UNLIKE the majority faith group who are Christians, most Jews experience what I refer to as baseline Anti-Semitism, hostility towards Jewish identity that is so prevalent it is background noise or weather. 7/10 merely emboldened what was already latent within our supposedly tolerant, free societies.

I can imagine that the aftermath of 911 must have been similar for Muslims. But the difference between experiencing the mainstreaming of bigotry and prejudice as a superminority compared to other groups is quite profound. It turns out that for every person promoting peaceful coexistence, there are at least 20 other people, promoting hatred as an end in itself. The justification for violence, martyrdom and ritual sacrifice of innocents at the behest of religion, is met with calculated outrage, conspiracy theories, blood libels, and a plethora of calls to “Globalise the Intifada”. A call to literally target Jews in places other than Israel.

This week, we saw two Jews being stabbed in London’s Golders Green, not because they were waving Israeli flags, but because they were Jewish. Most Jews that I know are both secularists, and supporters of a two-state solution. There are no Jewish theocrats to my knowledge. Nobody is seeking to convert, or force others to abide by religious laws.

And yet my own country has shown itself intolerant to secular rights when it comes to my own case involving a media corporate with an historical association as one of the pillars of the National Party. One would like to believe that what one does on the Sabbath, is a private affair. That the very structures we put in place in 1996 when our Constitution and Bill of Rights was enacted, compel us to accept that we are no longer a state constituted under any single one religion, but rather a multi-ethnic, diverse, and pluralistic entity.

As I sit here today, contemplating the twenty year anniversary of my ejection from a Media24 newsroom by a white supremacist, whose opposition to my interview with the late Robbie Jansen, is memorialised alongside apartheid-era justifications for separate development and complaints about my faith practices as a Jew. The same decision was handed down by a man who has admitted to being in business with an entity that was providing content to Media24’s Multichoice business at the time, and who also openly admits that Media24 was a client of his law firm. I can only express my total lack of confidence in my country’s corrupt justice system.

It should not need a lecture on secularism and pluralism, to point out that our country has sided and continues to side with those who wish to dictate religious identity, circumscribe belief, and cancel opinion. Those who seek to distinguish “Good Jew from Bad Jew” are in reality merely opening an obscene interrogation of religion, best exemplified by Naledi Pandor’s pathetic statements seeking to impose sanctions on individuals on the basis of religious doctrine.

Even persons such as Zackie Achmat, who are quick to voice their liberal opinions when it comes to events unfolding overseas, have shown themselves incapable, or unwilling to speak out, when similar events occur at home. Achmat refuses to engage in any dialogue, since for such persons, Jews are mere objects, a thing to be spoken about in the third person, or owned.

In 2007 I was locked up for being Jewish by a Muslim radio presenter at Heart 104.9 who took exception to my case, not because I have ever at any stage, demanded to go on air, or threatened anyone with anything more than scorn, but rather because my case presents a test of our secular identity as a nation, one that questions many of the assumptions made by such individuals when it comes to religious identity.

I therefore appeal to anyone reading this, to take time to revisit common assumptions about what secularism is and is not. For many it seems, secularism equates to “my religion must triumph over them all”, or “your religion must be destroyed, and suffer its fate”. On the contrary, secularism, as George Holyoke, the man who coined the term would have it, is not the absence of religion but rather the absence of religious rule.