South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Feb. 25 article in Foreign Policy—co-written by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, Colombia President Gustavo Petro and Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, a left-wing policy adviser and co-general coordinator of Progressive International—spreads misinformation about Israel while acting as a rallying cry for anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish sentiments.
Among the mistruths, the article claims that the deaths of “61,000 people” indicate a failed international system and are indicative of genocide—a claim that is far from the truth. The number of dead itself is already questionable, as it comes from the Hamas-run Gazan Ministry of Health, which has a perverse incentive to inflate the number of dead to condemn Israel. The number also doesn’t distinguish between genuine civilians and combatants.
The article also makes no mention of crimes undertaken by Hamas terrorists or the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for a now-late Hamas leader who helped execute the massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which kicked off this brutal war.
The article’s content is not surprising given that its writers are members of the Hague Group, which includes: Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Colombia, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa. Organizers say the group was founded to combat violations of international humanitarian law, but all of its focus has been on attacking the State of Israel.
The Hague Group has called for its member states and other nations to put an arms embargo on Israel and prevent vessels carrying military supplies to Israel from docking at their ports. Ramaphosa’s government, however, had no qualms about hosting Russian military exercises despite the country currently engaged in a brutal war of conquest over Ukraine. Additionally, while the South African government investigated and found itself not guilty of loading munitions and weapons onto the Lady R—a Russian vessel that was docked at a South African military base in 2022—accusations by the United States that the ship was transporting military equipment to Russia should not be ignored.
The South African government, and Ramaphosa in particular, have no right to claim adherence to international law as the country’s previous president, Jacob Zuma, refused to arrest Sudanese president and warlord Omar al-Bashir, who the ICC had issued an arrest warrant for in 2010 on charges of genocide with deaths predicted to be between 200,000 and 400,000. Ramaphosa was deputy president at the time.
The Hague Group itself also requires some further scrutiny.
Supporting organizations present at the founding of the group included Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights and Samidoun, all entities with links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated foreign terrorist organization. Progressive International, whose co-general coordinator is acting chair of the Hague Group, has also declared that Israel is a “colonial project and imperial outpost,” a factually incorrect statement that implies a desire for the destruction of Israel itself. The entire formulation of the Hague Group seems like a way to use international law as a crutch to condemn Israel rather than an actual principle that they support.
The Hague Group and Progressive International have not been transparent with their financial data, donors or sources of funding, raising concerns over both who is footing the bill and their intentions. This links to questions as to the timing surrounding South Africa’s accusations of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice, as it was followed by the country’s ruling ANC escaping a financial crisis ahead of the 2024 general elections.
The Hague Group is not a principled group of humanitarians. Rather, it is a cabal of anti-Western actors pushing an anti-Israel agenda, one motivated by greed and hate. With hypocrisy this rife, the Foreign Policy article should rightfully be considered as misinformation and hatemongering.
Zionism and Israel (which through AIPAC have for over six decades had 80 % of United States lawmakers in their pocket) now pose an existential threat to this country and its people.
Zionism and Israel–in frenzied Middle East acquisition mode and waging an ongoing genocidal campaign against a civilian Palestinian population–are pressing American lawmakers to criminalize any vocal opposition to their atrocities.
College students are being arrested, expelled, their degrees withheld for voicing objection to Israel’s murderous rampage through the Middle East.
Dean Cobb, of Columbia’s journalism Dept., suggests students stand down, and post nothing on social media that might get them into trouble.
WOW!
Zionists are undermining the sacred Constitution of this Republic, fought for against tyrants.
There are no greater threats posed the lives and liberties of Americans than Zionism and Israel.
Led by its beloved ‘Bibi’, supported by the United States and NATO,
Israel’s wildly disproportionate ‘defense’ of itself since Oct. 7th, 2023 has been a ghastly and relentless offensive of holocaust proportions.
Too few have vocally condemned Israel’s heinous actions. One of those few is Mahmoud Khalil, arrested and facing deportation for doing so. I am another, and remain free.
It may be only a matter of time. They came for Mahmoud, and will, if Zionism and Israel have their way with Congress, soon come for me.
The last seventeen months of israeli aggression have been a horror of sadistic and indiscriminate killing and maiming of Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians numbering in the tens of thousands, with no end to the genocidal campaign in sight.
The list of war crimes gets longer with each passing day, and no state entities or UN resolution propose to stop it. Mainstream ’embedded’ media systematically avoid reporting on the scope of Israeli atrocities, characterizing the horrific deaths, catastrophic injuries and disfigurements of civilians as unavoidable collateral to Israel’s necessary defense strategy against terrorism.
It is clear, Israelis have wanted from the start for a patient Iran to engage, and to have United States military boots on the ground to join them in the Zionist crusade across the Middle East.
They continue their killings of civilians in Gaza and West Bank, even now once again blocking critical lifesaving aid from entering Gaza despite a first phase truce, in transparent attempts to provoke Hamas, so they can excuse “…opening the gates of hell…” on desperate Palestinian civilians.
Israel’s crimes against humanity bring shame on the Jewish people, and dishonor those 6,000,000 Jews murdered by fascists in the mid-twentieth century.
Never, however, for the power in denial of their own now hackneyed defense cry, will Jews see their beloved Israel for the aberration it is.
In its 76-year history, Israel has managed to redefine Jews and Judaism.
No more the flock fleeing a genocidal pharaoh in early chapters of their magnificent history, and millennia later suffering a holocaust brought down upon them by Europe’s fascists who blamed the ills of their nations on them, shipping them off to concentration camps, and murdering 6,000,000 of them.
No! No more the victims, though the tribe strangely clings to a victim identity, having morphed into a grotesque band of genocidal killers, always claiming the atrocities they commit are in self defense.
No! No more the victims, but the victimizers. No more are they the inmates of concentration camps, but the builders and guards of concentration camps, starving and torturing their inmates to death.
No more the victims of racism making lives in a cruel world. No more the oppressed. Jews have learned how to be the racist, cruel oppressors, how to seize and hold power over the oppressed.
Such incredible irony. Israel, a home for Jews fished from rivers of Palestinian blood, and fashioned after that from which they over millennia fled:
the pharaohs and fascists.