Why are young blacks embracing anti-Semitism

DAVID SAKS

Actually, Dlamini was removed after having been found guilty of previous offences, including assaulting a senior staff member last year. It is not unlikely, however, that his Hitler remarks put paid to any further efforts on his part to delay his removal through lodging technical objections against the disciplinary process.

What bothers me is that while the pro-Hitler and anti-white comments have been thoroughly denounced by the university and in the media, practically no mention has been made of the lengthy record of anti-Semitic statements made by Dlamini over the past eight months or so.

For example last year, as reported in this newspaper, he claimed in the SA Human Rights Commission hearings into university transformation that Jewish students at Wits were being given preferential treatment because of Jewish financial contributions at the university. Following his being found guilty of misconduct by Wits earlier this year, he attributed the decision to the “Zionist-controlled Wits Legal Office”.

Even worse were his “Hitler” posts which, although not reported on in the media nor condemned by the Wits leadership, featured enthusiastic endorsements of the propositions that Jews were the killers of Jesus and that Hitler had done what he did because he was aware of what kind of people they intrinsically were.

Added to this, naturally, were the usual hysterical libels against Israel, to which was added the remark that Jews really loved Hitler, since if not, why did they insist on emulating him? Vicious stuff, all in all, and presented with unabashed glee.

It would be comforting to simply conclude that Dlamini is an unrepresentative crank who somehow insinuated himself into a leadership position, but that would be self-delusory. In reality, his malignant notions about Jews are surfacing more and more among young black South Africans.

During my nearly 20 years at the SAJBD, variations on the well-worn theme of “Hitler was right to kill the Jews – pity he never finished the job” were until recently confined almost entirely to white right-wingers and hardcore Islamists.

Now, as can be seen on university campuses, in the social media and on radio phone-in shows, they have for the first time become commonplace in the black community, particularly among the youth. What is more, it all happened so very suddenly; there was nothing gradual or incremental about it.

Last year’s Gaza conflict appears to have been a watershed event. It was as if the war provided a licence for people of all races and creeds to unleash a torrent of pent-up hatred against the Jewish people – the local community, as well as in Israel and elsewhere.

A sample: “Hitler was right to kill these cockroaches”; “we will approach President ZUMA and demand that he investigate the SAJBD for blood money that it get for killing Christian children and trading their body parts”; “the Jews must decide NOW if they are SA patriots or murdering mob sleepers on our shores”; “How many bricks, how many roads, did Jews build in SA? None! Queens and kings in my country of birth!”

Even prior to Gaza, however, the rhetoric was progressively worsening. There were calls for Wits to be freed from the “tentacles of Zionist money” (this from the SRC, please note – well before Mcebo Dlamini appeared on the scene), and of course, the now notorious dubula e juda (“Shoot the Jew) chants outside the Wits Great Hall a couple of years ago.

Cosatu, to my mind, lurched into open anti-Semitism years ago (for instance “…Their occupation and the theft of the land and natural resource of the indigenous people [of Palestine] is nothing but a legalisation of Jewish supremacy to further dehumanise everyone outside their scope of Zionist purity…”, July, 2012).

It is in this atmosphere that members of a black student movement in the Western Cape could deposit a pig’s head in a Woolworth’s store with the explicit purpose of sending a message to “the people who will not eat pork”, and genuinely feel they had done something very clever.

Likewise, it could result in the SRC at the Durban University of Technology demanding of their vice-chancellor that as part of boycotting “genocidal” Israel, all Jewish students at the university should be “de-registered” (meaning expelled), and feel that they were not doing anything at all wrong thereby.

To my mind, this abrupt lurch into classic anti-Semitic modes of thought by many young blacks is not really about Jews and Israel/Palestine (when is this sort of things ever really about them?) but about the progressive unravelling of the democratic, non-racial ideals with which the new post-apartheid society was launched.

Who of us who experienced that transition and the hopes it occasioned, do not feel repelled and distressed by the raw hatred that South Africans of all races now routinely express against one another? 

It continues to be remarkable, therefore, that when it comes to direct anti-Semitic behaviour – assault, verbal abuse and the like – South Africa continues to record such low numbers of incidents when compared with other Diaspora communities.