Public Protector commits to meeting SAJBD on Goodson antisemitic book
26 June 2017
Last week, the SA Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) requested a meeting with The Public Protector, Busisiwe Mkhwebane, to discuss her apparent endorsement of a book by a notorious antisemitic conspiracy theorist, Nazi apologist, Holocaust denier and racist, Stephen Goodson. The Public Protector has since agreed to meet with the SAJBD at the end of July. While the SAJBD welcomes being allowed this opportunity, it is nevertheless disappointed that, given the gravity of the situation, the meeting has been scheduled so far in advance.
The book reportedly endorsed by Advocate Mkhwebane, entitled A History of Central Banking (and the Enslavement of Mankind), repeats the classic antisemitic libel that Jews, through their supposed underhanded, unscrupulous practices, are guilty of foisting the evils of usury and corrupt international finance on humanity. Goodson further seeks to justify anti-Jewish persecution by attributing it to the alleged criminal behaviour of Jews themselves, blames Jews for instigating wars, revolutions and other such disasters and asserts that the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during World War II, is a Jewish-spawned lie aimed at extorting reparations from Germany. His public pronouncements have included endorsing the infamous Medieval blood libel, where Jews were falsely accused of using the blood of murdered Christian infants for their religious rituals.
Not only is Goodson a vocal, unapologetic antisemite, his past pronouncements also reveal him to be an outright racist and defender of apartheid. Speaking on ultra-right white supremacist platforms, he has described black people as being incapable of successfully governing a country. Goodson has gone so far as to describe not only the National Party after 1966, but the Conservative Party and even Eugene Terre’blanche as being traitors to the cause of patriotic white nationalism.
The danger posed by those who, like Stephen Goodson, disseminate defamatory and absurdly counterfactual narratives under the guise of scholarly analysis is that they lend a veneer of intellectual respectability to ideas that in reality have no place in the world of sane, civilised discourse. For that reason alone, responsible leaders, intellectuals and opinion makers should make every effort not to give underserved credibility to their noxious theories.
At the scheduled meeting with the Public Protector, the SAJBD will request that she refrain from endorsing, or appearing to endorse the book and to unequivocally distance herself from the views expressed by its author.
Issued by Wendy Kahn, National Director, SAJBD, 26 June 2017
