IF YOU think replacing an Haraam Israel with an Halaal Palestine is the great moral issue of our time, instead of bothering to grapple with the complex secular versus religious issues involved in the region, and the resulting Jerusalem problematic which has caused me to label the real issues a tragic case of injustice vs injustice . Think again.
You’re probably one of many local armchair activists and casual readers who get your news from outlets such as Independent Media. An organisation currently at the centre of a bogus baby scandal.
Readers such as yourself are probably experiencing an over-simplistic feedback loop based upon baldfaced lies and propagandist attempts to frame the issues in black and white, whilst burying the secular concerns and consequences of a global religious inquisition and blood libel, raised here on more than several occasions?
You may be a little surprised when I proceed to relate to you the story of yet another propaganda moment orchestrated by Independent.
In 2015 I issued a complaint to the Press Ombud regarding the extraordinary serialization of the life and times of Peter Plum, a former Nazi and member of the Hitler Youth, who at the time was also suing the Allies via the international criminal courts for as he alleges their ‘starting WW2’.
The Independent Group proceeded to issue a denial that the man was even a Nazi, but rather as they put it, was simply an ‘innocent victim of Hitler’ and the piece merely illustrative of a ‘diversity of viewpoints’, and for which he was entitled to his opinion.
The results they claimed, did not constitute hate speech nor propaganda for war.
South Africa’s sweetheart Press Ombud Johan Retief proceeded to oblige in upholding Independent’s absurd resort to press privilege, privileges which they continue to deny other members of the press, not to mention forgetting the proverbial public right-of-reply.
The pieces were published in the weeks following the November Paris Attacks in which radical Islamists killed 130 people, including 90 at the Bataclan theatre attending an Eagles of Death Metal concert.
I therefore wish to remind readers that it was Justice Millin, in a judgment delivered in the Transvaal Supreme Court on July 13, 1943, who pronounced on Hendrik Verwoerd:
“He (Verwoerd) did support Nazi propaganda, he did make his paper a tool of the Nazis in South Africa, and he knew it.”
The case arose out of an action, brought by Verwoerd (as editor of the Transvaler) against the Johannesburg Star, for publishing an article, entitled “Speaking Up for Hitler” , in which the Transvaler was accused of falsifying news in support of Nazi propaganda and generally acting as a tool of the enemy,
Verwoerd lost the case. In a lengthy judgment, extending to more than 25,000 words, the judge found that Verwoerd had in fact furthered Nazi propaganda.
The defendants had proved, said the judge, that Verwoerd “caused to be published a large body of matter which was on the same general lines as matter coming to the Union in the Afrikaans transmissions from Zeesen and which was calculated to make the Germans look upon the Transvaler as a most useful adjunct to this propaganda service”
Tragically Verwoerd went on to become Prime Minister of South Africa in 1958, a decade after the Nationalists attained power.