TALI FEINBERG
The storm around her erupted in June, when she wrote an Instagram post defending Israel. After she claimed to have received death threats and abuse, she chose to retract her comments, hold a press conference with BDS SA, and promise to go on a “a fact-finding mission to Palestine”.
Because of her association with BDS SA, she was barred from the Jewish state for ten years, but she visited Jordan, where she wrote a number of Instagram posts criticising Israel.
“I was offered 1.5 million to not take the stage with BDS. I was also physically threatened to stay away. I did what my conscious dictated,” she wrote on Saturday, after she was questioned on Twitter whether she had been bullied into joining BDS SA.
Naidoo responded to questions from the SA Jewish Report that, “It was someone from the Jewish community” who threatened her, and “I was also given the name of the person who would give me the money, who is a very, very well-known Jewish business person.”
When pressed for his name, she said “I refuse to get on the wrong side of such a powerful person within the business community.” She then blocked the SA Jewish Report on WhatsApp.
While Naidoo, must be given the benefit of the doubt, “If this is invented, then Shashi is playing into well-worn anti-Semitic tropes: rich Jews using financial power to further their nefarious ends,” says Milton Shain, Emeritus Professor of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town.
“Jews are seen in black-and-white terms – as a powerful ‘business community’. We saw this over and over again in the late nineteenth century, most vividly at the time of the Dreyfus affair, when Jewish ‘money-power’ was identified by the anti-Dreyfusard right as applying pressure on the French government.”
Wendy Kahn, the National Director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, said that the board would not respond to Naidoo’s comments. “At this stage it is a matter of conjecture, and the SAJBD cannot act on that basis,” she wrote.
Selwyn
Oct 18, 2018 at 2:36 pm
‘Shashi Naidoo is under threat, and everything she says, does, talks or writes about is fake as she is captured. That is my opinion. If Shashi was strong enough to rebuff her "new friends", she would have become a stronger, better and probably more succesful person. everything else is congecture. As I said, it is my opinion.’
Gary Sachs
Oct 19, 2018 at 5:51 am
‘Hopefully Shashi Naidoo will eventually realise that she is just being used by the BDS movement to further their cause and that it is just another form of Anti Semitism which she should want no part.
Pray for Shashi Naidoo to see things in this way soon.
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