Standing up to hate speech

This is a week of profound communal significance. On Tuesday evening, we gathered to mark Yom HaShoah and, in doing so, made history. For the first time, the Pretoria and Johannesburg communities came together as one in a unified act of remembrance. It was, in every sense, a deeply poignant occasion. 

That this year’s international Yom HaShoah theme was “The Family in the Holocaust” made the coming together of our two communities all the more resonant. There could be no more fitting expression of that theme than two previously separate communal events choosing to become one. In his closing remarks, Pretoria South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) chairperson Gary Nowosenetz gave voice to precisely this: that community, at its core, is family. 

Next week, we will continue these commemorations with Yom Hazikaron on Tuesday and Yom Ha’atzmaut on Wednesday, a full week that speaks to our community’s strength, vibrancy, and enduring commitment to its ideals. 

The Holocaust didn’t begin in the gas chambers. It began with politicians who divided populations into “us” and “them”. It began with intolerance and hate speech going unchallenged. It began when ordinary people grew desensitised, looked away, and allowed the unthinkable to become thinkable. This isn’t merely a historical observation. It’s a warning that carries urgent and concrete meaning right now. 

Two recent incidents have made this painfully clear. 

The first is, in important ways, a story of accountability. The South African Jewish community received an unreserved apology from Economic Freedom Fighters KwaZulu-Natal Chairperson Mongezi Twala, following his 2024 threat outside a Durban court to “cut the ugly throats of the Jews”. The road to that apology was neither short nor simple. But an unreserved apology, particularly from a senior politician in an otherwise hostile party, is a meaningful and significant outcome. We acknowledge it as such. 

The second incident is of an altogether different and deeply disturbing character. The Embassy of Iran in South Africa published a cartoon depicting a Jewish person as a rat, complete with kippah and payot, riding an eagle, captioned “who holds the reins”. This isn’t ambiguous. This isn’t a matter of interpretation. The depiction of Jewish people as rats is among the most virulent antisemitic imagery in existence, historically and inextricably associated with Nazi propaganda. Holocaust scholars identify this as the “dehumanisation phase”, the systematic process by which mass violence is made psychologically possible. The Nazi deployment of this imagery wasn’t merely offensive; it was genocidal in its intent and consequence. 

That this identical imagery has now been reproduced by the Iranian Embassy isn’t coincidental. Iran’s regime has a documented and bloody record of targeting Jewish communities globally. The 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people and injured more than 300, stands as testament to where this language of dehumanisation leads. The visual rhetoric of this cartoon doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists on a continuum with that violence. 

We reject this imagery without equivocation. The SAJBD has lodged a formal complaint with the South African Human Rights Commission and has written directly to President Cyril Ramaphosa, calling for concrete action to be taken against the embassy. 

We will not be silenced. We will not accept hate speech directed at our community. We will continue to assert and defend our rights as equal and free citizens of this country, a country we love, and whose founding constitutional values we hold dear. We will never forget. And we will work, without ceasing, to ensure that “Never again” isn’t merely a phrase, but a promise.