Heroes and villains

There are many import insights in this report on the annual International Conference on Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya. Amongst them is this from the renowned Steve Emerson, Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, about the extraordinary transference of victim status that has taken place in America, just like in Britain:

The irony, he revealed, is that ‘there are 10 times more hate crimes in the US against Jews than against Muslims. Nevertheless in terms of news coverage, there are 100 times more articles and news reports about hate crimes against Muslims. And what constitutes a hate crime by these human rights groups? Look at their list. It includes the arrest of a prominent Hamas operative with suspected links to terrorism.’

One reason for this factual and moral inversion is the group-think of the left which assumes that people from the third world are by definition victims and therefore cannot do any wrong. The iconic global hero of this world-view is Nelson Mandela, and not a whisper of criticism is heard in the west against the African National Congress on account of its struggle against the illegitimate apartheid regime. But in the real world beyond the cartoon manicheanism of the left, the people who struggle against a villainous regime may themselves be villainous. As Hussein Solomon, a Muslim professor at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and director of his university’s Centre for International Political Studies told the Herzliya conference, the ANC is in bed with jihadi and anti-Jewish terror:

‘I have received seven death threats to date,’ he revealed to Metro. ‘What was my big crime? Being invited by the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) in Johannesburg to share a platform with Jews to discuss the Israel/Palestine issue! That I am against the occupation in the West Bank was irrelevant. The mere fact that I had accepted a public invitation by the ‘Zionists’ was in the eyes of the local Muslim community an act of treason. The next thing a rumor had been circulated that the SAZF only invites Mossad agents; therefore I must be an agent. Soon the rumor had become accepted as fact and I had become a legitimate target to be bumped off.’

Solomon takes issue with a naïve world that ‘is still locked into the “miracle” of 1994 South Africa, when Nelson Mandela became president. They have this image of a country, frozen in time, bathed in the light of eternal morality. My country has moved on, and yes, while much has been achieved, there are also serious faults, ethically and morally disturbing. Sadly, South Africa has become a breeding ground for Jihadi activity.’ He makes no bones that al-Qaida and Hamas have established cells in South Africa. While the Muslim community represent only 1.5-2 percent of the total South African population, it would be a mistake, according to Solomon, to believe it poses no threat. ‘You must understand that the Jihadi activists today are not bound by the model of the nation state. Their aspirations are global and they see themselves as warriors for world domination. South Africa is merely a stepping stone for these guys towards the creation of the Caliphate.’

It is tragic that a hitherto oppressed people, the blacks of south Africa, should identify not with the Jews of Israel who are under existential attack by the Arabs who would deny them their right to self-determination in their one refuge from global historic oppression, but instead with those who would exterminate them and furthermore snuff out the light of freedom everywhere. The ANC does so because it is a revolutionary Marxist movement which ultimately stands for the extinction of freedom — an ideology which fatally warps and trumps its erstwhile noble aim of securing freedom for its own people from oppression. And the grotesque twist is that Israel is currently demonised and delegitimised as an ‘apartheid’ state, a patently absurd calumny perpetrated not merely by the western left but by ANC representatives — who thus engage in what must surely be called ‘apartheid denial’, since such a false comparison not only libels Israel where Israeli Arabs have equal rights (and the Arabs in the disputed territories occupied as a defence against war are not in Israel at all and indeed purport to be citizens of a different country altogether) but also serves to negate the brutal reality of the true South African apartheid regime.