The South African Jewish Report, published weekly in Johannesburg, is engaged in a heated public spat with the country's Jewish minister of intelligence, Ronnie Kasrils, and the South African Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI), over the newspaper's refusal to publish a letter by Kasrils that, the paper's editor says, compares Israel's actions in the Palestinian territories to those of the Nazis during WWII.

Ronnie Kasril, South African Intelligence Minister.
Photo: UN

The Report last week refused to publish Kasrils's reply to an article that questioned his stance on Israel.

SAJR editor Geoff Sifrin initially approved Kasrils's request to reply to an article by Anthony Posner entitled "Some Pertinent Questions to Kasrils."

Posner had concluded the article with the challenge: "So Mr Kasrils... now is your chance to engage in 'civilized discussion.' But perhaps this 'kitchen' is too hot for you? I am sure that the readers of the SAJR will be interested to see whether you have the ability to respond in a rational manner to all the points I have raised in this letter."

Sifrin refused to print Kasrils's reply, arguing in an editorial that it would not contribute to constructive debate and would offend the SAJR's readers.

Kasrils told The Mail and Guardian newspaper he suspected Sifrin had been pressured not to publish his views.

Sifrin rejects that claim. In a telephone interview with The Jerusalem Post, Sifrin said he had initially agreed to publish Kasril's letter but that "what he sent, in my estimation, was too offensive to publish. It referred to an analogy to Nazi action in the Warsaw ghetto and Nazi action after [SS leader Reinhard] Heydrich's assassination after which the Nazis destroyed [the Czech village of] Lidice. He basically said the Israelis are doing the same, and that crossed a red line as far as we were concerned."

Sifrin said he had "agonized" over whether to publish Kasril's letter, and had consulted with the chair of the paper's editorial committee. He rejected, however, Kasril's claim that he had been pressured into not publishing the letter.

"It's not true that I came under pressure by the [South African Jewish] Board of Deputies; nobody called me to threaten me. There is an ethos of a newspaper that one operates with, there was no order from anyone not to publish it. We don't operate in a vacuum. We know our readership - some of which are Holocaust victims. The editorial committee head and I agreed we couldn't publish the letter. Its effect would be unfair to our readers, and we could not give him a platform for this view, which basically crossed a red line," Sifrin told the Post.

In an open letter to Sifrin, published by the the South African Jewish Report on November 17, Kasrils accused the paper of "stifling his words" and said the editorial and Posner's column had distorted what he had written.

"This is a shameful debasement of journalistic ethics, not to mention the questionable morality and crass intolerance that refuses to allow my right to reply to questions directly put to me in your columns," wrote Kasrils.

"You reneged on an undertaking to publish my reply and yet have the temerity to claim that 'the richness and creativity of Jewish life owes much to its acceptance of open debate, even if acrimonious.'

"Your utterances fly in the face of a cowardly action last personally experienced when anything I said or wrote was silenced by an apartheid government banning order in 1962," Kasrils wrote.

He accused the newspaper of misleading readers into believing that he was calling for the annihilation of Israel and that he was a Holocaust denier.

"On the question of my invoking the Nazi parallel with Israel, you fail to acknowledge that I have consistently and pointedly referred to certain comparable measures being employed against the people of Palestine and Lebanon," he said. "I am clearly referring to certain actions and not a total genocidal system such as the Holocaust," Kasrils wrote.

"Mr. Editor, you and the cowardly cabal behind you can ban and vilify me, but as long as I have breath I will continue to protest against Israel's fascist-style brutality and declare 'Not in my name' in the interest of the true values of Judaism and humanity and in support of justice and security for all Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Middle East and further afield."

Kasrils said it was "absolutely dishonest" of the paper to publish Posner's piece without his reply.

Despite his anti-Israel stance, it is thought that Kasrils has been providing protection from terrorist threats to South Africa's Jewish community, several Jewish leaders, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, told the Post.

"I can't comment on that, because I don't know, but it is certainly possible he uses his office to provide protection. Nobody is accusing him of being anti-Jewish. I wouldn't be surprised if he was behind the scenes doing something like that," Sifrin said.

Regarding the decision not to publish Kasril's letter, Safrin said the minister's words had the potential to promote anti-Jewish feelings in South Africa. "The general atmosphere here is pretty anti-Israel. Comments like these rub off on the Jewish community here. All the comparisons that are being made between apartheid and Israel are all over the place, and Kasrils is adding to this. But I wouldn't accuse him of being anti-Jewish in any way," Sifrin said.

"We are not excluding Kasrils from the paper, just his letter, which we couldn't publish," Sifrin said.

Kasrils, in an e-mail exchange with the Post, confirmed that he does use his office to protect South Africa's 80,000-strong Jewish community, but would not go into specifics. Asked if he thought his comments could inflame anti-Jewish sentiment, he replied in the negative.

"No, not anti-Jewish sentiment. The black population in general and the Muslim population in particular congratulate me on demonstrating that not all Jews support Israel's inhumane treatment of the Palestinian and Lebanese people. My actions help them to understand that there is a distinction between Judaism, on the one hand, and Zionism and the Israeli government on the other," Kasrils told the Post.