South Africa 2004

 

None of the 37 incidents recorded in 2004 were of a violent nature. However, there were ongoing concerns over the dissemination of extreme anti-Jewish propaganda on Muslim radio stations and in Islamic bookstores. Developments in the Middle East, in particular the furor over Israel’s killing of Hamas leaders Shaykh Ahmad Yasin and `Abd al-Rantisi, were again the primary motivation for antisemitic outbursts.

 

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

There are an estimated 80 000 Jews in South Africa, out of a total population of some 45 million. The community is located mainly in Johannesburg (50,000) and Cape Town (18,000), with other important communities being Durban (2,700) and Pretoria (1,500). There are smaller communities in Port Elizabeth, Bloemfontein and East London and of late there has been a steadily growing presence along the Southern Cape coast. 

By the end of 2003 there were signs that the trend of Jewish emigration, which began in 1980, was leveling off. This may be attributed, among other things, to the country’s steady economic performance in the post-1994 era and a continued commitment to the democratic principles adopted at the time of transition to a non-racial democracy.

Despite the negative impact of emigration, the Jewish community remains highly cohesive and well organized. An impressive network of educational and welfare institutions ensures cradle-to-grave services for all members of the community countrywide. Over 80 percent of Jewish children are currently enrolled in Jewish day schools, the rate of intermarriage is under 10 percent and levels of Jewish identity compare favorably with those of other Diaspora communities. Jews remain prominently represented at all levels of civil society, including in Parliament and in the judiciary.

The recognized Jewish civil rights organization is the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), whose primary task is to monitor and where necessary respond to antisemitism (although opportunities to do so, given the fact that the great majority of antisemitic acts are carried out anonymously, are comparatively rare). In partnership with the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF), the SAJBD has also become increasingly involved in Israel advocacy initiatives, a move necessitated by the sharp rise in anti-Israel sentiment in the country following the collapse of the Middle East peace process after September 2000.

The SAJBD meets regularly with key political leaders from across the political spectrum and has been successful in forging a strong relationship with the ruling party at all levels of government.

 

political parties and extra-parliamentary groups

The ruling party in South Africa is the African National Congress (ANC), which in the 2004 election gained over 70 percent of the national vote and now has control of all nine of the country’s provinces. The Official Opposition in Parliament, which holds 50 seats in the 400-member House of Assembly, is the mainly white-supported Democratic Alliance, whose leader, Tony Leon, is Jewish.

The ANC, which during the apartheid years had close ties with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, has pronounced pro-Palestinian sympathies. However, the latter part of 2004 saw a significant swing towards a more even-handed approach to the Middle East question on the part of the South African government.

            At the end of June 2004, South Africa hosted the annual meeting of the UN Commission on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinians, in Cape Town. This was the third major UN meeting in four years to be held in South Africa, the others being the World Conference Against Racism (Durban, 2001) and the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Johannesburg, 2002). Thorough preparation by the government and the security establishment, working in close consultation with the SAJBD, ensured that the conference took place in an orderly atmosphere, with no repetition of the antisemitic and radical anti-Israel incidents that marred the Durban, and to a lesser extent the Johannesburg conferences. 

 

Extremist Parties and Hate Groups

Antisemitism in South Africa today is largely confined to radical groupings within the country’s 800,000-strong Muslim community. The white far right, for decades the primary source of antisemitic activity in South Africa, is now largely dormant as a political force and has virtually ceased to pose any kind of threat to Jews.

Islamic extremist movements tend to have small but militant followings, and are active mainly in the Western Cape Province. They include Qibla, founded in 1979 with the aim of promoting the establishment of an Islamic state in South Africa, and the Islamic Unity Convention (IUC). Qibla, which has been labeled a terrorist movement by the US State Department, has largely been dormant since the arrest of over one hundred of its supporters in the latter part of the 1990s for violent offenses, including murder. After 9/11, however, the organization announced that it had recruited fighters to send to Afghanistan. The IUC is an umbrella organization for over 250 South African Muslim groups, and is believed by some to be a front for Qibla. Both groups are headed by Ahmed Cassim, who was inspired to found Qibla by the events of the 1979 Iranian revolution.

The Muslim Judicial Council, once regarded as a relatively moderate Muslim body, today openly backs international Muslim extremist organizations such as Hamas and Hizballah, and its leaders make overtly antisemitic statements. The Media Review Network, a Muslim media advocacy group which promotes the ideologies of Muslim extremist organizations worldwide, remains a vociferous presence in the South African media and propagates antisemitic material, including Holocaust denial, on its website. In addition, there are a number of radical, mainly Muslim-supported, anti-Israel groupings, of which the Palestinian Solidarity Committee (PSC) is particularly active. The PSC calls for Israel’s disappearance as an independent entity within a bi-national state, but avoids overt expressions of antisemitism.

 

ANTISEMITIC ACTIVITIES

A comprehensive Bill of Rights, incorporated within the Constitution and adopted in 1996, ensures adequate protection for all citizens, including members of religious and ethnic minorities. The relatively low level of antisemitism in South Africa can in part be attributed to the strong non-racist ethos that has prevailed in the country since the demise of white minority rule.

Annual totals of recorded antisemitic incidents in South Africa have consistently averaged below forty over the past two decades, and this was again the case in 2004. A total of 37 antisemitic incidents were recorded in 2004, slightly up from the previous year. However, whereas in 2003 there were several cases of assault on Jews, none of the incidents in 2004 involved actual violence. Developments in the Middle East, in particular the furor over Israel’s killing of Hamas leaders Shaykh Ahmad Yasin and `Abd al-Rantisi, were again the primary motivation for antisemitic outbursts.

 

Threats and Intimidation

The immediate aftermath of the assassinations of Yasin, in March, and Rantisi, in April, was an uneasy time for the Jewish community, with feelings running particularly high in Cape Town and Pretoria. A number of individual Jews reported receiving threats during this period. Reference was made on a Cape Town radio talk show to a pamphlet being circulated stating that unless Jews condemned the killing of Yasin, Muslims the world over, including in Cape Town, would attack them whenever Ariel Sharon did something wrong. No attacks, in fact, took place, although the assassinations did raise levels of anti-Jewish rhetoric to alarming new heights.

 

Demonstrations

Virulently antisemitic statements were made at a protest rally in Cape Town following the Yasin killing. Shaykh Ebrahim Gabriels, president of the Muslim Judicial Council, stated, inter alia: “You need to understand that the world today, the USA, the UN and most of the governments are controlled by the Zionists,” and “we must stop looking at the films that was designed by the Israeli Zionists [sic] … it is written in the Protocols of the Zionists that they will establish cinemas around the world to corrupt the gentiles… we are not human beings, we are animals in their eyes, they want to corrupt the people.”  Shaykh Ebrahim Abrahams said: “Do not go into any agreements with the Jews; they are a filthy people; they have forever stood against Allah; they have killed so many; they even plotted and planned to kill your Prophet Mohammed.”

Another rally to protest the assassination, held in Pretoria, featured a six-year-old Muslim child dressed up as a suicide bomber. This took place with the blessing of the boy’s father, Dr Mohammed Dockrat, who also took part in the rally. Ironically, Dockrat serves both on the National Religious Leaders’ Forum and on the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities, both of which are designed to promote inter-group understanding and reconciliation.

 

Verbal or Written Abuse

There were fourteen cases of verbal abuse of Jews, mostly directed from passing cars at Jews walking to and from synagogue. Also fairly common over the years have been instances of pro-Nazi remarks and gestures, including the display of swastikas, during sports matches between Jewish day schools and their non-Jewish counterparts. These incidents are generally satisfactorily dealt with by the principals of the schools concerned; in 2004 the SAJBD was called upon to intervene in two such cases.

Eight incidents of offensive letters were reported, roughly half the previous year’s total. Most of these were sent anonymously. 

Tensions in the work place between workers and management have occasionally resulted in antisemitic accusations. In June, the Independent Exemption Board of the Metal and Engineering Industries Bargaining Council received a letter from National Union of Metalworkers Shop Steward I.T. Zwelibanzi at AfMag, which referred to the company’s Jewish director in the following terms: “Our director Mr Victor Farkas is a foreigner i.e. a Jew. He can leave and skip the country any time since his history with the company finance is not for good. Our previous management can witness to this.” The employee was dismissed following disciplinary action.

Seven cases of antisemitic graffiti were recorded, nearly all daubed on Jewish institutions or private homes. In May, for example, two Magen Davids and the word “pig” were spray-painted in green on the gate of a Jewish home in Fairlands, Johannesburg; later that month graffiti reading “PLO kill Zionist” appeared on the wall of Herzlia School in Cape Town.

Although there was no clear-cut evidence of their having been antisemitically motivated, the regular vandalizing of isolated Jewish cemeteries in the rural districts was also noted.

 

The Media

Hate speech based on race, religion or ethnicity is constitutionally prohibited in South Africa, and in general the mainstream media is careful to avoid disseminating material that is overtly offensive. Talk radio, which enables unidentified members of the public to call in and express their views, is less easy to control, hence the occasional surfacing of overtly antisemitic remarks. A caller on Radio 702’s Tim Modise Show, for example, declared “Christians… have to help the Christians of Palestine to remove Israel off the map once and for all and the only crime that, I believe, Hitler committed was that he didn't kill all the Jews.”

The most virulently antisemitic broadcast noted in 2004 took place on Voice of the Cape, a Muslim radio station, in September. The show featured an interview with Shaykh Mogamat Colby, a local Muslim studying at a madrasa in Egypt. Colby, encouraged by the host, made various extremely denigrating remarks about Jews and Judaism, referring frequently to The Protocols of The Elders of Zion (a banned publication in South Africa). Amongst other things, he stated:  “They [the Jews] believe that they have been created to enslave and subjugate humanity and take full control of all matters of life”; “the Yehud are controlling all our land, all the means of the radio stations, the newspapers, the televisions – and this is how they have full control over the whole world”; and “This is their protocols. They say: we will carry out any form of destruction and killing and slaughtering and murdering and raping without any mercy whether it is children, mothers, babies… this is what governs them, this what they believe in.”

The mainstream print media rarely included material offensive to Jews. Several minority interest fringe publications, however, did occasionally feature overtly antisemitic material, such as anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial. They included the Scribe (aimed at a Muslim readership) and Die Afrikaner (organ of the extreme white right-wing Herstigte Nasionale Party).

None of the political parties in Parliament has an antisemitic agenda, but excessively anti-Israel sentiments within such groupings as the ANC Youth League occasionally, or almost, cross the line to outright antisemitism. The July posting of the ruling party’s online ANC Today included an ANC Youth League diatribe against Israel featuring the following statements: “The collusion about finding Jews a ‘national home’ was motivated by the political influence the Jews wielded within these superpowers and the wealth they had amassed”; and “Does the state of Israel really have a right to exist? It is a vexing question that has been responsible for the soaring of temperatures on both sides of the spectrum.”

 

RESPONSES TO RACISM AND ANTISEMITISM

The Community Security Organisation, the security arm of the Jewish community, which operates under the auspices of the SAJBD, continued to play an important role in ensuring security at Jewish communal functions. This proved especially important at the annual Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day for Israel’s Fallen) and Yom Haatzmaut (Independence Day) functions and at the annual Jewish youth camps, attended by over 2000 Jewish children, in Cape Town.

The SAJBD, in tandem with the SAZF, continued to run its Media Team, set up the previous year to respond in the media to attacks on Israel and Jews. The group is made up of professional staff and volunteers, who were successful in getting numerous articles and letters defending Israel published, and who called in regularly to radio talk shows. The SAJBD has since established a separate media committee, with a view to promoting local Jewish affairs in the media while the hasbara aspect is now overseen by the SAZF.

The main target of the struggle against antisemitism in South Africa has been radio broadcasting. The Broadcasting Code of Conduct expressly prohibits the dissemination of hate speech. Over the past decade, the SAJBD has regularly lodged complaints, and where necessary taken legal action, against antisemitic broadcasting, the culprits in the main being Muslim community radio stations. 

The year 2004 saw encouraging developments with regard to the SAJBD’s seven-year-long legal battle with Radio 786, a Muslim community radio station based in Cape Town and run by the Islamic Unity Convention. The SAJBD’s complaint arose from an hour-long program broadcast by Radio 786 on 8 May 1998, which featured many instances of antisemitic conspiracy theorizing and Holocaust denial. The IUC pursued every possible legal avenue in an effort to avoid the issue going to a formal hearing by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA). After three unsuccessful appeals by the IUC, the stage was finally set for a formal hearing into the SAJBD’s complaint. This was expected to take place in the first half of 2005. 

The SAJBD also lodged a complaint with ICASA against Voice of the Cape for the above-mentioned Colby broadcast. The broadcast was further brought to the attention of the Mail & Guardian newspaper, which published a report on it. Voice of the Cape subsequently posted an apology on its website, but this was considered to be too half-hearted and evasive to constitute a genuine repudiation of the offensive material and the SAJBD wrote again to ICASA pointing this out and requesting that it deal with the matter.