SAJBD responds to further antisemitic comments from ANC WC
27 February 2018
The SA Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and SAJBD (Cape Council) condemn in the strongest terms the reprehensible statements made by ANC MPL Sharon Davids and the attempts since made by ANC Provincial Secretary Faiez Jacobs to justify them. The SAJBD (Cape Council) received the following statement from the Western Cape ANC spokesperson, Yonele Diko on behalf of the Provincial Secretary Faiez Jacobs, in response to MPP Sharon Davids’ antisemitic remarks in the Western Cape legislature on 23 February 2018:
… “Anti-Semitism is however not a scaremongering tool to whip others in line and to prevent them from interrogating the truth. If there is an illicit relationship between DA and Some Jewish aligned formations for whatever reasons, such must be interrogated without fear or prejudice. We will therefore be talking to Sharon Davids to understand the context in which the remarks were made. A full statement will be released after the engagement with Davids”…
Last week ANC MPL Sharon Davids accused the DA of having fabricated the Day Zero water crisis in order to obtain desalination contract kickbacks from what she referred to as the “Jewish mafia”. Such allegations amount to a racist smear campaign against the Jewish community. The surfacing of such clearly antisemitic conspiracy theories are particularly disturbing in view of the very difficult situation that the people of Cape Town find themselves in and the potential this creates for seeking convenient scapegoats for what has gone wrong.
Davids has since attempted to backtrack on her remarks, claiming that she had referred only to a ‘foreign-based company’ and ‘Israel-based people’. However, this is belied by her own words. Davids referred to a ‘Jewish mafia’. She further attributed the opposition to Patricia de Lille within the DA to the fact that she had opposed the award of a property to the Jewish community for purposes of building a Jewish day school.