Business Day: Zionism as a Prime Evil

Jacob Dlamini, political editor of the Business Day Weekender Edition, thinks that Zionism is one of the primary evils of the past two centuries: No escape from Guernica’s ocean of pain and death

What’s worrying is that Dlamini is the editor of a reputable mainstream business newspaper. The creeping normalisation of the utterly crazy is gaining momentum.

Has there been since Guernica a statement that speaks as boldly of the myriad moral challenges of the 20th and 21st centuries: endless wars, apartheid, Zionism, oppression, sexism, racism, imperialism? [...] What about Zionism? What image is there to speak to its cruelty? The Apartheid Wall, perhaps? The weeping Palestinian father huddling over his son, shot dead by Israelis?

The article is actually two weeks old and I only spotted it thanks to a reference to it in an article by Jocelin Hellig in the Jewish Report exploring whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

Hellig concludes that the author of the article is not anti-Semitic but that “anti-Israel prejudice is, in its own way, as flagrant a breach of morality and common sense as anti-Semitism.”

I agree with Hellig's general argument but has Dlamini left us a tacit clue by not including Nazism in his list of moral failures of the past two centuries ("endless wars, apartheid, Zionism, oppression, sexism, racism, imperialism")?

Comments

[Barry]

I saw this article - also found it to be disturbing. Another -ism that is noticeably absent from his list of 'moral challenges' is terrorism. That it didn't cross Dlamini's mind to include this is also telling.

Interestingly though, in the same edition of the Weekender he wrote an article on Arab racism. He was very reluctant though to make any concrete accusations, musing it might simply be an invention of anti-Islamic propagandists. However, at least he was asking the questions. That is something rare in SA papers. Here's the link: http://www.businessday.co.za/weekender/article.aspx?ID=BD4A414824

[Robert in Washington DC]

Barry writes:

"However, at least he was asking the questions. "

Hmmmm. It seems to me that Dlamini raised the questions merely so that he could dismiss them -- the headline and opening paragraphs clearly send the message that there's no such thing as Arab racism, and a reader has to go all the way to the end of the article (which many readers won't do) to find out that MAYBE Arabs are a teensy bit racist after all.

[Steve]

Perhaps he sees terrorism as a response to these challenges?

Form the other article it is interesting to see how the cynical take he views anything that might be positive about Israel.

"The late Parks Mankahlana, former presidential spokesman, once accompanied Nelson Mandela on a state visit to Israel and occupied Palestine and came back with interesting observations about race in that part of the world. He said, for example, the Israeli government delegation that met Mandela had more black people in it than the Palestinian side.

This is not to say that Israel has a better handle on the race question than the Palestinians in particular and the Arab world in general. It could simply be that Israel’s well-oiled propaganda machine is better at playing the race card. It could also be Israel has a larger population that self-identifies as black than its Arab neighbours. But this cannot and should not blind us to the work that the Arab world still needs to do to address its race problems."

Still, perhaps he does deserve credit for bringing attention to this issue but his contempt for Israel and Zionism far outweights his grievances with Arab racism.

[Gary]

Interesting that he also ommits Communism that was responsible for over 100 million killed and countless lives ruined...

[Gary]

"What about Zionism? What image is there to speak to its cruelty? The Apartheid Wall, perhaps? The weeping Palestinian father huddling over his son, shot dead by Israelis?"

Never a word about Israeli children killed by Arab terrorists...the reason the so-called 'apartheid wall' was built.
To bigots like Dlamini and Kasrils, Israeli Jews are not humans and count for nothing.
Dalmini makes me want to vomit.