← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · FadeTheButcher
Thread ID: 10229 | Posts: 15 | Started: 2003-10-03
2003-10-03 23:25 | User Profile
There is a new book out today about the Jews and the role they have played in South Africa in the last fifty years, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa. I have briefly scanned over the book and so far it looks as if it contains some pretty damning information. I will post some interesting excerpts as I read through this. Feel free to circulate them across the internet. Enlighten the masses. :)
"Yet, alongside this overwhelmingly pattern of conformity, a deviant tradition that balked at the established social order is also traceable in the history of South African Jewry. One outstanding early manifestation was related to the struggle for relief from the disabilities suffered by the Indian population from 1906 to 1914. During this campaign the legendary Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi developed his doctrine of active nonviolent resistance, named by him satayagraha and employed year later with empire-shaking effect in India itself. The closest of Gandhi's white associates were in fact Jews, notably Henry Polak, who had come from England, Hermann Kallenbach, who was Litvak-born but had come to South Africa from Germany where he had qualified as an architect, and Sonia Schlesin, a young Litvak immigrant who served faithfully as Gandhi's secretary. Moreover, their actions resonated in perhaps the earliest incidence of a publically aired controversy over the moral implications of Jewish complicity in the South African system of racial discrimination. **Polak averred that he had been drawn into the Indian satyagraha struggle "as a Jew who has tried to remember Judaism is a matter not only of belief but also of action." **
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), p.7
"Some Jews were also prominent in the Labor Party. The party's race relations policy rested in essence on protection of the interests of solely white workers. However, the justice and wisdom of this policy did not go unquestioned over the years, and Jews in the Labor Party's leadership generally were numbered among the proponents of a color-blind policy. As this failed to gain acceptance, several major players moved politically leftward.
Even more than in the South African labor movement, Jews were prominent in the development of radical socialist groups. A striking early exemplar was Yeshaya Israelstam."
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), p.8
"Formally founded in Johannesburg in August 1917, it commanded a following of a good few hundred members and fellow travelers. The ISL was a major player in the founding of the united Communist Party of South Africa, which duly became an affiliated section of the Communist International.
Thus a self-defined Jewish group was intimately involved in the formation of a communist party from the outset - the only political party that opened its ranks to blacks. Once the party was created the Jewish group dissolved itself, but individual Jews continued to constitute a remarkably high proportion of its active white membership. It is an index of the prominence of Jews in the leadership core of the party that, when directives from the Moscow Comitern forced the South African Communists to adopt the slogan - considered by some party leaders as disastrously unrealistic - of a "Native Republic, with minority rights for Whites," and to launch a compaign against an alleged danger of right-wing deviationists, both the main fomenters and the victims of the purge-like explusions that ensued were Jews."
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), p.9
"The prominence of Jews in the leadership of the Communist Party continued to be an obvious fact of which the authorities were only too well aware. Thus, a police report delivered to Prime Minister Smuts, listing sixty active leaders, secret and open, of the Johannesburg District of the Communist Party of South Africa in February 1946, contained twenty-three Jewish names, one of which was the chairman Michael Harmel. Paralleling the highly disproportionate involvement of individual Jews in the Communist Party, leftist sentiments and affinities continued to be manifest in the framework of cultural activities conducted by a Yiddisher Literarisher Farein that had been founded in 1912 and in an ephemeral socialist-Zionist group of Yiddish speakers formed in 1919, which also participated in the founding of the Communist Party. Assuming the name Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion), it identified with the socialist-Zionist movement of that name, which was an ascendant political force in the world Zionist movement."
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), p.9
"Changes in the attitude of the white population, however, profoundly affected the situation of Jews. This became critically evident in the year 1930, when the South African parliament enacted a new immigration law that effectively reduced the flow of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to a mere trickle. The word Jew was not mentioned, but only the politically blind could fail to see that Jews were the main target of restriction." (Fade: Just like in the United States, this became a locus of Jewish resentment.)
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), p.11
"In late 1936 widespread public opposition rose to a crescendo surrounding the arrival of a ship carrying Jewish would-be immigrants, the Stuttgart, which had been chartered by the Council for German Jewry in London. Prominent among the protestors was Dr. Hendrik F. Verwoerd, a professor at the University of Stellenbosch destined to become prime minister of South Africa and the foremost architecht of apartheid."
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), p.13
"Verwoerd suggested a quota system by which, henceforth, licenses would be refused and expired ones not renewed, so that Jews would be barred until the stage when they occupied no more than 5 percent of the country's commerce and industry." (Fade: It is becoming clear that Jews in South Africa began to associate Apartheid with anti-Semitism, and thus militated against white South Africans.)
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), p.14
2003-10-04 00:21 | User Profile
Well -- I am shocked, shocked, shocked! at such suggestions that Jews might be inclined to Marxist behavior. :jester:
Great post, Fade. Thanks. Please keep posting those quotes, and I will save them all for future use.....
FYI to newbies: more Jewish funsters in S.A. here:
[url]http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Others/Others-TheJews&Communism-Yes.htm[/url]
2003-10-04 00:28 | User Profile
Its from a Jewish source as well, published in Jerusalem as part of a series. That is even better because the shabbos goy cannot go run and cry about "anti-Semitic" sources. If the Jews say it is true, it has to be so. :p
2003-10-04 07:43 | User Profile
Excellent post, Fade. Unfortunately, philosemitism is very widespread among Afrikaners (the notoriously philosemtic nut Jan Lamprecht comes to mind) and many mistakenly see Israel as a 'friend' or even a role model, all because of Israel's 'support' of South Africa during the years economic sanctions were in place.
2003-10-04 08:04 | User Profile
By the way, where are Joe Slovo and Nadine Gordimer on that list?
2003-10-04 10:16 | User Profile
Good find and an excellent post.. I'm going to have to read that book.
Ausonius
2003-10-04 11:05 | User Profile
Only 14 million of these people on a planet of 6 billion, yet everywhere there is disaster - there they are!
Isn't it funny how every halfwit with a byline was an expert on South Africa during the sanctions - yet now that South Africa is a flyblown sinkhole, you can't find a word about it in the Western 'free press'? For the shabgoys and the people tugging their leashes, the Happy Ending to the South Africa Story is simply [I]Nelson Mandela.[/I] That's it. Just those two golden magical words are sufficient to send us all to bed, dreaming of dancing color-blind sugar plums.
"Rape capital of the planet"? Huh? Which planet would [I]that[/I] be?
2003-10-04 14:29 | User Profile
Here's a recent take on the SA situation from our friends at the eXile
[url]http://www.exile.ru/174/174180000.html[/url]
Mandela PornCAPETOWN (the eXile) – The television's bombarding me with publicity regarding the upcoming 'Proudly South African Week' (21-28 Sept) and my countrymen did not disappoint—I have more body parts on display.
Since we last spoke, Free State police arrested 5 people and a witchdoctor after they received reports that the 6 were involved in peddling human body parts at a muti sale. In their possession was a bag filled with a head, intestines, genitals, a pair of hands and feet, a heart, and a cut-up liver—all from an unidentified twenty-something male. Further investigation led the cops to the scene of the butchering at a dam in Bloemspruit. During their first court appearance, the crowd was so angry and amped to kill them should they get bail that the venue for the hearing was moved to the courtroom basement at the last minute. The perps also asked to be placed in police cells should the other inmates entertain any thoughts of doing the crowd a favour. Or six.
On the subject of all that, Vereeniging police are looking for a muti murderer after discovering the mutilated corpse of 3 year-old Thabang Malakoana. Well, they didn't exactly discover it—village dogs hauled the child from his flimsy grave about 15km from Vereeniging. He was missing his left hand, the brain and soft inner parts had been removed and his pelvis hacked.
Well, muti sure didn't help 2 Shoshanguve robbers last Friday. 3 men help up 2 security guards in plain clothes as they were collecting cash from a butchery. They took wallets and cellphones, but missed the crucial gun in the pocket. Needless to say at some point bullets flew, killing 2 of the robbers, and wounding the third in the ass. Police found unlicensed weapons, cellphones and lots of muti in the pockets of the dead robbers. So the police are wagging fingers and clucking that crime and witchcraft doesn't pay.
Looks like the spate of violence against babies isn't letting up. This weekend, 2 little girls died horribly in Cape Town. One was stabbed in the head and chest minutes after her birth in Bishop Lavis. The mother, a 21 year-old woman from Delft (whom nobody knew was pregnant) apparently depressed and confused, disappeared into the bathroom at a relative's house for a over 2 hours with the shower running. When the relatives were allowed access to the bathroom, they found the baby wrapped in a jersey in a shower decorated with its blood. Also in Bishop Lavis, 3 year-old Jamie-Lee Julies died after being beaten and raped by the 23-year old man who was supposed to look after her while her mother was at work. When she arrived home she found her daughter laying on a bed with her face bashed in and her genitalia a bloody mess. The offender has been apprehended.
There was a bit of bedlam at the magistrate's court in Esikhawini, KwaZulu-Natal, when a Mozambican cannibal called Elvis Mathenjwa appeared in court over the murder of a woman, whose remains he boiled in a pot about 2 weeks ago in the township. Crowd was pretty pissed off. Threw bricks and stones and had to be dispersed with stungrenades and loud voices through megaphones. They're considering moving the case to another district.
Cape Flats residents aren't sleeping easy. As part of a national amnesty announced by Correctional Services Minister Ben Skosana, about 6,000 convicts are to be hitting the streets in the next couple of weeks. Neighbourhoods and gangsters have been told to remain calm. Ravensmead Community Police Forum chairman Tommy Klein said that over the years these kinds of programs had included the release of robbers, rapists and murderers who would often become repeat offenders. But as it stands, 6,000 in the Western Province and 8,000 more (regarded as low-risk) on parole countrywide. Let's see what the fruit of this prison over-crowding relief project brings.
Remember my theory on faking a hi-jacking as being an almost perfect way of offing somebody without getting caught? Pastor Itumeleng Sibenye (34) from Soweto tried it, paid hitmen Mzungezwa Majola and Sjondo Zakhwe R3000 to pull it off, but in a bum move of note left his shoes at the scene of the crime. The preacher's currently doing life, Majola's doing life plus 4 years (for illegal possession of a gun and ammunition)—the 2 sentences to be served consecutively, and Zakhwe got off on the murder charge, but got 3 years for possession of a gun and ammo. The 1 year difference in sentence for same offence? His wasn't the murder weapon, therefore worth less points.
Steven Pillay (24) from Ladysmith was indicted for breaking into his former girlfriend's home, overpowering her, driving to a secluded spot and incinerating her in the boot of her own car. It was the second time he'd kidnapped her. He'd shown plenty strange obsessive behaviour, and was in fact out on bail (he'd gone in for having kidnapped her on a previous occasion).
In Durban, after being ratted out by his landlord and ex-employer, a slender former Capetonian with a strong Afrikaans accent, is being investigated as he claims to have offed 37 women (mostly prostitutes) in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg over a 4 year period. So far he's only been positively linked to one murder, but the Durban police are currently liaising with the police in the other areas mentioned, and if his claim is true, he'd be a South African serial killer with one of the highest body counts.
Oh look. We have a blunt instrument attack. A good old fashioned bludgeoning. This time, Brackenfell niightlclub bouncer Dewald Kemp connected with a baseball bat wielded by a wild silver Audi motorist and his passenger in an incident of road rage on Old Oak Road, near Tygervalley. I know exactly which intersection they're talking about. Apparently, there had been a bit of a vehicular stand-off down part of the highway, and at one point they pulled over and screamed at each other, but once the commute resumed, there was much finger pulling and crazy driving. Eventually Kemp was forced to take the Old Oak turn off, and at the intersection, the silver Audi motorist got jumped out the car, smashed Kemp's window with the baseball bat and tried unsuccessfully to pull him out through it, whereupon Kemp got out and grabbed the motorist by the chest. The passenger then grabbed the baseball bat and proceeded to bludgeon him. He has 12 stitches in the back of his head and various other injuries, including the indentation of a shoeprint across the left side of his face. Kemp recognised the driver, so I guess he'll get his.
It had to happen sometime. Hapless armed hi-jackers ****ed with the wrong person at a lonely spot in the Drakensberg—the Mazda with Durban license plates they were tailing was an unmarked police car with Captain Eddie van Rensberg (a detective at the provincial head office of the Serious and Violent Crimes Unit) behind the wheel. Which immediately qualifies them for the Sorry Bastard Awards. 'nuff sed.
2003-10-04 14:40 | User Profile
Available here on Amazon.
[url]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1584653299/qid%3D1065278367/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/103-4423778-3300612[/url]
CAVEAT: It costs FORTY BUCKS!!!!!
Walter
2003-10-04 19:15 | User Profile
>>>Excellent post, Fade. Unfortunately, philosemitism is very widespread among Afrikaners (the notoriously philosemtic nut Jan Lamprecht comes to mind) and many mistakenly see Israel as a 'friend' or even a role model, all because of Israel's 'support' of South Africa during the years economic sanctions were in place.
It would take me a century to post all the relevant excerpts from this book, and I am only 100 pages into so far. This book explodes the myth that the Jews were somehow friends of the Afrikaner. It systematically demonstrates how both Israel and South African Jewry undermined the apartheid government.
2003-10-04 19:25 | User Profile
"As for the attitude of Jews to Katzew's philo-Afrikaner sentiments, there can be no doubt that the conscience of most morally sensitized and politically aware Jews was troubled, if at all, not by the Afrikaner's plight but by that of the underprivilaged and oppressed black majority."
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), p.29
"Chief Rabbi Rabinowitz's demeanor was quite the opposite of Abraham's. By temperament far less repressible, he never wavered in demonstration of his ardent Zionism (he was a foremost supporter of Revisionist Zionism) and, at the same time, tended to make his opposition to apartheid increasingly explicit. . . ."Our concern is with the doctrines of Judaism, not the views of individual Jews," he said, "and we betray these doctrines if we do not proclaim that Judaism teaches, without equivocation, the absolute equality of all men before God." He pleaded that there surely was a specifically Jewish attitude toward discrimination based on race or creed and that "it was as unreasonable to suggest that it was wrong to denounce theft because some Jews favoured it, as it was to suggest that it was wrong to denounce theft because some Jews are theives." In his sermons he protested against the deportation of Bishop Reeves, declaring: "It was the sacred duty of all religious leaders to speak out clearly on the ethical aspects of social problems."
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), p.40
>>>and many mistakenly see Israel as a 'friend' or even a role model, all because of Israel's 'support' of South Africa during the years economic sanctions were in place.
ROFL!!
"Throughout the 1950s the foreign relations between Israel and South Africa developed cordially enough, although diplomatic representation remained low-key. Only Israel maintained a permanent diplomatic mission. Although by the late 1950s there were already signs that Israel was developing close relations with several African countries hostile to South Africa's white regime, Prime Minister Verwoerd himself could comment in conversations with Israel's minister plenipotentairy, Katriel Salmon, that he appreciated Israel's restraint regarding the international crusade against South Africa. Verwoerd added pointedly that this contrasted with the difficulties he was experiencing with the Jewish community, whose members had disappointed him by mostly voting nay in the plebiscite on declaration of South Africa as a republic.
A crisis was precipitated in October 1961 when at the United Nations some African states launched an attack on the South African foreign minister unprecedented in its severity. He was none other than Eric Luow, well remembered by Jews as a foremost anti-Semite in the pre-1948 period. Amid the clamorous support of many of the African delegates, the Liberian representative moved that Luow's speech be struck from the record. Although this did not pass, the General Assembly did roundly censure Luow, and Israel voted in favor of this censure. In white South Africa this news was received with much indignation. With the exception of Holland and Israel, all the Western states had abstained from voting or absented themselves from the debate. This made Israel's offense against white South Africa particularly conspicuous.
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), p.47
"Not long after the Eric Luow incident, Israel took another step toward alliance with white South Africa's enemies at the United Nations. Whereas a clause calling for diplomatic and economic sanctions against South Africa met with the opposition of the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western States, Israel again conspicuously aligned itself with those who voted in favor."
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), p.48
"What were the considerations that determined the Israel Foreign Ministry's policy? There can be no doubt that Israel's overriding motivation was to gain the diplomatic support of African states as counterbalance to the chronic international hostility it had to face from the Arab States and the Soviet Union and its satellites. This interest was reinforced by moral repugnance for the racism that apartheid signified."
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), p.49
"When an anxious appeal was made to Minister of Finance Dr. Doenges, he commented sternly that after South Africa had gone to great lengths to be helpful to Israel, Israel had now "slapped South Africa in the face and ganged up with her enemies.". . .
. . .Since Israel continued to vote with the Afro-Asian bloc against South Africa, reprecussions upon South African Jewry was exacerbated. Die Transvaler, for example, said that the hostile behaviour of Israel toward South Africa destroyed whatever compatibility had ever existed between the dual loyalties of the Jews in South Africa. "The Jews will thus now have to choose where they stand. . .with South Africa or with Israel. It can no longer be both."
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), p.51
"So much for participation of Jews in conventional white South African politics and what can be surmised concerning the voting preferences of Jews. Turning now to the forces, legal and extra legal, that constituted the vanguard of opposition to apartheid on the part of whites, one cannot but be struck by the extraordinary salience of Jews. Two women, Ella Hellmann and Helen Suzman, exemplified above all other persons the prominent involvement of Jews in the liberal opposition to apartheid, which functioned with them bounds of constitutional legality as laid down by white South Africans.
Dr. Ellen Hellmann, nee Kaumheimer, was born in Johannesburg to Jewish parents who had come from Germany. She obtained her doctorate in social anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, specializing in research on the urban African. This led her into expanding social and political concern within the framework of the Institute of Race Relations. She served as its president in 1954-55 and took a leading part in numerous liberal activities such as the Johannesburg Citizen's Native Housing Committee, the board of management of a creche in Soweto sponsored by the Union of Jewish Women, trusteeship of the defense fund in aid of the defendants in the great Treason Trial of the late 1950s, which will be discussed shortly, and the similar Defense and Aid Fund Committee in the mid-1960s. Politically, she associated herself mainly with the Progressive Party, serving on its executive committee in the 1960s and also standing for election to the Johannesburg City Council on that party's ticket in 1962. In all, Ella Hellmann became one of the most prominent and academically authoritative liberal critics of South Africa's system of race relations. In the retrospective typological spectrum of the so-called "liberation struggle" she exemplifies those who worked primarily through the nonparty Institute of Race Relations, rather than through multiracial political agitation, and who have consequently been described by some observers as "social liberals."
Helen Suzman, more than any other political personality, epitomized the white liberal opposition to the apartheid regime in the eyes of the world as in those of South Africans. She is undoubtedly the foremost exemplar of those who worked within the system and used it to attack apartheid intrepidly and relentlessly. In 1953 Suzman commened her parliamentary career - thirty-six years in duration - as the successful United Party candidate for the Houghton constituency in Johannesburg. But before long she came to the conclusion that the United Party was too equivocal and ineffectual an opposition instrument in the face of Afrikaner nationalism's unshakable determination to institutionalize and fortify white racial domination. In 1959 she was part of the group that split to form the Progressive Party. However, the new party made precious little headway within the white electorate. For thirteen years, from 1961 to 1974, Helen Suzman was its sole member of parliament. In that solitary role she courageously battled each and every apartheid measure, often enduring not only general calumny but also anti-semitic taunts from the government benches. Yet occasionally there was also grudging acknowledgments of her political integrity and courage. Her parliamentary speeches were informed by a rationally articulated humanism. They were models of nondemagogic delivery, finely researched data, and sound reasoning.
Although holding fast to her ideological convictions as a political liberal, Suzman also played a key role in rendering every form of legal, material, and moral succor to radicals who feel foul of the apartheid state's laws, whether the accused in the great Treason Trial or political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela and his comrades after they were incarcerated on Robben Island, off Capetown. She retired from her parliamentary career in 1989, shortly before the great transformation of the South African political system, the essentials of which she had consistently and courageously advocated for so many years.
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), pp.58.60
2003-10-04 20:18 | User Profile
Excellent info Fade! I am going to post some of these excerpts on Lamprecht's forum (he'll probably ban me, but its worth it).
2003-10-04 20:21 | User Profile
LOL I am FAR from finished.
"The forms of white opposition to apartheid that remained within the confines of formal legality ranged on a spectrum that included the work of the Institute of Race Relations, which conducted research and acted as a pressure group on the government; the Black Sash movement, which mobolized women for protest and social action; the Christian Institute, an ecumenical organization founded in 1963 for promoting dialogue; the Liberal Party that existed from 1953 to 1968l and the Progressive Party, which at first coexisted with the Liberal Party and afterward succeeded it, in a sense by default. All these organizations were composed essentially of an English speaking membership led by major public figures such as Alan Paton, or Margaret Ballinger an Patrick Duncan of the Liberal Party, or "renegade" Afrikaners such as Beyers Naude of the Christian Institute. The role of Jewish individuals should not be exaggerated, although they certainly were involved in numbers disproportionate to the size of the Jewish population, and prominent almost emblematically Jewish assailants of apartheid such as the Liberal Party's Leslie Rubin or the Progressive Party's Helen Suzman were perceived in the Afrikaans press as thorns in the side of the positive forces upholding white supremacy.
But this irritant was a naught compared with the glaring prominence of Jewish names in the radical opposition. Throughout the first two decades of National Party rule, Jewish names kept appearing in every facet of the struggle: in the lists of "named" communists and of persons banned from all public activity, detained without trial, or placed under house arrest; in the courts, whether as defendents or as counsel for the defense; and among those who fled the country to evade arrest or unbearable harrassment. The public prominence of Jewish names was particularly marked in the course of the epic Treason Trial, which captured the attention of the news media throughout the second half of the 1950s. In a concerted effort to crush the antiapartheid resistance the police had dramatically swooped down upon well over a hundred suspects. When the trial opened in December 1956, 156 people belonging to all apartheid-defined racial groups were charged with treason in the form of a conspiracy to overthrow the state by violence in order to replace it with a state based on communism. The accused were mostly blacks, numbering 105, but there were also 21 Indians, 7 coloreds, and 23 whites. It was a glaring fact that more than half of the whites were Jews. They were Yetta Barenblatt, Hymie Barsel, Lionel (Rusty) Bernstein, Leon Levy, Norman Levy, Syndey Shall, Joe Slovo, Ruth (First) Slovo, Sonia Bunting, Lionel Forman, Issac Horvitch, Ben Turok, Jacqueline Arenstein, and Ronald Press. All had been associated with the Communist Party of South Africa at some time before it was banned in 1950, and some were in the clandestine reconstituted party (formed in 1953 and renamed the South African Communist Party). Most were overtly active in the South African Congress of Democrats and in other organizations associated with opposition to the apartheid regime such as the Society for Preace and Friendship with the Soviet Union and the Federation of South African Women.
The conspicuous disproportion of Jewish names in the list of accused was compounded by the prominence of Jews in the defendants' legal counsel. In the initial prepatory examination stage, the defense counsel included Maurice Franks and Norman Rosenberg. Jews were also prominent in the main fund-raising support within South Africa in behalf of the accused - the Treason Trial Defense Fund. Alongside author Alan Paton and Anglican bishop of Johannesburg Ambrose Reeves, seven of its initial twenty-two sponsers were Jews, as were also two of its four trustees - Dr. Ellen Hellmann and Alex Hepple. The trial was of unprecedented duration, the state repeatedly failing to establish its case, consequently dropping charges against more and more of the accused, and ultimately changing the indictment against the remainder. By August 1958 charges had been dropped against all but 92 of the accused. With (from the Jewish point of view) a twist of irony, however unintended, the trial was then resumed in a building known as "The Old Synagogue" of Pretoria, a synagogue that had fallen into disuse and been purchased from the local Jewish community in 1952.
To top it all, at the most critical stage in the trial the defense counsel was led by a prominent personality in the Jewish community, Israel Maisels, assisted by Sydney Kentridge (son of the notable parliamentarian and Jewish communal leader Morris Kentridge), while the prosecutor was none other than the former Nuwe Ordre (New Order) leader Oswald Pirow. The juxtaposition was striking, and quite invidious from the vantage point of the Jewish community's public relations work: Miasels, the Jew, a prominent leader in both the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Zionist Federation, defending those accused of seeking to overthrow white supremacy; Pirow, the extreme Afrikaner nationalist and former assertive pro-Nazi, defending white supremacy. All in all the trial dragged on for four years and four months. In March 1961 the prosecution finally gave in, and all the remaining accused were released. It was a testimonial to the residual power of the formal rule of law, notwithstanding the fundamentally defective "democratic" polity of South Africa. As such, it was a most frustrating defeat for the governmental apostles of apartheid, who redoubled their efforts to legislate away such legal obstacles as far as was possible by deploying their parliamentary majority.
Prominence of Jewish names continued to glare in periodically issued government gazettes listing persons banned or restricted in various ways for falling fould of the increasingly sweeping repressive legislation. Sensitive to the implications for the public image of the Jewish community, the Board of Deputies monitored and filed such lists as they appeared in official gazettes and the press. One example is a particularly comprehensive list issued in November 1962, containing 437 names of persons who were suspected of being former officeholders, members, or active supporters of the banned Communist Party. According to a Board of Deputies memorandum, gauging by names alone at least 62 of the 132 whites listed were Jews. A later gazette dated 25 August 1967 listed persons (all white) who had been officeholders, members, or active supporters of the banned Congress of Democrats. Of the 35 names, 18 were identifiably Jewish.
Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Lebanon, NH 2003), pp.60-61
2003-10-04 20:37 | User Profile
[QUOTE=FadeTheButcher]LOL I am FAR from finished.[/QUOTE]
Keep on testifin', brutha! :clap:
2003-10-04 23:27 | User Profile
Goodamn it Fade, you beat me to it :bash: :bash: :bash: :bash: :)