that neither Pretoria nor our nations jurists, has an intention of protecting property rights in the country, nor of defending the rights of farmers on the land, who now qualify for asylum in the USA.

Yet people like CNN Anderson Cooper and Holocaust denialist Whoopi Goldberg were this week parroting a different narrative, the self-same straw-man arguments promoted by Gareth Newham, at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, who can see nothing wrong with a TRC submission admitting statements such as “Kill the Boer” drove farm murders, as Ramaphosa’s delegation attempted to spin a fable about crime.

Saying ‘black and white are murdered equally in South Africa’ is little respite for the victims of criminality.

NOTE: After briefing the meeting about the Congo, where a peace deal between Rwanda and DRC is about to be signed, only a fool would use a page from the briefing to cast shade. South Africa is not only a party to the conflict, a leader on the continent, but earlier this year, almost went to war with Rwanda over the deaths of 14 SANDF personnel.

by davidrobertlewis -

Chatbot tales: xAI Grok hacked, Claude master prompt leaked, & Qaanita Hunter issues robo-fatwa

NO sooner had the chatbot Grok malfunctioned, interjecting normal chats on x.com with snippets about “White Genocide”, the incident was being reported to the company, xAI who immediately took corrective action.

An unprecedented statement by the company states “On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot’s prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI’s internal policies and core values.”

“We have conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability. What we’re going to do next: – Starting now, we are publishing our Grok system prompts openly on GitHub. The public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI. – Our existing code review process for prompt changes was circumvented in this incident.”

xAI says it will be putting in place ‘additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review.’ The company is also implementing a 24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems, so we can respond faster if all other measures fail.

Incident raises questions

The several hours in which Grok was responding to unrelated user queries with additional information related to the disputed “White Genocide” news-story (even adding that it was disputed), then admitting in other chats, it was being prompted to do so, certainly raise issues in regard to the manner in which these models can be hacked, manipulated and redirected by employees, external agents, or rogue actors in a method known as prompting.

This year a hacker demonstrated how Microsoft’s Copilot could be coaxed into revealing secure data normally protected by security tags in a hacking method known as ‘social engineering’.

To its credit xAi and the LLM industry has shown itself willing and able to self-regulate, but of course, the controversy plays into the hands of regulators, in particular, those who not only perceive a conspiracy involving Elon Musk with his background in South Africa, but who genuinely fear the rise of artificial intelligence.

News24’s Qaanitah Hunter practically had a meltdown on South African television about the incident, calling it ‘an unprecedented attack on the nation’s sovereignty”. Hunter literally accuses Musk of being the man behind the “White Genocide” story and is calling for artificial intelligence to be restricted by South African regulators by muzzling those chatbots who do not give the right answers to our lawmakers and politicians.

The question arises whether AI enjoys any of the free speech guarantees awarded human beings in our Constitution? To what degree are they considered influential, given that early versions seemed to hallucinate?

This week, the master prompt for popular LLM Claude was leaked via reddit. It is a fascinating example of post-training prompting. You can view the xAI chat prompts here too.

 

 

by davidrobertlewis -

Gaza: Step back from the war before it is too late Mr Ramaphosa

FOR DECADES South Africa’s ruling ANC has clung to the notion that solidarity with the Palestinian cause translates into influencing events on the ground. Yet the upshot of expelling the Israeli ambassador Eliav Belotsercovsky following the atrocity of 7/10, appears to be an ingress into the conflict arena, a tit-for-tat expulsion of Ebrahim Rasool from Washington.

Our ICJ case has emboldened Republicans to call for sanctions and boycotts against our country (one of many consequences of taking sides) leading SA Jewish Report’s Howard Sackstein to write, Cyril , was it worth it? Worse , South African lawfare has turned into a political circus — with a veritable line-up of dictators, rogues and monarchs in the region, diluting what may be said to comprise our nation’s democratic appeal and moral clarity before the court.

If like Swaziland and the Saudis, we condone absolute monarchy, and are not promoting the secular frame of our democratic constitution, with its emphasis on human rights, equality, religious freedom and protection of minorities within the general body politic, what exactly are we pursuing other than sheer blindness to ‘rule of law’?

Where the late Nelson Mandela was decidedly bipartisan on the issue, promoting a two-state solution that would allow both sides to coexist, successive ANC administrations have gradually adopted the maximalist view, consistent with those like ‘Islamic Jihad for Palestine’ who wish to eliminate Israel, to remove the Jews from the Middle East. All of which begs the question, where would half of all the Jews living in the world go, if they were removed under objectives outlined by Hamas, or promoted by Fatah with its ‘pay-for-slay’ programe?

Barrister Natasha Hausdorff of ‘UK Lawyers for Israel’ asserts South Africa’s ‘claims of genocide, occupation and apartheid’,  are a canard, an ‘untrue blood libel without basis in international law’. In the instance of our ICJ case, our claim, she says, is merely a legal hook on which to draw Israel before the court, since Israel is a signatory to the Genocide Convention, which came about because of the Holocaust. In addition the legal definition she says, requires intention to commit genocide, an element that she avers is entirely missing given the sequence of events following 7/10.

Absent the Hamas-led, live-streamed slaughter of Israelis on that tragic day, which included disabled victims considered too much trouble to hold hostage, or the cold-blooded slaying of black Kenyan students, one may well be mislead into believing Israel has a genocidal motive in the conflict. The resulting war has been particularly devastating for the population of Gaza given Hamas refusal to provide shelter and aid for its citizens. Instead of bomb shelters we have seen tunnels with munitions, secondary explosions, as Israel plays wackamole, in one of the densest urban environments, this whilst the Islamic group is accused of denying access to food aid transferred during the ceasefire period.

According to Hausdorff’s evidence before the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs committee, last week, the UN famine review committee found claims of famine by the IPC implausible considering the amount of aid which has entered Gaza. She points to calorific content exceeding NHS guidelines and the sheer weight of aid delivered during the recent ceasefire, amounting to several months of food for each and every Gazan. Instead she fingers Hamas’ active diversion of aid, as one of the tactics used to blame Israel in a psychological war that has deployed martyrdom as a tactic.

While pro-Israel attorneys such as Hausdorff are quick to promote the idea of a ‘moral army fighting terrorism’, with one of the ‘lowest combatant to civilian kill ratios of any conflict in the world’, the mounting death-toll and prospect of starvation of the general population caused by the Jihadist logic behind the conflict, puts paid to the notion that anyone can simply, step back from actively promoting a cessation to hostilities on both sides.

Particularly appalling is the manner in which South Africa has repeated the mistakes of its near distant past. Our nation’s own complicity in the humanitarian crisis occurring in Gaza harks back to Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’, a programme of euthanasia of Europe’s Jewish population by the Nazis which came about following then Minister of Interior ( under the Smuts government) DF Malan, who introduced legislation before the House of Assembly curtailing Jewish immigration to South Africa. A policy which predates the 1938 Evian Conference where world leaders all agreed to implement similar embargoes on Germany with a tragic result — Germany’s solution to the problem of Jewish refugees streaming into places like Palestine, was to engage in industrial scale murder.

As one watches the brutal targeting of Gaza, by IDF artificial intelligence, with rockets and missiles still being launched into Israel by Middle East states, some of whom, are pro-slavery and the very antithesis of our secular democracy, one can only remark at how a perfect storm of martyrdom has created the necessary conditions for the wholesale sacrifice of human beings at the mercy of bureaucrats such as those in Pretoria. If our country were providing guaranteed aid and refuge for Gazans and Israelis alike, in fact anyone wishing to flee the conflict, I might think differently.

In both these tragic instances, instead of walking back our allies from an historical pressure cooker, we have encouraged more pressure. We may yet live to regret it, having repeated the mistakes of our nations’ past in not considering peaceful alternatives

by davidrobertlewis -

Dear Ebrahim Rasool, open letter to former SA ambassador to USA

Dear Ebrahim Rasool,

YOUR CAMPAIGN IN SUPPORT OF GLOBAL INTIFADA, CLERICAL DICTATORSHIP & JIHAD REFERS

We first met at Community House back in the 1980s, where your organisation, World Council on Religion and Peace (WCRP) had its offices. Subsequently you became involved in environmental justice as a co-sponsor alongside Cape Town Ecology Group (CTEG) of the inaugural 1991 Environment and Development Conference at UWC, where Farid Esack, Cheryl Carolus, the late Sandile Dikeni and myself were on the same anti-apartheid platform that aligned with the objectives of the Freedom Charter to ‘save the seed, and save the soil’ and which resulted in the inclusion of ecological sustainable development under article 24 ‘Earth Rights’ in our Constitution.

Over a year ago, I watched in horror, as images of the Hamas-lead ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ in which jihadists live-streamed their attacks on Israeli citizens during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, and on the 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, were streamed onto social media. These appalling events which included the slaying of two Kenyan students, the cold-blooded slaughter of disabled persons (such as the wheelchair bound Ruth Peretz who attended an outdoor Music festival), and the taking of female hostages, many of whom appeared to have bloody buttocks — were soon followed by equally appalling video of the Israel counter-assault on Gaza.

I am not writing this letter to take issue with your controversial webinar statements about the current President of the United States, but rather to question your  divergence from the path of peace and non-violence, to embrace a violent global “Intifada” — a self-styled Jihad to “liberate Quds and Al Aksa”, by any means necessary, and on behalf of a clerical dictatorship which has resulted in a modern inquisition of Jewish identity on the campuses of the world.

This is very far from advocacy of a secular solution to a religious disagreement at the heart of the problematic of apartheid —  the much-vaunted Afrikaner ‘Vow at Blood River’ — which some may view as a parallel to “God’s apartheid” (see here) — which you most certainly opposed and rallied against during the struggle against a system based upon race segregation, not religious schism nor national boundaries per se.

Resistance by any means necessary and come what may, whatever the death toll, is surely the path of bloody mayhem leaving everyone in the world blind.  It is most certainly inconsistent with our country’s pacifist constitution which prohibits propaganda for war. Religious zealotry of such order, would have been regarded as anathema during our own struggle. I therefore wish to challenge your uncritical embrace of Holy War, or what you claim is simply ‘Islamic resistance to Zionism’,  a religious vendetta in which Hamas with its Death charter sets out a basis for an Arab state within a constellation of Arab states, to replace Israel, “from the River to the Sea”.

Have you forgotten how similar ideologies in our country panned out? Those who rendered their vengeance on all and sundry during the 1993 St James Church Massacre did not receive amnesty at the Truth & Reconciliation Commission. They were considered very much in the same league as Botha, Malan and Vorster who saw fit to deport Jews such as Rabbi Andrew Ungar from our country, so easily stripping citizenship from those not deemed European enough, and thus incarcerating Zionists and Non-Zionists alike alongside Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia trial.

I need not relate the fate of the Jews of District Six or the contribution of Zionists such as Arthur Goldreich, to bemoan the fact that I live in a country wholly absent of Antisemitism,  according to bizarre denials issued by Minister Ronald Lamola and where successive affronts against Jewish communities have resulted in a situation in which the Jews of South Africa are a vulnerable minority, having reduced in size from some 100 000+ to barely 40 000 in little over two decades.

To see our country taking a lead in pursuing a vendetta on the basis of religion, in which critics such as Joel Pollack are moved to challenge South Africans on this count, is a disgrace.

“Faith used in this way and abused is a throwback to the Medieval Era when the Inquisition would pursue Jews on the basis of these selective readings or misinterpretations of the Jewish faith and to watch South Africa do [this at the ICJ by misquoting the Hebrew Bible as evidence of genocide] was really stomach turning”  explained Pollack on a recent Daily Maverick podcast.

Pollack believes the country should rather take a more productive approach by exporting our peaceful negotiated outcome as a model to emulate instead of falling in line with the so-called “Axis of Resistance”.

Those who believe in a military solution to the conflict as your wearing of an Iraqi-designed Keffiyah (appropriated by the Palestinian movement) and signed by Haniyeh suggests, are surely living in cloud-cuckooland? As Mother Teresa of Calcutta put it: “I was once asked why I don’t participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I’ll be there.”

Sincerely yours,

David Robert Lewis

 

by davidrobertlewis -

SA diplomatic shambles: Pollak v Rasool

PRETORIA’S foreign policy is in complete disarray following the demarche of the Pro-Jihad Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool from Washington on Friday. The expelling of the Islamist South African ambassador to the United States signals an unprecedented escalation of tensions between the two countries.

Not only is Rasool supportive of the Islamic movement to create a clerical dictatorship in the Middle East to replace Israel, (known as Hamas), he seems to have ignored the fact Trump gained office primarily due to the Latino vote. Labeling any opposition to Arab expansionism as ‘racist’ or ‘supremacist’ or worse, ‘Islamophobic’, has become a routine slur against non-members of a faith practiced by 25% of the planet.

Be that as it may, neither nations nor religions are races. Rasool should know better than to label American citizens (and their leader) who want a closed Southern border to avoid drug cartels from Central America pursuing them, along with the associated decline in living standards as ‘racist’, and to rail against the Jeffersonian values of non-compulsion in religion.

While Rasool’s race-baiting of Donald Trump was being taken to task by US secretary of State Marco Rubio, none of this has come as much of a surprise to those bothering to gain the perspective of both sides, and especially considering last month’s controversial co-authoring by our President of an article by the so-called Hague Group in a Foreign Policy journal.

Ramaphosa doubles-down on strange claims made in an October 2024 address in which he seems to believe Israel was the one which attacked an outdoor peace festival in Gaza, taking hostages in the process. (You can read my response here), since we all suffer from the UN-sponsored fiction that Gaza was occupied by Israel at the time, and thus Israel was somehow attacking Israel?

As a candidate US ambassador to South Africa Joel Pollak suggests, the article “never once mentioned Hamas” —   as if the protagonists here are merely the Hague Group versus Israel? South Africa has had to increase VAT to pay for the millions being spent on ICJ litigation, while ANC officials face the prospect of US sanctions in addition to tariffs.

Pollak’s analysis of what has gone wrong with South Africa’s bizarre foreign policy should be required reading by our diplomatic corps — but of course this would mean foregoing an ostrich mentality associated with previous regimes — and a cancel culture which immediately labels any opinion not sanctioned by the Mullahs in Tehran as “Zionist Witchcraft” read “Haraam”.

Interviewed on local Jewish-focused radio, ChaiFm, Pollack who is a former South African, having married an anti-apartheid activist here, says: “If you take a look at the big picture, South Africa has basically cast its lot with these terrorists and the regimes which support them. You have to ask why? Because in the heyday of the Rainbow Nation under Mandela, there was an idea that South Africa could play a positive peacemaking role, export some of the lessons of compromise and reconciliation from the transition to democracy, and these could be applicable whether in Northern Ireland or the Middle East.

This has shifted over time to a SA which wants to be on the side of the “Axis of Resistance” as the Iranians call it. The people who are trying to undermine American leadership, and to destroy Israel, and to suppress Western Europe, and that is where SA sees itself. To get there you have to misread the history of the South African transition as if it were a military victory by the ANC where it crushed all before it, and basically decided in its magnanimity to tolerate the presence of other people in the country, when actually it was a hard-won compromise . The lessons of that reconciliation have been lost.”

SEE: South Africa could lose its United States consulate in Johannesburg if the city changes the name of Sandton Drive to Leila Khaled Drive.” Note: Khalid is the terrorist behind a Black September 1970 plane hijacking which occurred during the attempted Black September coup in Jordan, to overthrow the monarchy and establish a Palestinian state. Jordan is historical Palestine on many pre-British maps, but plans for King Abdullah to become ‘King of Palestine’ were scrapped at the Jericho conference.

by davidrobertlewis -

Nuclear Disarmament: an historical link between Ukraine & South Africa

BOTH UKRAINE and South Africa share a history of nuclear disarmament. In fact we are the only two nations on Earth to willingly give up atomic weapons. Accusations that Pretoria is assisting Iran with nuclear capabilities are thus demonstrably false given this astonishing history.

Shortly before the country transitioned to democracy, South Africa formally dismantled its weapons and production equipment, becoming the only country to voluntarily relinquish nuclear weapons after achieving the capability.

In 1994, Ukraine, which had inherited a large Soviet nuclear arsenal after the USSR’s collapse, agreed to relinquish its nuclear weapons and join the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear weapon state. It did this in exchange for security assurances from the US, UK, and Russia, an agreement formalized in the Budapest Memorandum

South Africa is also a signatory to the NPT. In February 2019, South Africa ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, becoming the first country to have had nuclear weapons, disarmed them and gone on to sign the treaty.

Ukrainian President Zelenksy has been invited to this years G20 meeting by President Ramaphosa, it will provide ample opportunity for the parties to set the matter straight.

 

by davidrobertlewis -

DEBUNKED: South Africa is an ‘ethno-nationalist, gangster state’

FOUR house Republicans wrote a letter to Donald Trump last week, claiming the United States had been marginalised under the ANC and calling South Africa an “ethno-nationalist gangster state” . While the claim by Andrew Ogles, Joe Wilson, Tom Tiffany and Don Bacon of marginalization of US interests may be true, (given Pretoria’s obsession with BRICS to the detriment of the African Union), the strange assertion that far from beings a non-racial democracy our country is rather some form of criminal enterprise, one based upon a narrow ethnic nationalism, is demonstrably untrue.

Thus the budget was postponed after pressure from the ruling party’s coalition partners. This is because the last election delivered a resounding victory for multi-party democracy and plural government when it delivered a coalition under the Government of National Unity (GNU). The coalition comprises a range of ethnic groups, and includes the Democratic Alliance, a political formation that represents a majority of the so-called ‘white electorate”.

Not only is Afrikaner leader of the DA, John Steenhuisen a cabinet minister, but his party fields  no less than 12 Cabinet and Deputy Ministers. We list them below:

DA Cabinet Ministers:

  • Minister of Agriculture – John Steenhuisen
  • Minister of Basic Education – Siviwe Gwarube
  • Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure – Dean Macpherson
  • Minister of Home Affairs – Dr Leon Schreiber
  • Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment – Dr Dion George
  • Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies – Solly Malatsi

DA Deputy Ministers:

  • Deputy Minister of Finance – Ashor Sarupen
  • Deputy Minister of Energy and Electricity – Samantha Graham-Maré
  • Deputy Minister of Small Business Development – Jane Sithole
  • Deputy Minister of Higher Education – Dr Mimmy Gondwe
  • Deputy Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition – Andrew Whitfield
  • Deputy Minister of Water and Sanitation – Sello Seitlholo

The defamatory assertions by the Republican congressmen are thus a blatant falsehood, since all 12 MPs gained their posts via a democratic process which was labeled ‘free and fair’ and whose observers, included the United States,

US participation as electoral observers alongside the  Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa has occurred every election since 1994, when the first democratic government was elected under the late Nelson Mandela, an ardent democrat.

by davidrobertlewis -

Republican congress seeks AGOA suspension over Taiwan, Hamas

MEMBERS of the US Congress have written to President Trump urging him to revoke South Africa’s AGOA preferential trade privileges. They cite the countries support of Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Hamas), and the attempted removal of the Taiwanese embassy in Pretoria, in addition to ‘destructive land reform policies’ and ‘consistent infidelity to the rule of law’, as violation of eligibility criteria for AGOA.

Four congressional members including Andrew Ogles, Joe Wilson, Tom Tiffany and Don Bacon penned a letter last week, claiming the United States had been marginalised under the ANC, and if Pretoria did not act ‘constructively’, to rather pursue a path that includes suspension of diplomatic ties and removal of trade privileges, in addition to sanctions.

Trump recently signed a presidential order suspending aid to South Africa, and granting refugee status to its white minority Afrikaner community over  the signing into law of a ‘confiscation with nil compensation’ land reform bill. The new law opens the door to state seizure of private property in South Africa, in contravention of the constitution.

Pretoria’s consistent undermining of US interests such as “the filing of a baseless claim” before the International Court of Justice following the 7/10 ‘murder of 1 200 Jews including American citizens’ is mentioned. The congressmen are upset that South Africa claims Israel wants to ‘destroy the Palestinians’, while it enjoys close ties to Hamas, allowing two “Hamas-controlled charities” the Al Aqsa Foundation and Al Quds Foundation to operate freely within our borders.

“For decades, officials of the South African government have acted as Hamas propagandists, urging the international community to lift trade sanctions and otherwise engage with the US-designated foreign terrorist organisation.” The Islamist group whose charter calls for the elimination of Israel and its replacement by a clerical dictatorship under a Pan-Arab constellation of states, is opposed to the secular rights and freedoms outlined by South Africa’s own constitution.

by davidrobertlewis -

South Africa’s ambitious foreign policy under scrutiny

SOUTH AFRICA made headlines this week, and it’s not all good. First up was the public spat between President Ramaphosa and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame over M23 and the DRC. Kagame accuses our president of deploying SANDF troops to further his own interests that include mining, (in the process supporting Felix Tshisekedi and the self-same forces responsible for the Rwandan Genocide).

Next it was Donald Trump’s “Very Bad Things” remark in reference to the signing into law of a bill that allows the state confiscation of property at nil cost. That our President says it won’t be used, is no real assurance to those investors worried about what else is under the mattress.

No sooner had presidential spokesperson Vincent Magwenya indicated that Ramaphosa wished to see Trump over a round of golf in the runup to the G20 Summit to be held in the country this year, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued an extraordinary statement declining to attend.

One cannot help thinking that Magwenya would have been better off inviting Paul Kagame to play golf at Sun City, than issuing informal invitations via the media, playing Trump diplomacy that seems rather shallow considering the range and scope of the disagreement with the USA that has been brewing for over a decade.

Instead of playing a losing game with macho dedollarisation talk inside BRICS with its male-only summits, we could have been rebuilding our continent and avoiding the situation in which we are on the brink of a war with Rwanda. With decades of low-growth and under-spending on security, South Africa lacks the military capability it once had.

Bear in mind that the USA is going through a radical shakeup of its federal government under the auspice of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)to curb a trillion dollar deficit, as it enters a period of protectionism, tariffs and anti-globalism under Trump.

That there is a toxic mix of climate change denialism and ultranationalism congealed around the excesses of the left in the USA is certain. Rubio’s emphatic opposition to Ramaphosa’s buzzwords,(nothing more than empty promises undermining market-led meritocracy) comes on the heels of the Biden administration support for bizarre aid programs around the world that include transgender education for children in India

Instead of crying about aid packages and bail-outs, South Africa could do well to learn from Argentina’s Javier Milei, where his government posted a fiscal surplus for the first time, and in little more than a year. As others might put it: a country that cannot pay its bills, doesn’t get to set a foreign policy agenda.

by davidrobertlewis -

Hijacking of Holocaust Remembrance Day: Screening of Al Jazeera Gaza Documentary refers

Dear Sir/Madam,

Hijacking of Holocaust Remembrance Day: Screening of Al Jazeera Gaza Documentary refers

I am writing to complain and protest with regard to the hijacking of the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day event to screen an Al Jazeera documentary on Gaza: “Al Shifa The Crimes they Tried To Bury”

No matter how one may feel about the recent conflict, in particular the claims made by various parties, such an event is a time of sombre reflection and not a platform for political posturing by organisations and individuals, especially those who are not directly affected by the Holocaust.

A similar event occurred in Ireland this week, resulted in the removal of Jews who turned their backs on President Higgens, in protest at his address where he referred to the Holocaust as ‘an attempted genocide’.

The screening of the documentary in this manner, alongside the lighting of candles, at the Groote Schuur auditorium in which the context of the Holocaust was stripped of its connection to AntiSemitism, was calculated to grandstand.

“In remembering the Holocaust, we recognize threats to freedom, dignity, and humanity – including in our own time. Today – in the face of growing economic discontent and political instability, escalating white supremacist terrorism, and surging hate and religious bigotry – we must be more outspoken than ever. We must never forget – nor allow others to ever forget, distort or deny the Holocaust.” António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General,

Repackaging the Holocaust as if it were a mere trope, to be superseded by more contemporary issues, is not only offensive, but completely inappropriate given South Africa’s role in the tragedy involving industrial scale euthanasia of Europe’s Jewish population barely 80 years ago. A role our country refuses to acknowledge.

It appears the following organisations were involved in this week’s event: Desmond & Leah Tutu Foundation, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Gift of the Givers and SAJFP.

The result must be rejected as curated propaganda and replacement theology. Our constitutional rights to dignity, religious freedom and  freedom from war are not served by obliterating history.

Here is what they don’t teach you in our local history books:

One year before the 1938 Evian Conference, Minister of the Interior under the Smuts government, D F Malan passed a piece of Anti-Semitic legislation aimed at preventing Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany entering South Africa. The last ship to arrive before the law went into effect, the SS Stuttgart was thus met by Malan’s brown-shirts in Table Bay with force. South Africa later attended the Evian Conference in France where the leaders of the world discussed the “Jewish Problem” and determined to act collectively to not allow the deportation of German Jews under Hitler to continue.

With thousands entering British Palestine, both the British and Arabs began a well-publicized campaign to stop the flood. It was the Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini, later President of the All-Palestine government in Gaza (1948-1956) who personally met with Hitler in November of 1941, appealing to the Fuhrer himself to deal with the problem. By that time, the Farhud (Arabic for Pogrom), a violent dispossession of Jews from the Middle East & North Africa at the behest of Husseini, was well under way.

This motion was backed by Arab leaders from Saudi Arabia and Iraq in a round of shuttle-boat diplomacy the same year between Berlin and the Arab world. By January of 1942, Adolf Eichmann was presenting his plan for what became known as “The Final Solution”.

It was a ‘solution’ to precisely the topic under discussion by our own government. Thus at the Wannsee Conference, in the southwestern Berlin borough of Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Germany, and with Hitler notably absent, the Nazi Party delivered its infamous address to the German High Command. A diabolical plan to deal with the 11 million Jews then under Nazi Occupation.

Husseini would later tour the Trebben ‘concentration camp’ murder factory, as he enthusiastically supported the Nazis in their endeavor to ‘kill all the Jews’.