South Africa’s City Press ran an outrageous screed by Ali Mazuri, which includes comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany, and apologies for Palestinian suicide bombings:
The Israelis have proven that even former victims of the Holocaust can commit their own crimes against humanity once in power. The Israelis have been narrowing the moral gap between themselves and the Nazis…
Presumably Israeli homicide bombers are morally superior to Palestinian suicide bombers. If you fight by killing yourself, it is supposed to be a strategy morally worse than if you kill without harming yourself.
Comments to City Press: [email protected]
Read the entire article below:
Martyrs making martyrs of others
Ali A Mazrui
THE tragic suffering of South Africa during the apartheid era was a resource for Pan-Africanism. The martyrdom of people of colour in South Africa generated passions of solidarity among Black people worldwide.
Events like the Sharpeville Massacre and the brutalities of Soweto struck a powerful chord of sympathy. From 1948 to the 1990s, South Africa evolved an institutionalised form of racism unprecedented in history. Its martyrs ranged from Mandela in prison to Steve Biko in his grave.
Apartheid in South Africa also strengthened Trans-Saharan Pan Africanism and Afro-Arab relations. The idea that Whites and Blacks needed separate homelands was similar to the Zionist idea that Arabs and Jews needed separate homelands.
Bantustans in South Africa were the equivalent of the Occupied Territories in Palestine – separate and brutally unequal. Both Zionism and macro-apartheid were forms of ethnic cleansing. Africans and Arabs were brought together sentimentally in the joint struggle, against a background of nuclear collaboration between Israel and apartheid South Africa.
Most of us expected a racial war before apartheid would be dislodged. But a great Faustian bargain was struck between Whites and Blacks. The Whites said to the Blacks: “You take the Crown and we will keep the Jewels.”
Blacks were to receive the political crown, while Whites kept the economic Jewels. Since then, there has been progress in political democratisation. The peaceful and orderly elections last month are testimony to that claim. But comparable progress in economic democratisation has been slow in coming. Economic apartheid is still intact. Is Black empowerment the answer?
I prefer the term “economic democratisation” to “Black empowerment”. Economic democratisation would seek not just racial equalisation but also gender equity.
The triumph of South Africa created opportunities for the country to be a vanguard and pacesetter in Africa and the world.
South Africa’s quest for peace and justice includes its support for the Palestinian cause, its opposition to the American war in Iraq, its efforts to find peaceful solutions to the problems of the Congo, Burundi, and other African flashpoints. Both Mandela and Mbeki have tried to give Africa a voice on global issues.
The vision of an African Renaissance is another potential vanguard role in the quest to reactivate the creative energies of Africa. South Africa’s vanguard input has also included its role in the birth of the African Union – the most ambitious form of institutionalised Pan-Africanism to-date. Also a vanguard role is South Africa as midwife of Nepad – a risky but worthy enterprise.
Finally, South Africa has the requisite qualifications for becoming a regional superpower, a regional hegemon. It is the premier industrial state of Africa – perhaps the richest of the members of African Union.
South Africa’s immense capacity to invest in other African countries could be an engine of continental economic development, but it could also degenerate into intra-African colonisation.
The Israelis have proven that even former victims of the Holocaust can commit their own crimes against humanity once in power. The Israelis have been narrowing the moral gap between themselves and the Nazis.
It was a liberal Israeli, Professor Yashayau Leibovitz, who coined the term “Judeo-Nazism”. Noam Chomsky, himself a Jew, has also warned about the emergence of “Judeo-Nazism”. The Jews, pre-eminent victims of history, have been learning how to victimise an almost defenseless people – and then complain if their victims try to fight back.
Presumably Israeli homicide bombers are morally superior to Palestinian suicide bombers. If you fight by killing yourself, it is supposed to be a strategy morally worse than if you kill without harming yourself.
South Africa should learn that being former victims is no guarantee that you will not victimise those weaker than yourself. South Africa as a society of former martyrs should always remember not to make martyrs of others.
This is an edited version of a lecture at the Africa Institute of South Africa on the occasion of its International Conference to celebrate Ten Years of Freedom.
Mazrui Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton, New York.
