"Shoot the Jew" chant condemned by SAJBD
What was supposed to have been a silent demonstration against a concert by an Israeli jazz quartet at Wits University last Wednesday turned ugly when some of the protestors chanteddubula e juda - ‘Shoot the Jew' - outside the venue. The protest was organised by BDS-South Africa, an organisation that campaigns for a boycott of anything to do with Israel, whether in the cultural, academic, economic or any other sphere.
Rather than condemning this incitement to violence against South African Jews and distancing his organisation from those calls Muhammed Desai, Coordinator of BDS-SA, has sought to justify it. As quoted by the Wits Vuvuzela, he said, "Just like you would say kill the Boer at funeral during the eighties it wasn't about killing white people, it was used as a way of identifying with the apartheid regime". Desai further commented, "The whole idea anti-Semitism is blown out of proportion".
The SA Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) deplores this blatant incitement to racist violence against the South African Jewish community. It further finds it deeply shocking that that BDS-SA, an organisation that purports to stand up for human rights, refuses to acknowledge that it is doing anything wrong by propagating it.
SAJBD National Chairman Mary Kluk believed that by allowing its members to make such hateful and dangerous statements and subsequently defending them for doing so, BDS-SA had revealed its true colours.
"What this incident unmistakeably shows is that BDS-SA's real agenda is not to stand up for the Palestinian cause but to incite hatred, and possibly even violence, against Jewish South Africans" she said, "South Africa, in view of its own tragic past of bigotry, racism and violence, simply cannot tolerate this kind of hateful, inflammatory rhetoric, whether aimed at the Jewish community or against any other sector of South African society".