I’VE LIVED for twenty years with a ban on my writing by Media24. The company destroyed black jazz history, photography and a piece on Iranian Faridah Zariv’s “Hand of Fatima” exhibition at the Bo Kaap. For my trouble I was locked up, subjected to a racist religious inquisition. (All documented here).

To finally see justice arriving for the people of Iran, like most Iranians in my own country, I can only congratulate Marco Rubio and Donald Trump for making the right call and hope that the IRGC Pretoria regime will meet a similar fate —  at very least the antisecular theocrats like Naledi Pandor, that have installed themselves as the final arbiters of Jewish and Iranian identity will be, G-d willing, removed from power.

You can view an excellent interview with Iranian South African economist Dr Iraj Abedian in which he views this weeks strikes as inevitable.

Members of the Iranian community in South Africa have publicly welcomed military action against Iran’s autocratic regime, describing it as a ‘long-awaited step toward liberating their homeland from decades of repression’.

Evisceration of Pluralism

While no reasons for the spiking of the 2006 Zariv piece were provided at the time by Media24, and the piece is only referred to obliquely in the transcripts of proceedings during the corrupt Labour Court hearing, one should see this evisceration within the context of the company’s ecclesiastical charges, in which I am reduced to a mere Jewish stereotype, without any agency over my identity and practices as a Jew.

For the record, whilst my Jewish family were indeed Orthodox, and I have a bar mitzvah certificate from the Union of Orthodox Synagogues, this does not make me an ultra-Orthodox Jew. You can read a piece about my pleading in the matter in which I argued the Jewish Haskalah, Enlightenment position that acknowledges the Torah is written by human hand and thus fallible, and stated, ‘Judaism is not monolithic, there are many different types of Jews.’

Why do I think the piece was spiked? Because it dealt with a symbol that predates both Judaism and Islam, common to both religions and found across the Middle East and North Africa. Anyone writing about such commonalities within these faiths is perhaps subject to the issue known as ‘Christian Triumphalism’, in which everything needs to indicate that Christianity is the top-dog, or worse, sheer ignorance and prejudice on the part of Media24 editors.

Until 1996 when it adopted a secular constitution, South Africa was for all intents and purposes a theocracy.

NOTE: Secularism, as coined by George Holyoake, is not the absence of religion, it is the absence of religious rule.