Stop the smear campaign

Vilifying an entire community only fuels hostility. We must reject collective blame, condemn racism and protect the bonds between Jewish and Muslim South Africans

In his latest column, “Condemn the person, shield the ideology” (Mail & Guardian, 16 October), Ebrahim Fakir again launches a further ad hominem attack on the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and South Africa’s Jewish community, this time including me.

And again, he offers not one shred of evidence. Nowhere does he show that our organisation or our community fosters racism, or that we “craft and police narratives that dehumanise Palestinians”, as he alleges.

Instead, his column consistently misquotes and misrepresents points I stated clearly. It rests on claims I never stated and props up its argument with facts that are simply false. The SAJBD unequivocally condemned the racial outburst by Rodney Plett and at no time has condoned the unacceptable by him and Gavin Katz towards a Norwood shopkeeper last week.

Yet Mr Fakir takes the conduct of two men, neither of whom holds any position in our community or speaks for it, and stretches it to cover an entire community, its institutions and its beliefs.

The aim is not to understand what happened in Norwood. It is to drive a wedge between Jewish and Muslim South Africans who have lived side by side for generations.

Our position has always been clear: abusing anyone, on any street, because of their faith or their politics has no place in our community or our country.

However hard Mr Fakir tries to imply that our communal organisations are culpable, it is not for us to keep proving our innocence for the conduct of individuals who do not speak for us.

Consider how he manipulates and misquotes my previous column in the M&G.

He claims I “demand that Muslims must absorb, explain and apologise for the conduct of individuals.”

I wrote the opposite: “We do not hold Muslim South Africans responsible for that image of a cockroach or for the acts of a few rogue individuals, any more than Jewish South Africans should be held responsible for the assailant’s words.” (This in reference to a cartoon of a boot stamping on a cockroach with a star of David published by the Cape Town Ulama Board.)

He claims my logic is that anything done by anyone with a Muslim name must reflect on Islam. I said no such thing.

He claims we expect Muslims to be grateful for our condemnation. Nowhere did I say this.

He places the words “indispensable expression of Jewish identity” in quotation marks, as if they were mine. They are not.

He builds an entire section around the idea that we treat Zionism as a race. I never mentioned race.

When I raised the graphic of the cockroach cartoon, he questioned why Muslims should denounce acts “not done in the name of Muslims or Islam”. But that image was not the work of a lone man on a street corner. It was published by an Islamic religious body.

By his own test, it is exactly the kind of institutional conduct that ought to be answered for.

This stands in contrast to two lone men who do not represent South African Jewry or its leadership in any way.

Mr Fakir also goes to great lengths to pontificate on the meaning and ideology of Zionism.

I disagree with his version and his understanding of it but this is entirely tangential to his defamatory attack on the SAJBD and South African Jewry.

No Jew and no South African should be required to take positions on international politics in order to satisfy Mr Fakir’s “scrutiny” of our community.

Once again, I call out Mr Fakir’s incessant demonisation of our community. Anyone who disagrees with him is labelled a hypocrite, a coward or wilfully blind.

He goes further, saying we feel “nothing for the mass murder of innocents”.

Our organisation has consistently expressed sympathy for the suffering of all innocents in the painful Middle East conflict.

The SAJBD stands firm on the importance of not importing a conflict from abroad onto a Johannesburg street. Doing so does nothing to alleviate the suffering of those affected by that conflict.

Mr Fakir, on the other hand, continues to exploit this hostility and escalate it.

My organisation has publicly condemned Islamophobia and racism whenever and wherever they emerge. Mr Fakir is turning two ugly incidents on a Norwood street into a charge sheet against an entire community.

His incessant attempts to sow disharmony and demonise South African Jewry do nothing for the residents of Norwood.

Neither do his misquotations and libellous remarks about me and my organisation.

Flags have been an inflection point over the past three years: Palestinian, Israeli, Hezbollah and Hamas flags. Now is the time for us to rally behind the South African flag and all it symbolises.

I look forward to the day when we all stand together under it, for the values that unite us as fellow South Africans.

Wendy Kahn is the national director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.