THIS past week has been quite a storm of racist invective aimed at Jews in general, and Israel in particular.
It appears an Anglican girls tennis team had refused to play King David in Linksfield, due to the Jewish school’s association with Zionism (too many Stars of David?), and following representations including a letter sent to the school by Daniel Friedman, an ex-pupil, of the local branch of Qatari-based ‘Jews for a Free Palestine’.
The news elicited an immediate condemnation by the Jewish Board of Deputies, followed by a denial of anything amiss, from Roedean, (apparently nobody could find directions to the school, ‘a scheduling bug’, so the match was simply cancelled.)
The self-referential Friedman letter, appears oblivious to the secular framework of our Constitution in which schools such as King David, St Cyprians, and Roedean operate.
Nonsense statements such as “the Zionist worldview rejects moral and critical thinking”, seem to be written in a vacuum in which no criticism of any competing ideologies are to be entertained.
Which is par for the course, when one issues a literal fatwa, an easy ‘resort to one’s authority’, not even an attempt to invoke the authority of others. The clumsy communication from SAJFP is just a chain of self-referential excess: ‘it must be true’, or ‘we should just accept it’, and ‘because others say it is true’.
One can only hope that scholars at these private schools are more open-minded and willing to debate and research the facts at hand.
Rabbi issues Curses
Next up was a spat over Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein’s comments on Iran and the demarche of a local Israeli chargé d’affaires a debacle in which the head of the Orthodox Jewish faith in our country called out ANC support for Iran whilst civilians are being massacred in the streets of Tehran, some 90 000 at the last body count.
“The government is prepared to let its own people die rather than concede that its foreign policy on Israel is misguided” said the Rabbi in a statement posted on x.com.
Goldstein proceeded to label Ramaphosa, “a cursed leader of a cursed party”, harsh words indeed.
Commentator Redi Thlabi immediately complained of “a cunning strategy” by the Chief Rabbi “to create Pro-Israel communities in South Africa”, all completely Haram of course, and the thought of secular communities breaking bread and solving water issues together must come as a shock.
In an effort to get ahead of the news (Jah forbid) she claimed variously that the Chief Rabbi had literally been ranting outside her door after she refused to grant him an interview, then she changed tack, and claimed she had given both the Chief Imam and the Chief Rabbi a ‘joint interview’.
Requests for a link to the actual interviews and exactly how many ‘joints’ were involved, went unanswered, and thus one may certainly doubt any such incident occurred.
Not tennis
Then, with ageing parsons such as Richard Popcluck issuing similarly calumny, and with calls from fringe political party, EFF members to deport the Rabbi, reminiscent of deportation threats issued by John Vorster and his gestapo, (why no commemoration of the actual deportation of Rabbi Andre Ungar?), our vainglorious, ‘Minister in the President for Women’ Sindiswe Chikunga, delivered a homily congratulating Iran, on the ’47th Commemoration of the Islamic Revolution Day of the Islamic Republic of Iran’, to the tune of ‘Death to America, Death to Iran, Lock up the Women’.
The mind boggles.
UPDATE: Audio made available of a conversation between the two schools make it clear the issue is King David being a “Jewish Day School”, not Zionism per se, and thus pressure being placed on Roedean by parents in which the issue of ‘cancel culture’ arises in relation to Jewish students.
SEE:Leaked Audio Reveals Roedean Did Not Want to Play Against Jews
SEE: SA Anglican Church’s dishonest prognostications on ‘Israel Apartheid’