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