The hateful invective thrown by the Mail & Guardian shows no signs of yielding. I refer to a recent episode where John Matshikiza wrote the most outrageous opinion piece where he alleged that the intention of the Israeli security barrier is to keep the "darkies out of the Holy Land". Concerned readers of the M&G took the M&G to the Press Ombudsman, who ruled against the M&G, forcing them to accept an unedited "right of reply" from the readers. This past week, Matshikiza has hit back.
Here are the links for the first Matshikiza column, as well as the forced reply. Write to the M&G and politely give your views on Matshikiza's articles. Alternatively contact them through one of these options.
Take 1: Matshikiza's original anti Israel diatribe
Forced Response: Separation Anxiety
Take 2: Matshikiza hits back: Horror of Inhumanity
I have been under attack in recent weeks for suggesting that the extraordinary concrete wall that the Israeli state is building around itself, designed to keep Muslim Palestinians out of its borders, is racist.
Only between 3-5% of the structure is a concrete wall. The towering concrete section exists to prevent snipers from firing at the highway around the Qalqilya area.
I am attacked for being racist myself — why shouldn't Israel be allowed to do what it likes, considering the anti-Israeli assaults that are constantly being launched against it by supposedly fanatical Palestinian paramilitary groups that launch devastating suicide bombings and crude rocket strikes against its civilians? The new Israel Wall (that I have likened to both the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall that separated Eastem Europe frorn the West for so many years) is certainly designed to keep "civilisation", as represented by the brashly exclusiveJewish state, safe from the new Barbarians, represented by the Palestinians justifiably knocking at its doors.
Supposedly? Are the suicide attacks not real, and if they are then are they not perpetrated by fanatical Palestinian groups? This "brashly exclusive Jewish state" includes a substantial non Jewish Arab minority constituting 20% of the total, while of the remaining 80% more than half originate in Arab, Asian and African countries. The literacy rate of Arab women in Israel is higher than that of any other Arab state in the world.
The truth is lost in the smoke of war, because that is what has become the daily bread and butter of the Middle East stones thrown by the angry children of the intifada that festered unstoppably in the refügee camps of Sabra and Chatila and many other non-homelands of Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in what Arabic-speaking cultures rightly regard äs their inherited domain were met, and continue to be met, with rockets, tanks, heavily missiled strike aircraft and all the other vicious means at the disposal of the militarised Israeli state.
Stones did this?
Matshikiza is also an authority on what is and what is not an act of God.
The irony is that the victim has become the determined victor. This, too, is an agonising element of this war. The modern state of Israel came about not by an act of God, but by a process of increasingly aggressive colonialism, instigated from the same Europe that had taken the initiative of dividing up the world among its own warring factions. The theoretical division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews became another step in this long, calculated game.
As Dershowitz says: "Israel is a state comprising primarily refugees and their descendants exercising their right of self determination." Jews fled to Israel escaping the oppressive anti-Semitism of colonia Europe and the Muslim states of the ME and N.Africa. "For whom were these socialist and idealists working? Were they planting the hated Czar flag of Russia, or the anti-Semitic regimes of Poland and Lithuania? The Jews came without any weapons of imperialism. Their tools were rakes and hoes. The land they cultivated was not taken away from its rightful owners by force or confiscated by colonial law. It was purchased, primarily through absentee landlords and real estate speculators, at fair and often exorbitant prices."
The devastating genocide against people of Jewish descent, played out in European pogroms over centuries, and culminating in the extermination camps of World War II, was a European affair. Its consequences are being played out not in Europe, but in the Middle East, with the Arabs as the main losers. History is reinvented, and its consequences justified, from afar.
The Arabs - not the Jews themselves - are the main losers from the Holocaust? I don't think that the statement even warrants a response.
Let me say it once again: injustices and genocides against Jews are no more acceptable than those committed against any other peoples. The Holocaust was a crime against all humanity, and its conception and implementation surely affects us all. But, for that very reason, it was not a private affair. Its consequences in the sorrowful state of human history should not, and cannot, be confined to the fortunes of the modern state of Israel. The fault is that all of us were there — just as in the horrors of the genocides of Rwanda and Burundi, the amputations and butcherings of Liberia and Sierra Leone, the dark nights of Cambodia and Guatemala and Chile, when so many wanton killings were sanctioned in the name of civilisation, and the unrequited injustices (to put it mildly) of apartheid South Africa, in spite of its much-cited Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to name but a few.
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