 |
| Bongani Masuku |
Bongani says hi to you all as we struggle to liberate Palestine from the racists, fascists and zionists who belong to the era of their Friend Hitler! We must not apologise, every Zionist must be made to drink the bitter medicine they are feeding our brothers and sisters in Palestine. We must target them, expose them and doo all that (sic) is needed to subject them to perpetual suffering until they withdraw from the land of others and stop their savage attacks on human dignity
Despite the fact that Masuku didn't mention Jews and used the tired formula of saying "Zionist" as a proxy for Jews, the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) complained about the obvious antisemitism in his statement.
They first complained to the SA Human Rights Commission, which agreed that the statement was antisemitic. The SAHRC found Masuku’s statements to have been of “an extreme nature that advocate and imply that the Jewish and Israeli community are to be despised, scorned, ridiculed and thus subjecting them to ill-treatment on the basis of their religious affiliation”, and therefore they are “offensive and unpalatable to society”.
They then got an equivalent ruling from the Equality Court, which ordered Masaku to apologize in 2017. He refused.
Now, the Constitutional Court of South Africa has also ruled on the matter. It upheld the Equality Court's finding that a reasonable person would understand the statement as being based on Jewishness as an ethnicity and not on anti-Zionism.
"This was primarily because of the statement's reference to 'Hitler', because a reasonable reader would have noted that a reference to Hitler to a group which was predominately Jewish was used because of their Jewish ethnicity and identity. After all, Hitler's anti-Semitic extermination campaign was not limited to people of the Jewish faith or ethnicity who identified as Zionists," said the court in its media summary.
Even South Africa, which is as anti-Zionist as any state short of Iran, recognizes that some speech that modern antisemites call "anti-Zionist" is really hate against Jews.
The courts did not seem to rule on Masuku's statements made shortly afterwards in March 2009 at an "Israel Apartheid Week" event at Wits University which even more explicitly targeted South Africa's Jewish community without saying the word "Jew":
During that speech, Masuku made other statements including that Jews who continued to stand up for Israel should “not just be encouraged but forced to leave South Africa”. He said that COSATU would do everything to ensure, whether at Wits University or ‘Orange Grove’ (a historically Jewish suburb) that those who did not support equality and dignity must face the consequences, even if it meant “something that may necessarily cause what is regarded as harm”.
Cosatu and the Palestinian Solidarity Committee continue to support this bigot.
Bongani Masuku has 30 days from the date of the ruling last Wednesday to apologize to the SA Jewish Board of Deputies.
