Marika Sboros: A rational counter to Jew-hating dominance in South Africa’s public discourse on Israel and Hamas
Key topics:
Words are weaponised to distort facts and incite hatred in Gaza discourse
Fringe Jewish voices are used to legitimise anti-Israel narratives
South African media and politics accused of fuelling antisemitic bias
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By Marika Sboros*
There’s an old schoolyard ditty that goes: “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me.”
Whoever coined it got it wrong.
Words can harm more than heal, as Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza shows. In this war, Israel’s critics deliberately abuse, misuse and weaponise specific words, lobbing them mindlessly like grenades into safe rooms and bomb shelters.
It’s not just meanings that suffer. Words can incite violence with potentially fatal consequences, and not just for Jews, the intended targets.
“Genocide” and bedfellow, “holocaust”, are prime examples. “Rape” is locked in lethal embrace with “resistance”, a word once evoking noble defiance against tyranny. Today, it it whitewashes mass sexual violence, including against children and babies, as weapons of war.
“Revolution”, once linked to liberation and justice, now glorifies terrorism and erases moral boundaries. “Occupation”, “colonialism”, “starvation” and “famine” are shadows of their former selves. Jewish babies are branded “occupiers”. “Terrorist” has lost its edge to genocidal “freedom fighters” who wear it as a badge of pride.
“Zionist” is a slur and the anti-Israel lobby’s code word for Jews. “Antisemitism” is mired in doublespeak, a euphemism for Jew hatred.
The backdrop to these semantic missiles is the terror attack by Hamas on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. If it registered only fleetingly in your consciousness, here’s a reminder:
Around 3,000 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorists and Gazan civilians launched a killing spree, targeting 22 mostly civilian sites, including the nearby Nova music peace festival.
They left over 1,200 dead, wounded more than 5,000, mostly unarmed civilians, as they raped, tortured, genitally mutilated, beheaded and burnt alive people and whole families. The terrorists also mutilated children and babies in front of their parents, parents in front of their children.
They kidnapped 250, including children, babies and the elderly, as hostages to Gaza. Of the 50 hostages still in captivity, most are presumed dead. Survivors cling to life under hellish conditions.
British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore likened the unprecedented savagery to a “medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and trophies”. The terrorists set it apart by uploading videos of their crimes online in real time for posterity.
Calling the massacre of innocents an “attack”, as journalists routinely do, understates it. So does calling it an “event”, as Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival CEO, did after reversing his decision to screen a documentary on October 7.
Bailey initially banned it, citing a lack of permission from Hamas to use its videos. Presumably, he’d demand copyright clearance from ISIS before airing footage of beheadings or from Hitler’s SS before screening Auschwitz images.
A disturbing post-October 7 phenomenon is the growing chorus of Jewish voices accusing Israel of genocide, “baby killing” and deliberate starvation of Gazans.
Anti-Israel lobbyists seize on these voices as proof. As if something is true because a Jew says so. As if identity and virtue signalling equal evidence.
They ignore the principle: if 50 million people say a stupid thing, it’s still a stupid thing. They’re deaf to expert Jewish voices, legal, historical, and military, who dispute these claims with facts.
In South Africa, the first Jewish voice to support Hamas just days after October 7 was former ANC Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils.
Kasrils called it “a brilliant, spectacular guerrilla warfare attack... damn good.” He claimed that Hamas and PIJ are “very religious people” who “wouldn’t touch a non-Muslim woman”.
Taking that theatre of the absurd to bold new heights is Jo Bluen, chief spokesperson for South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP).
SAJFP is a fringe, unrepresentative group with no communal mandate or credibility. To boost numbers, it cosies up to Gift of the Givers and its controversial founder, Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, who is still dogged by claims that his charity has been funding Hamas in Gaza.
It partners with extremist Islamist, anti-Israel, anti-West groups, including the BDS (Boycott Disinvestment and Sanctions) movement, South Africa’s Muslim Judicial Council (MJC), and Palestinian factions that support Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
In September 2024, the morning after Israeli soldiers found six young hostages executed by Hamas in Gaza, MJC president Sheikh Riad Fataar declared: “I am Hamas! Cape Town is Hamas! Viva Hamas, viva!”
Bluen uses similar rhetoric and robotic repetition of incendiary terms, including the de rigueur “death to the IDF”. She ridicules recognised Jewish community leaders, groups and organisations, including Tikkun Africa, which does humanitarian work.
Her kindest words about Israel are that it is a “settler colonisation of Palestine since 1948”, a “fascist state” and a “whole entity that must be unsettled”. “Unsettled” and “Free Palestine” are Bluen’s codes for making Israel judenrein, the Nazi term for a Jew-free Germany.
Within days of October 7, Bluen claimed the existence of “near-universal consensus among international lawyers” that Israel was committing “textbook genocide.” No such consensus exists.
Undeterred, she uses every opportunity to accuse Israel of genocide on a scale that “reaches the threshold of almost every single crime in the (Genocide Convention) statute”, including war crimes, apartheid and deliberately starving Gazan civilians by “impeding relief supplies”.
She blithely ignores the mountain of publicly available evidence that Hamas hijacks aid, shoots civilians trying to access it and uses starvation as a deliberate strategy.
Bluen has yet to condemn Hamas for its recent horrific propaganda video showing skeletal hostage Evyatar David (24) digging his own grave in a Gazan tunnel.
Perhaps the most egregious sign of Bluen’s unadulterated Jew hatred is her use of inverted red triangles.
The Nazis used them to mark Jews and political prisoners in concentration camps. Hamas has appropriated the symbol to designate Israeli targets in its propaganda videos. Its supporters use them to identify, target and harass Jews online.
Bluen uses them in her social media posts with them to mark and celebrate deaths of Israeli soldiers in Gaza. With a big grin on her face and red or black keffiyeh round her neck.
She is aided and abetted in her campaign to demonise Israel and Jews by a willing South African political and media environment and journalists who are pathologically hostile to Israel.
She is not above massaging biographical details to boost her standing. She claims to be a journalist but her credentials are thin. She cites a stint as a columnist for Business Day. The newspaper published only a handful of columns under her name in 2016.
Genuine journalist and satirist David Bullard dismissed Bluen in an opinion piece in Daily Friend in 2019 as a “work-shy rich kid”. Thanks to “daddy’s money”, Bullard wrote, Bluen “got herself a couple of degrees” and was “trying to bag a PhD” through the London School of Economics (LSE). She began it in 2017. Eight years later, aged 38, she’s still trying to bag it.
On LSE’s website, Bluen lists her expertise as “crimes against humanity, Nuremberg Trials and international criminal law”. A more honest description would be chief Hamas propagandist.
South African-born Israeli Joshua Schewitz calls her a “vulture” in a “grotesque political theatre” lurking in South Africa’s wings until October 7. Schewitz is a researcher and analyst specialising in African and Middle Eastern security-related issues and blockchain technology.
The star director of this political theatre is DIRCO, South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation, backed by a “suspect cast of terror-sponsoring states, full-time activists, journalists and bureaucrats who feed not on facts but corpses”.
Among them is Daily Maverick’s moody Kevin Bloom, who styles himself its “lead genocide journalist”. Bloom, like Bluen, routinely slings the genocide and other libels at Israel and Jews.
He is at it again with his claim that Israel is deliberately targeting and killing journalists in Gaza. Bloom appears to believe that a PRESS vest magically transforms Hamas sympathisers and terrorists into journalists.
The Daily Maverick, recently outed for having a “Jew problem”, helps him on his journey. It is not alone in its bias against Israel. It does have a “pronounced pattern of singling out the Jewish community for special attack” with genocide libels, as David Saks, consultant and former associate director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), notes in a PoliticsWeb article.
Adam Louis-Klein, a Yale graduate in philosophy, writer, anthropologist and musician, currently completing a PhD in anthropology at McGill University in Canada, has a sobering view of such patterns.
He calls them what they are: pure “projection-inversion of Hamas’s genocide of Israeli Jews” on October 7.
Amid the surge of Jewish and other voices labelling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide, US military analyst and combat veteran John Spencer offers sharply contrasting views grounded in battlefield realities.
Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, argues that Hamas’s strategy is asymmetric and, from the outset on October 7, deliberately engineered to provoke such claims.
With over 724km of tunnels embedded beneath civilian infrastructure across Gaza, Hamas has created a “subterranean urban warfare” system designed to shield fighters while maximising civilian exposure. This tactic, Spencer contends, is central to Hamas’s doctrine of prolonging conflict, manipulating media narratives and inviting international condemnation of Israel.
He explains how Hamas’s tunnel strategy complicates Israel’s military response and fuels the rhetorical battlefield, where terms, such as genocide, are deployed more as political weapons than legal assessments.
His analysis reframes the conflict as a war of survival against an enemy that cynically weaponises urban density and civilian shielding.
Jewish commentators echo this view, among them Ted Sheskin, a US scholar who critiques the rhetorical misuse of genocide, Sherwin Pomerantz, a Jerusalem-based writer, and British barrister Natasha Hausdorff, an international law specialist.
All argue that high civilian casualties, while tragic, do not constitute genocidal intent under international law. They warn that such accusations distort legal and moral frameworks of war, turning political outrage into a substitute for evidence.
In a blog on Lay of the Land website, Schewitz summarises DIRCO’s script that Bloom, Bluen and others follow slavishly:
“As if taking their cue off the local wildlife, they wait like vultures circling the wounded. They need and feed off death and salivate over child-sized coffins to prop up their message.”
In their language, “they may call themselves humanitarians but in reality they are scavengers feeding off proverbial carrion”.
In the end, sages remind us that language is never neutral. It shapes perception, policy, and possibility.
As the late UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote: “Words are the vehicles of meaning. They can heal or hurt, uplift or diminish. Language is the architecture of peace – or its undoing.”
* Marika Sboros is a freelance journalist and best-selling author with decades of service at leading South African titles. She was the BizNews Health editor in our early years.