It’s no surprise that hostility towards Israel has found a comfortable home on the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC).
Criticism of Israel in the aftermath of the recent Gaza border violence has been particularly virulent in South Africa. One-sided statements of condemnation from the government as well as the recall of its ambassador to Israel have added to an already hostile environment for Israel and its supporters.
The South African government even went as far to tweet a call for Israel to withdraw from the Gaza Strip for which it received a great deal of ridicule given Israel had done exactly that back in 2005.
In a interview on SABC News, Zwelinzima Vavi, the former General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions was given almost eight unchallenged minutes to spew hatred against Israel culminating in a thinly veiled threat against the South African Jewish community.
Here are some of the “highlights”:
SABC promotes fake news
The interview begins with the SABC anchor discussing a video he’d seen circulating on social media that day – the Israeli bombing of a Palestinian funeral procession.
That Vavi didn’t respond to specifically to that incident is unsurprising given that there is no record of such an event. That a SABC presenter could spread a fake news story that he’d taken from social media rather than an actual news source is unprofessional at best if not malicious.
But a lack of journalist professionalism is par for the course as the interviewer fails to challenge anything that Vavi says.
For example, Vavi claims that 80 Palestinians had been killed and 8,000 wounded in the recent Gaza violence. That’s eight times the actual number of injured.
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The apartheid libel
Vavi is quite clear where he is coming from when it comes to Israel:
We know what it means to live in a country where you are discriminated on the basis of your color of your skin for 40 years. Now the Palestinians have been going through exactly the same experience but we argue that they’ve gone through much more worse than South Africans had to go through under successful regimes of the apartheid state that imposed the most, worst kinds of humiliation on the people.
Is Vavi seriously suggesting that Palestinians are discriminated against on the basis of skin color? But not only that – ‘Israeli apartheid’ is actually worse than that experienced by South Africans.
If ordinary South Africans knew the truth, they’d be appalled that their own very real suffering under apartheid has been trivialized and minimized in such a way. Vavi’s charge is an insult to the millions of South Africans who lived under genuine apartheid.
(To see why Vavi’s apartheid libel doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, see HonestReporting’s resources page.)
Vavi continues:
We will not rest until Palestinians are freed from the yoke of colonialism, which is combined with an occupation and basically the worst kind of ethnic cleansing of society. The drive by the Israeli government is very clear – they want to take out and force out every Palestinian out of their land.
And the SABC interviewer during this? Sitting in silent approval.
A thinly veiled threat to South African Jews
Vavi calls for boycotts on Israel not only in his own country by on the entire African continent urging people to treat Israel as a pariah state.
But then comes something even more insidious. He mentions calls for new legislation to tackle racism within South Africa and then says that such an anti-racism law:
must be extended to the rest of the people who are supporting the occupation of Palestine, who are supporting the Israel apartheid state, all of those racists in South Africa irrespective of what excuses they are using must be punished just like we have to punish all the other racists in our country.
This is a thinly veiled threat to punish any supporters of Israel most of whom would be from the South African Jewish community. This doesn’t seem to be dependent on an individual’s view of Israeli government policies. No, any supporters of Israel (Zionists? Jews?) are automatically to be branded as racists and should be punished under the law.
This is a truly frightening suggestion that both delegitimizes South African Jewry’s basic rights to support a Jewish state and actually calls for legal sanctions on Israel supporters in South Africa.
And, as in the rest of the interview, the SABC interviewer fails to intercede at all.
The SABC should be ashamed that it broadcast nearly eight minutes of unchallenged hate, including a fake allegation on the part of the interviewer, grossly inaccurate “facts” and a threat to punish supporters of Israel for being racists.
At least following the interview with Vavi, South African Jewish Board of Deputies spokesperson Zev Krengel (spelled incorrectly by the SABC) appeared on the same show a few hours later. This cannot, however, mitigate the hatred of the prior interview. Watch his response here.
