SAJBD response to Ahmed Munzoor Shaik Emam’s comments at Sona

20 February 2024  

“On 14 February, the chambers of Parliament once again echoed to the sound of bigoted hatred targeting the South African Jewish community. And once again the culprit was National Freedom Party representative Ahmed Munzoor Shaik Emam. Speaking during the SONA debate, Emam used his platform to embark on a paranoid rant about a supposed Jewish take-over of Cape Town facilitated by the Democratic Alliance.

In the course of his remarks, Emam declared that there would be “a bloodbath” in Cape Town if the DA were to hand it over to “the Zionists”, and that the people would “not allow you to make this a Jewish State”. He combined these warnings with claims that the DA and its Zionist backers had “pawned the land in the Western Cape to the United States and others”.

 SA Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) National Chairperson Prof Karen Milner compared Emam’s “racist and defamatory ravings” to how Nazi-supporting white supremacists had once used the opposition benches in Parliament to rail against supposed Jewish control of the economy and clamour for restrictions on Jewish immigration.  

 “This is not the first instance of this individual using Parliament as a vehicle for peddling his antisemitic bigotry. On at least one other occasion, in June 2021, he informed the House that the reason why Jews had been thrown out of so many countries was because they made themselves unwanted. What is new, however, is his readiness to uses dangerously inflammatory language that at least borders on incitement to violence” .  

The SAJBD calls on the South African government,  and all political parties to condemn these racist and defamatory remarks and further urges Parliament to censure Ahmed Munzoor Shaik Emam for having flouted the democratic principles and human rights values of our Constitution". 

Issued by Karen Milner, National Chairperson, SAJBD, 20 February 2024