by davidrobertlewis -

President Ramaphosa’s deplorable 7/10 address

“TODAY marks one year since the start of an onslaught against the Palestinian people” reads President Ramaphosa’s perverse statement released to mark the anniversary of the 7/10 attack on the Nova Music festival and Kibbutz Be’eri alongside other communities in Southern Israel, which claimed the lives of 1200 civilians with some 250 being taken hostage.

The event which occurred on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, one of the holiest days of the Jewish calendar, was launched to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Both dates are religious holidays equivalent to Eid al-Adha in Islam or Easter in Christianity . The perpetrators could not have picked a worse time to commit their heinous crime, and the result has been bloody mayhem ever since.

The casualties included Joshua Mollel and Clemence Felix Mtengaa, both Tanzanian students, and at least two South Africans who died, amongst many foreigners taken into captivity by Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah, an Islamic Jihadist movement (abbreviated as Hamas), and its Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades.

Disabled hostages were quickly slain for ‘being too much trouble’ by Hamas. One a girl with autism, another with cerebral palsy in a wheel chair. It should be noted, South Africa is signatory to the Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

Though Ramaphosa’s statement goes on to deplore the slaughter of civilians on either side, he deserves condemnation for the capricious manner in which he seeks to invert the historical record, appearing to make out a case that the attack was merely a legitimate strike against an oppressive regime, thus Israel is the one who attacked a music festival in Gaza?

This absurd rhetoric is typical of those who deny Resolution 181, passed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1947 — the resolution called for the partition of British Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with the city of Jerusalem as a corpus separatum (Latin: “separate entity”) to be governed by a special international regime.

UN181, which is the basis for the failed 2007 Olmert Plan — was rejected by the Arab community— and immediately resulted in violence, and the status quo we have today.

For those whose political world view is skewed by the so-called ‘Nakba‘, itself a revisionist dogma — the subsequent Arab-Israel war of 1948, the Six Day War, and Yom Kippur War, are all justifiable acts taken in the defense of Arab sovereignty. Nakba theology painfully ignores the plight of over 800 000 Mizrahi Jews similarly dispossessed of their land in MENA and the earlier Farhud, a “violent dispossession” that was carried out against the Jewish population of Baghdad, Iraq, on 1–2 June 1941.

No doubt President Ramaphosa would have supported Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Ottoman Empire during World War 1, as he appears to unconditionally support Jihad and the tactics of martyrdom, alongside German and Arab Imperialism?

Statements such as “we have condemned the atrocities committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October 2023, as we have denounced the killing of civilians in any context” ring hollow, since they are all issued in the past tense, with the President refusing to regret his earlier failure to condemn the massacre. It took 10 days for the President’s office to issue a statement, a point made by members of the local Jewish community.

If the deaths of our own compatriots and fellow Africans on Oct 7 pales in comparison with the loss of life in the aftermath, one can only hope our President comes to his senses and condemns both parties to the conflict, one which I perceive as a tragic case of ‘injustice vs injustice?” At very least efforts at reconciling the parties should not be abandoned.

One could go further and ask why our President lacks the courage to abandon war, as a means to resolve conflict? As the wisdom from Isaiah goes: “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Instead, what is demonstrated here are empty calls for ‘justice and peace’ by an executive unable to tell truth from fiction in its eagerness to satisfy the Palestinian lobby.

READ: RAMAPHOSA GAFFE: A River too Far?

READ: DA goes woke, as President Ramaphosa gets into Messiah mode.

READ: Former Israeli and Palestinian ministers: A way out of this endless war

by davidrobertlewis -

Open letter to IOL’s Lance Witten,

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. 

Published in part “Attacks against Civilians can never be justified” Natal Mercury