Dear Lance Witten,
Your Editorial refers
A delusion is an unshakeable belief in something that’s untrue. You could call the Israeli government right wing and even extremists, and the status quo highly problematic (and take a non-binary approach) but you cannot call, the rape and murder of over 260 innocent civilians at an outdoor dance party, and the taking of hostages at the Nova Peace Festival, on the Weekend, the result of a ‘just cause’.
During apartheid, if there was any doubt as to the modus of our struggle, we could point to a Freedom Charter, a secular document outlining human rights as the basis for our resistance. There is no similar document in existence amongst any of the opposing parties — neither Fatah nor Hamas. At no point during our struggle did any cleric nor religious authority provide a blank cheque. The ends do not justify the means here, and one has got to question the credibility of the bald assumptions being made by people who should know better?
It is not helpful to bemoan Islamic fundamentalism, but in the same breath to continue to pursue equivocation after equivocation, the likes of which are demonstrated by a Hamas spokesperson on Sky News claiming that ‘no civilians have been killed by Hamas’ over the Weekend because the organisation has redefined civilians as ‘enemy combatants’.
Shani Louk, a German-Israeli tattoo artist, captured at the Nova Sukkot Peace Festival, whose body was paraded naked through the streets of Gaza, is an example of the depravity of a political movement which until 2017 saw its goal as the ”elimination of all Jews wherever they may be found, and subsequently ‘all Zionists’. The attack on an outdoor music festival has demonstrated this group are the equivalent of ISIS in outlook, banning electronic music festivals within Gaza, imprisoning LGBT, and reducing the status of women to mere objects.
The distinction drawn between Zionist and Non-Zionist has turned out to be both unsustainable and discriminatory. My own choices in this matter have been removed by an ecclesiastical case, reducing my identity to nothing more than stereotype and caricature, my rights expunged by zealous moral policing by South Africa’s own corrupt legal authorities. It is not a trivial matter that judges such as Siraj Desai openly support Hamas.
My country is currently a member of an economic block that recently concluded an agreement with Iran, a state which desires nothing more than the removal of Israel from the map, alongside advocacy of the death penalty for LGBT and ‘moral opposition’ to electronic beat music. In the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution, the Iranian government ‘turned pop music into forbidden fruit, condemning it as indecent’.
I currently do not possess the right to a legal personality, based upon equality, privacy and freedom of religion, which in my case entails freedom from the religious views of others, this within the borders of South Africa, my home. I therefore challenge you to openly debate your perverse ‘just war’ thesis and especially the so-called apartheid analogy.