Most of the workings of the African National Congress (ANC) are concealed from sight – submerged “like a vast iceberg in the murky waters of nepotism, cronyism, influence peddling, deal making, and corruption,” says political commentator William Saunderson-Meyers. This is certainly true of the ANC’s links with Islamist and Jihad terror groups.
Saunderson-Meyers was reflecting in the wake of the shock May elections that unseated the ANC after 30 years of the uncontested political predominance that came with being the outright majority, and before President Cyril Ramaphosa announced his new cabinet on Sunday, May 30. Extensive negotiations were required before he reluctantly succeeded in creating a government of national unity (GNU) with multiple parties, including the former opposition Democratic Alliance (DA).
The ANC was especially disappointed in the Western Cape province, where support plummeted from nearly 29% in 2019 to less than 20%. Contrary to their predictions, the province with the largest Muslim voter base secured greater support for the DA than previously.
Expecting to resume his former position as provincial premier, ANC candidate Ebrahim Rassool reportedly predicted “that based on Palestinian solidarity, the ANC would take 60% of Muslim voters from the DA.”
“We were very confident of their support,” one provincial leader told the Sunday Times newspaper. “Considering the Palestine matter, and the time and resources we had put into the Muslim community, I am very disappointed,” he said, faced with the fact that even Ramaphosa’s lengthy campaign in these areas, including the spectacles of his jarringly militant call for Palestine to be “free from the river to the sea” and bowing in prayer in a mosque, failed to muster electoral enthusiasm.
Neither did the last-minute flurry of Minister of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) Naledi Pandor, when she appeared as the guest of honor at a mosque in central Cape Town the night before the elections. Pandor has not been re-elected to Parliament and has announced her retirement. Ronald Lamola, previously minister of justice and corrections, has been named as the new minister of foreign affairs.
The ANC manifestly misjudged popular support for its vehemently anti-Israel position. Analysts are left wondering what, then, motivates it.
What motivates the ANC's anti-Israel position?
Five months before the elections, astute observers at The Hague’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January were given a rare glimpse into the subterranean ANC iceberg, and a clue as to what went wrong in the party’s election campaign and what is at stake for the country and globally in the party’s anti-Israel support for Hamas.
Comfortably in attendance among the South African ICJ delegation was Jekyll and Hyde character Shawan Jabarin, the general director of the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. He ostensibly aims to promote and protect the rule of law and act against Israel in the international arena but is regarded in Israel’s intelligence and security community as a key figure in the Marxist, national-secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terror organization in Israel, the US, the European Union and Canada.
The PFLP is militantly opposed to the Oslo Accords and intent on Israel’s destruction. “Negotiations will be held only with knives and weapons,” famously declared plane hijacker and aging PFLP activist Leila Khaled (herself a popular visitor to South Africa, where people clamor to name roads after her).
Responsible, among other crimes, for plane hijackings and, during the Second Intifada, suicide attacks and shootings that killed dozens of Israelis and wounded hundreds more, the PFLP incorporates complementary soft power human rights and boycott campaigns in support of its terror activities.
Recognizing Al-Haq’s above-the-line activities as constituting an important component of the network of PFLP civil society organizations operating undercover on its behalf and under its instructions, in 2021 Israel formally designated it a banned terrorist entity.
It was slow off the mark: The NGO’s ties to the PFLP had resulted three years previously in Visa, Mastercard, and American Express shutting down credit card donations made to it online.
Jabarin himself “is part of the PFLP’s directorship, leadership, and the overall role player in carrying out clandestine operations,” according to a well-placed source not authorized to speak on the record about the still-classified intelligence information surrounding Jabarin (which, examined by Israel’s Supreme Court in 2008 with the agreement of his advocate, Michael Sfard, was found to be “concrete and reliable”).
Sitting in the courtroom behind the key ICJ South African protagonists, including then-minister of justice and correctional services Ronald Lamola, retired jurist John Dugard, and law professor Max Du Plessis, and standing behind Pandor on the steps of the court at the press conference after the proceedings, Jabarin’s presence at The Hague revealed the sustained partnership between Pretoria and anti-Western Palestinian terror organizations generally and the PFLP’s Al-Haq in this instance specifically that culminated in the legal antics on the world stage in defense of Hamas, another Iran-funded designated terror organization.
Writing on its website in June 2009, Al-Haq described its relationship with the South African government: “For the past 15 months, Al-Haq has been involved in an extensive legal study... commissioned by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC)... funded by the South African Department of Foreign Affairs, to “examine the suggestion made in the 2007 report of eminent South African jurist John Dugard, in his capacity as UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967, that Israel’s practices in the OPT had assumed characteristics of colonialism and apartheid. Working with Dugard himself as consultant and du Plessis as a principal contributor, Al-Haq contributed researchers to the study, which, they said, culminated in the publication of a report entitled Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A Re-Assessment of Israel’s practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories under International Law.”
Strangely unavailable on its own website, the 300-page HSRC report is accessible online instead through the University of Sussex, which notes it was never peer reviewed and, in the process, makes a mockery of the HSRC’s mandate to produce “leading-edge policy research through engaged scholarship.”
The report’s dubious academic status never discouraged the PFLP, Al-Haq, or Pretoria’s foreign policy community from widely punting it, animating it in the lawfare arena where it has formed the basis for further reports defining Israel as an apartheid state by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other international human rights luminaries.
Dugard and du Plessis also relied on their own, popularized research in representing South Africa at the ICJ, the platform the octogenarian Dugard has long sought in order to present his legacy project.
Sitting behind them, Jabarin was well positioned to ensure that the South Africans enacted the script they had jointly crafted nearly two decades earlier.
With Pandor and Lamola at the helm, South Africa used Israel’s military defense against Hamas’s October terror assault as the excuse to trigger the switch on Pretoria’s foreign policy community’s long-planned course of legal action targeting the Jewish state.
The supposedly urgent application to the ICJ made internationally visible an evolved chunk of the anti-Western iceberg in the form of the sustained partnership, actively cultivated out of line of sight for several decades, between Pretoria and Iranian proxy Palestinian terror organizations.
A devout and early convert to Islam, Pandor, enrobed in varying keffiyehs, was perfect for the role. Well connected in the global Muslim business community through her husband, Sharif Pandor, she was hosted in mosques in Cape Town and Durban in February, April, and the night before the elections in May. People at Pandor’s glowing pro-Palestine performances had front-row glimpses into the ANC’s subterranean world.
“International human rights organizations have provided research that clearly indicates that the conduct of Israel toward Palestinian people renders Israel an apartheid state, which we should name as such in the context of the United Nations,” said Pandor in Durban’s Jumah Masjid Mosque on April 12, 2024, unashamedly referring to the report generated in part by Al-Haq, with funding from her own department.
Speaking at Cape Town’s Al Jaamiah Masjid mosque, in her final election push the night before voters went to the polls on May 29, Pandor addressed some of their frustration.
“I get lots of emails, sometimes from some of you here. You write to me and say, ‘Minister Pandor, you aren’t radical enough.... When are you going to lead jihad?’” she said.
“I can’t,” she said.
But Pandor shared her constituents’ concerns; she promoted the international legal fora to pursue their jihadist goals. “So, I say to them, ‘The world has established institutions whose mandate is to protect people, whose mandate is peace and security, whose mandate is to judge on issues of international law,’” she said. “As a government, we’ve done what we think we can to support the people of Gaza through the legal mechanisms available to all governments that are state parties to the Geneva Convention and the ICJ,” she said. “We’ve approached the International Criminal Court [ICC] on the individual charge of war crime for the leadership of Israel, and we then approached the ICJ to address the breaches of the responsibilities of Israel under the Genocide Convention”.
Seeking re-election for herself and her party, Pandor appealed for patience: “To defeat a huge monster, you sometimes have to do it piece by piece by piece. … You have to … dig a hole, and … as you dig, it becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. And in the end, the monster will sink,” she told her militantly anti-Zionist Cape Town audience.
Acknowledging that South Africa had failed to achieve everything hitherto sought in its piecemeal legal campaign, in April Pandor claimed “one absolutely excellent victory of exposure.” “For the first time, Israel had to appear before the international community and attempt to defend itself .... We cannot understate the significance of the court’s ruling; it’s the first time in 75 years that any institution has tried to hold Israel accountable,” she said.
Pandor personally shared some of her audience’s jihad-related frustration. “I’m doing what I’m doing from too safe a position,” she said at the Al Jaamiah Masjid. “I would wish I were shoulder to shoulder with the men and women in Rafah. That’s where I feel I should be. We have been denied that opportunity by the circumstance of our geography,” she said, encouraging people to continue fighting. “My core message to you is, fight on,” she said. “So, dear brothers and sisters, … all I can say to you now is a luta continua, the struggle continues,” said Pandor.
She appealed for support for global solidarity campaigns from people present in the Al Jaamiah Mosque in Cape Town the night before the elections whom she knew to be actively involved with the Al Quds International Institution which works in close association with people in Gaza and around Al Aqsa in Jerusalem.
On April 5, in between his ICJ appearance in January and the May 2024 elections, the last Friday in Ramadan, which has in past years been associated with sparking violence in Jerusalem, Lamola spoke at Cape Town’s Shiite Ahlul Bait Mosque. Opened in 2017, it is the spiritual and proselytizing home of Shia Muslims, including expats from Pakistan and East Africa . It was established in 1979 by Iran’s first Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini as an annual focus international to promote Iranian interests by celebrating the fight by its global proxies and supporters against Israel and Western power.
Lamola was the keynote speaker on Quds Day. “The nations of the world must protect the people of Gaza. This is a fight … we will continue with even after the 29th of May when the ANC government will continue to lead the people of South Africa and continue to lead humanity across the globe,” he told his mosque followers. “It’s a fight we will take to the UN, to the ICJ, and to all international platforms,” he said.
“I know Sheikh Gabriels and other leaders have links all over the world. We have got our guests present here from Lebanon and Istanbul,” said Pandor, referring to three men who had been formally welcomed by Nazeem Jamie, Al Jaamiah Mosque chairman, earlier in the evening.
“I acknowledge the presence of Honorable Sheikh Gabriels, executive director of Al Quds South Africa; Dr. Ayman Zeidan, deputy director general, chief executive officer of the sanctioned and designated terror organization Al Quds International Institution, Istanbul Office; and brother Yunus, external relations manager of Al Quds International Institution,” Jamie had said.
Sheikh Ebrahim Gabriels, a prominent leader in Cape Town’s Muslim community, had opened the evening with a prayer of thanks. Describing Muslims in democratic post-apartheid South African society as being “among the most free Muslims in the world,” he said that “not even Muslims in Muslim countries enjoy the freedom that we have in South Africa. May Allah grant that tomorrow should be a very successful day for all of us as Muslims and for all South Africans,” he prayed, encouraging the community to vote for the ANC.
Among the freedoms Gabriels enjoys is his work as executive director of Al-Quds South Africa. Established in 2001 and based in Beirut, the Al Quds International Institute (QII) acts for or on behalf of Hamas.
Gabriels is aware no doubt that in 1997 the US State Department designated Hamas a terrorist organization and that, operating under the cover of charity, the Al-Quds Foundation is Hamas’s fund-raising proxy. Controlled by its members under the guidance of its leadership, it promotes Hamas’s influence and control in the Palestinian territories and financially supports its projects of terror against Jerusalem, including support for its fighters’ families and prisoners. Al-Quds considers its representatives to be unofficial Hamas ambassadors in their respective countries, including Gabriels in South Africa.
He is aware, too, that in 2012 Al Quds was sanctioned by the US Department of Treasury, its assets held under US jurisdiction frozen; US citizens are prohibited from transacting with it.
In expressing his gratitude for the freedoms available to him in South Africa, Gabriels is no doubt fully aware also that his activities are prohibited not just in the US but also in Arab countries including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain.
In contrast, Hamas is publicly embraced in South Africa at the highest political levels. Shortly before the elections, at the global anti-apartheid Palestine solidarity conference in Sandton in May, Deputy Minister of DIRCO, Alvin Botes (who has retained his position in the current cabinet), together with Mohammed Dangor, former South African ambassador to several Iran-aligned countries and the Palestine Authority, warmly accompanied Hamas representatives Basem Naim and Emad Saber.
Following the Hamas 2007 takeover of Gaza, Naim was appointed minister of health in Gaza and immediately replaced Fatah-affiliated hospital directors and medical staff with Hamas-aligned individuals. He proceeded to militarily exploit the hospitals by embedding Hamas’s terrorist operatives inside the hospital buildings.
Saber is Hamas’s representative in South Africa and director of the East, Central, and Southern African regions in the International Relations Office of Hamas. In spite of his Hamas comrades’ own body cameras and other unabashed proclamations of their murderous achievements, he denies they killed innocent women and children in their October 7 attack on Israel. “There is no such evidence. If the media has such evidence, we would be happy to review it and respond. But, to date, neither the Israeli authorities nor the Israeli media have provided such evidence,” he claimed poker faced. Freely roaming South Africa, he enjoys an increasingly confident platform to network widely, including with his friends in the dubious Johannesburg-based Media Review Network (MRN). Visitors to Johannesburg’s Nelson Mandela Foundation in May shouldn’t have been surprised to encounter Hamas and MRN co-published war propaganda material being freely distributed. Bassam and Saber also conversed openly with Pandor at the Sandton conference.
Mandla Mandela, the problem grandson of former president Nelson Mandela and until recently a parliamentarian, was appointed an executive member of the League of Parliamentarians for the Liberation of Al-Quds, headed by Yemenite businessman and strong Muslim Brotherhood figure Hamid bin Abdullah Al-Ahmar, who lives in exile in Istanbul and is close to President Erdogan, a strong supporter of Hamas.
Nelson Mandela’s influential place in his grandson’s life has been closely filled by Gabriels. Overseeing Mandela’s 2016 marriage to his fourth wife, conversion to Islam and subsequent marriage to the daughter of his close community members and mosque attendees, Gabriels has groomed Mandela to abuse his famous family name to promote the interests of Hamas’s terror organization by propagandizing the malicious Israel/apartheid libel. Much of South Africa’s outrageous condemnation of Israel and promotion of Hamas now implicitly take place in the name of Nelson Mandela.
Shortly before South Africa announced its legal action at the ICJ, seeking to achieve through the courts the military halt sought by Hamas on the battle fields, Mandela coordinated the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine with its now-ubiquitous key logo symbolizing the intention to return to Palestine, even by force. He hosted other members of the League of Parliamentarians for Al-Quds.
Mandela was excluded from the list of ANC parliamentary hopefuls and is no longer an MP. His place as Al-Quds faithful in the South African Parliament has been taken by Sheik Imraam Subrathie, secretary general of United for Palestine and The Association of Muslim Accountants and Lawyers of South Africa. Popping up as number 7 on the ANC list of parliamentary hopefuls, he has since been sworn in as an MP.
Thanking Pandor for her presentation at Durban’s mosque in April, Subrathie signaled his links to Al-Quds, wearing as he did, Mandela’s key-embossed Global Campaign to Return to Palestine keffiyeh. Subrathie is also close to Gabriels.
Out in the non-parliamentary cold and in spite of the ANC’s poor election results, Mandela continued to lobby for his cause, appearing on a panel with Dr. Imtiaz Sooliman, whose humanitarian activities with Gift of the Givers charity in Palestine have, since October 7, increasingly taken on an explicitly pro-Hamas political face with his new globalized Coalition for Good.
Also freely operating in South Africa is Al-Quds’ Ayman Zeidan, openly mobilizing the local Muslim community for what he describes as “political jihadist support” for “people who are on the battlefield” in Al-Quds’ military struggle to re-Islamize Jerusalem and liberate the city of Jews. Zeidan publicly solicits financial contributions to support Hamas’s military operatives and their families in Jerusalem, to support families of men who serve prison sentences, to fund their legal processes, and to support families whose houses are demolished due to terror attacks.
Speaking after Pandor’s appeal to him and others for support for global solidarity campaigns, Zeidan expressed his deep appreciation for and pride in Pandor, whom he described as “a Muslim lady,” “a great woman,” and “one of the heroes of this era.” “When we speak of the heroism of the people of Gaza, we can also speak of the heroism of Minister Pandor,” he said. “I’m really very proud to be here today,” said Zeidan. “We are here to do our duty,” he said. “It is an important communication and appreciation that we are doing to a great person, Minister Pandor. We cannot think that this term is ended while we are not appreciating this great hero of the world, not only for South Africa.”
Zeidan’s Islamist Jihadist encouragement to South Africans to continue to support Pandor in her position as foreign affairs minister proved fruitless; South African voters demonstrated minimal support for and failed to endorse Pretoria’s partnership with anti-Western Palestinian terror organizations.
The ANC government’s vehemently anti-Israel defense of Hamas and other terror organizations appears to perform another function. While it appears to be harnessed to the support of the three-million strong, vocal, financially resourced and globally connected Muslim community, its real foreign affairs agenda lies somewhere other than Israel.
Put simply, the attack on Israel functions as a wrecking ball to bring down another structure. The fact and timing of Pretoria pulling the trigger on Israel in the multinational legal fora of the ICC and the ICJ in January 2024 are significant.
South Africa’s approach to the ICJ is linked to its position in the anti-Western BRICS bloc of countries where, due to its role on the African continent and its emotional and ideological tendencies, it punches above its weight with China and Russia.
The ICJ move coincided precisely with the ascendance by Russian President Vladimir Putin to the position of BRICS general secretary. Putin’s Russia has been sanctioned by the West for his assault on Ukraine, and he is personally subject to an ICC arrest warrant by countries that are signatory to the Rome Statute for abducting Ukrainian children into Russia.
They coincided also with Iran’s entrance as a BRICS member. By waving the post-apartheid banners of anti-racism, human rights, and multiculturalism hard borne in the struggle for democracy on behalf of the Palestinians and assaulting Israel in court, Dugard’s ICJ show is designed by his bosses, whether he likes it or not, to provide cover to take issue with and weaken or otherwise transform the multinational fora holding Putin to account.
One proof of the pudding is the fact that Pandor’s emphasis on humanitarian values and principles driving the assaults on Israel in the ICC and ICJ in the name of saving the lives of innocent women and children has not been accompanied by pressure on her friends and admirers in Hamas, the PFLP, Al-Quds and other terror organizations to release the innocent women and children and other hostages, to desist from using innocent Palestinian women and children as human shields, and to immediately end the war, obviating the need to try to obtain a ceasefire in court.
The international community, which does not share Pretoria’s interest in supporting Putin, would do well to excavate into the parts of the ANC iceberg starting to be revealed, to see the latest and most grotesque round of state capture rapidly becoming embedded in the political landscape: South Africa has become, firstly, Putin’s mouthpiece, seeking to transform multilateral institutions in his favor; and secondly, Iran’s shadow attack dog promoting the interests of their proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen.
As things stand, South Africa, under the ANC government, has repeatedly refused to join the US, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in designating Hamas and Hezbollah as terror organizations. Instead, it has knowingly and deliberately created an enabling environment for related interest groups to successfully operate freely and publicly. The new government of national unity is ANC-led, and certainly in vital areas such as foreign policy. The appointment in Pandor’s place of Lamola as minister of foreign affairs clearly points to South Africa being set to continue on this path, and to support Hamas. Beneath the surface, DIRCO appears to have been strategically and fundamentally infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood and its associates. Left unchecked, funds will certainly continue to be collected from local and international Islamist sources and may be channeled into the hands of terrorist organizations.
It is time for concerned people to start connecting the dots, which are starting to be increasingly visible from Pretoria. ■