As South Africa began to make sense of shocking revelations by a Sunday Times lead story on SA Jews undergoing military training in Israel, a day later, the American embassy in Pretoria fired a missile.
Its explosion reverberated across the country and in many parts of the world. Overnight the dominant news centered around what turned out to be a paltry few paragraphs which warned of an unsubstantiated terrorist threat to US interests in SA.
That the terror alert was vague, lacking detail and possibly deliberately designed to obfuscate, was quite evident. For instance by ambiguously referring to "extremists" as the culprits likely to target US interests, the embassy paved the way for all types of speculation, leading to confusion and of course, reviving the "Islamist" bogey.
Once again many media platforms resorted to acquire analysis from so-called "terror experts" and invariably the end result gave the scourge of Islamophobia a fresh lease of life.
Interestingly and unsurprisingly, SA's intelligence and security ministry sought to downplay the American-fuelled paranoia. By countering the terror alert, they in fact disputed US intelligence sources, though not saying it in so many words.
South Africa, since the dawn of democracy would have learned that it is essential to distinguish "information peddling" from credible, verifiable intelligence. In fact, this was quite evident at a meeting with senior intelligence officials on the eve of 2010 FIFA world cup.