Reports from various sources suggest that negotiating teams from the United States and Iran may return to Pakistan in the coming days to resume talks aimed at ending the war in the Gulf.

Though reference is made to the “war in the Gulf’’, it does not adequately describe the reality of the war against Iran, nor why it was launched and by whom it was launched. 

It is thus crucial to recall that Israel and the US launched Operations Roaring Lion and Epic Fury on February 28, with the stated aim of collapsing the government of the Islamic Republic and imposing regime change.

Iran retaliated by firing missiles at Israel, across the Middle East at Gulf nations hosting US military bases in the region. The sustained ferocity of Iran’s response demonstrated its ability to defend itself from the combined air and naval attacks by the US and Israel.

Though Iran claims that hundreds of soldiers from the attacking forces have been killed, Israel has downplayed this. According to Zionist media, only twelve IDF soldiers and 23 civilians have been killed, and at least 7,693 more injured in ballistic missile attacks across Israel since February 28, while eleven US soldiers have been killed.

While uncertainty about the toll reigns, and a fragile truce hangs by a thread, the US has imposed a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump has threatened to sink any ship that dares to defy the blockade, adding that US forces will employ “the same system of kill” used against drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea.

Despite Trump’s bravado, we learn that four Iran-linked vessels have sneakily skirted around his blockade – with China blasting the siege as “dangerous and irresponsible”.

Netanyahu comes unstuck too, with global economic crisis brewing and the IMF now issuing warnings about negative growth rates. As the instigator of the unprovoked and illegal war, Netanyahu is aware that the likelihood of a global recession resulting from his criminal actions and having dragged Trump along, places his regime as the central cause of it.

The alarm that gripped Western economists points to a strain on supply chains. The unwise and foolish military blockade by Trump to ostensibly “punish” Iran for exercising its sovereignty over the Strait puts the international community at risk of a global food crisis, the chief economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warned on Monday.

While Netanyahu exercises his manipulation of US policy against Iran, Saudi Arabia has publicly been pressing the United States to end its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and return to negotiations with Iran, according to a The Wall Street Journal report. 

The report said Riyadh fears the standoff could trigger a broader regional escalation, including threats to Red Sea shipping routes and Saudi oil exports.

In obedience to Netanyahu and fearing axing, which ultimately led to him being fired, Mossad Director David Barnea proclaimed at the Holocaust ceremony that his spy agency will not rest until it facilitates the “fall of the Islamic regime of Iran”.

“Our mission is not yet complete. We did not think that our mission would be completed immediately with the fading of the battles, but rather we planned, and [really] we planned to continue, and this will be manifested even after the time of attacks on Tehran,” said Barnea.

This was the first time that the Mossad chief publicly addressed his role and views about regime change in Iran.

After regime change in Iran had not transpired in the early weeks of the war, and even more since a ceasefire kicked in without regime change, various Israeli and American officials have sought to blame the Mossad and Barnea for the failure.

Unconvincingly pushing back, the Mossad desperately rejected allegations that it had failed or that it tried to “sucker” the US into believing in delusions of regime change.

Having failed miserably to attain any of his military and political goals, Netanyahu is in a fix – domestically as well as internationally.

With Trump desperate to end his malicious adventure that has resulted in a huge fallout of his prestige and power, he is set to cave in to Iran’s legitimate demands in the forthcoming second round of talks hosted by Pakistan.

*Iqbal Jassat is an Executive Member of the Media Review Network.

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Media Review Network welcomes Iran’s incredible resilience in defending the country and its revolution that has led to an amazing military victory. 

While analysts and strategists within the military industrial complex across the US, NATO and the Zionist-apartheid regime will be staring at their drawing boards to make sense of their humiliation, Iran’s steadfastness will ensure that its fingers remain on the trigger. 

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been bitten more than once since its brave people overthrew the corrupt Pahlavi dynasty during the Islamic Revolution of 1979, led by Imam Khomeini (RA). 

The pattern of deception engraved in Western duplicity is a badge of dishonour which Iran is fully aware of and will be on guard against. 

It knows that the defeat inflicted on Israel has left the settler colonial regime in disarray, angry and extremely bitter. 

Zionist leaders such as Yair Lapid have sharply criticised the ceasefire. He lashed out against it by blaming Netanyahu and described it as a failure of political and strategic leadership, warning of long-term consequences for Israel’s security. “There has never been such a political disaster in all of our history,” Lapid said, arguing that “Israel wasn’t even at the table when decisions were made concerning the core of our national security.”

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That Netanyahu has been opposed to Trump’s inclination to seek an exit strategy by maliciously sabotaging offramps is well known. And that he apparently was sidelined and forced to eat humble pie has left him to account for the devastation caused by Iran’s missiles, without him achieving any of his military or political goals. 

Indeed, the irony of Netanyahu’s messianic zeal to obliterate Iran confronts him in the ashes of a synagogue in central Tehran, destroyed by him in a missile strike. Jewish representatives condemned the attack, saying Torah scrolls remained buried under the rubble.

“The Zionist regime showed no mercy towards this community during the Jewish holidays and attacked one of our ancient and holy synagogues,” Homayoun Sameh, Jewish representative in the Iranian parliament, was quoted as saying. “Unfortunately, during this attack, the synagogue building was completely destroyed”. 

Netanyahu’s failure to obliterate Iran stares him in the face as he grapples with the reality of defeat. 

It was after all his pressure on Trump based on a presentation designed to persuade the US that Iran’s regime could be toppled within 48 hours. 

He outlined a scenario in which the country’s “ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks, the regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against US interests in neighbouring countries was assessed as minimal.” Forty days of spirited retaliation by Iran, which undermined and defeated Netanyahu’s goals in addition to exposing Trump’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal war, and extracted a ceasefire on terms dictated by the IRGC, have reinforced Iran’s status and prestige among the oppressed masses of the world. 

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Israel’s genocidal regime has had to unwillingly, reluctantly, with resentment and annoyance, pay a price for the ceasefire. 

Despite Netanyahu’s efforts to sabotage the ceasefire, Trump was desperate to be relieved of his erratic demands and obligation to follow through on his threat to “open the gates of hell” on Iran. 

Now that the US has conceded defeat and Netanyahu is being forced to halt his war on Hezbollah, Iran has rightfully re-emerged as the leading edge of the global Islamic Movement and the axis of Resistance.

*Iqbal Jassat is an Executive Member of Media Review Network, Johannesburg

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By Ebrahim Moosa

On 25 February 2026 – 7 Ramaḍān 1447—South Africa lost one of its most consequential and visionary Muslim figures. Suliman Mohamed Ghoor, fondly known to all as “uncle Solly” of Vryburg, who passed away in Johannesburg at the ripe age of 93.

Businessman, philanthropist, and a tireless patron of Islamic education at home and abroad, he left behind a legacy that few could match and almost none would have kept so quietly.

He was born on 29 September 1932 in Ranavav, a village set in the Khatiavar Peninsula of Gujarat, India. Ranavav is today a small town of some 160,000 souls situated roughly 15km from Porbandar – the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi, who himself had spent formative years in South Africa as a lawyer. This geography of coincidence is fitting. The region’s people are also known as Memons, a community with a distinct Gujarati dialect and culture that today constitutes an impressive and influential global diaspora. From such roots grew the Ghoor family’s story in South Africa.

The family ancestor, Cassim Abdulla Ghoor, was a farmer in Ranavav. He had two sons: Dada Cassim (DC) Ghoor and Mohamed Cassim (MC) Ghoor, whose mother died when the latter was just two months old. It was DC Ghoor who first made the crossing from India, arriving in South Africa at the tender age of ten in 1888, where he worked for a merchant. His younger brother MC Ghoor followed, also arriving at age ten, spending a few months in Dundee, then Pretoria, before joining his brother in Vryburg in 1898. MC Ghoor was Suliman Ghoor’s father.

Their destination, Vryburg, was itself a place of layered histories. Once the capital of the short-lived Boer Republic of Stellaland (1882–1885), and then the capital of the British Crown Colony of British Bechuanaland (1885 –1895), Vryburg was later annexed to the Cape Colony and is now part of the North West Province. Its population in the 19th century numbered 18,082 residents. Into this remote but historically charged town, DC and MC Ghoor were drawn by a network of Memon families also from Ranavav. The brothers alternated their stays between South Africa and India for several decades: while one kept the family hearth in Ranavav, the other worked in South Africa. In 1903 they formalized their presence, opening a general dealer partnership trading as DC Ghoor in the downtown area next to Vryburg’s Grand Hotel.

MC Ghoor continued his crossings. In 1933, he brought his wife and five children to Vryburg, the youngest of whom was Suliman, who was then barely a year old. Suliman began his schooling in the town but could not advance beyond the primary stage: apartheid’s brutal logic barred him from the only white high school, and no high school existed for non-whites. Circumstances thus pressed him into the family business. DC Ghoor and his brother MC dissolved their partnership in 1935. MC Ghoor then renamed the departmental store MC Ghoor & Sons but died five years later at the age of 52. Suliman Ghoor was only eight years old, and his older siblings assumed responsibility. Eventually Suliman joined them and later took charge, specializing over the decades in clothing, curtaining, fabrics, flooring, appliances and furniture. In the 1970s the Group Areas Act forced the business out of the downtown area toward the edge of what is today’s central business district. There it continues to flourish, serving a Vryburg which has now grown to 90,000 residents and functioning as a regional hub for a vast farming and mining hinterland.

Through the success of his business and the force of a sterling character, Suliman Ghoor gained recognition far beyond the Memon circles of South Africa. From seven to 10 Muslim families in the 1880s, Vryburg had grown to over a thousand Muslims, hosting a mosque whose committee Suliman Ghoor chaired at the time of his death. Yet modesty and self-effacement were his most distinguished marks. He would never disclose the extent of his own generosity. The most he would ever say – and I witnessed this firsthand – was “our family helped out a bit,” words offered as encouragement for others to give. What he withheld was that his contribution was almost always the lion’s share of any project he took to heart. He was among those who spent his wealth according to the Qurʾānic teaching, “secretly,” fully reassured that his reward is with his Lord (Q 2:274). This, too, is the teaching of an authentic ḥadīth: giving with the right hand such that the left hand does not know what the right hand gives.

His public engagement with Islamic life was no less devoted. In the 1970s he became active in the Muslim Youth Movement of South Africa, which hosted important international figures and made a vital contribution to Islamic awareness in the country. He was especially moved by the Pakistani Islamic scholar and preacher Mawlānā Fazlur Rahman Ansārī (d. 1974) and by the Lebanese-American biochemist and Islamic preacher Dr. Ahmed Sakr (d. 2015), who advanced the cause of halal certification in the United States. Suliman Ghoor was also a regular member and contributor to the Quranic Study Circle in Vryburg. And he was deeply engaged with the South African National Zakah Fund (SANZAF), a premier Muslim faith-based socio-economic welfare and development organization.

His legacy is most indelibly marked by two major projects. He had a close personal relationship with the physician Dr. Imtiaz Suliman, the founder of the globally reputed NGO Gift of the Givers (GOTG). It was Suliman Ghoor, together with Dr Haroon Tayob and an established network of friends, who urged Dr. Imtiaz Suliman to commit himself fully to relief work. GOTG is today known as the unofficial “fourth arm of the state” in South Africa: a hyper-efficient, non-governmental disaster relief organization that routinely arrives at crisis zones faster than the government itself, both at home and abroad.

The second project was the founding of the Islamic Academy of South Africa. In 1989, Suliman Ghoor and his network of donor friends formed the Academy and endowed, in perpetuity, two academic positions at the University of Cape Town (UCT): a junior lectureship and a full lectureship. The Academy also supported smaller ventures at other South African universities. It was an act of institutional vision, executed with the quiet determination that characterized everything he did. 

After a national search, the inaugural hires for these two positions were Professor Abdulkader Tayob, a graduate of Temple University, USA, appointed as lecturer, and me as the junior lecturer. In his tribute, Tayob – now emeritus professor of Islamic Studies at UCT—noted “Uncle Solly’s” unique, quiet and understated manner: a businessman with a deep social commitment. Tayob, who knew him through family networks and later worked closely with him, added: “Uncle Solly represented a long line of visionaries in South Africa that committed themselves to its current crop of vibrant institutions, be it mosques, schools, or colleges. May that line not disappear. We need people like him, more than ever in our world.”

Without that endowment of the Islamic Academy embodying Suliman Ghoor’s vision, I often wonder what alternate trajectory my career would have taken, were it not for the opportunity he and his committed group of friends created for two South African scholars. Whatever contribution we make will always be indebted to his act of social benevolence and to the contributions of his colleagues in the Islamic Academy. We will never know for certain, but I carry an informed hunch that when additional fundraising for these positions slowed, Uncle Solly and his network of friends quietly covered whatever remained – asking nothing, saying less. The Muslim tradition is very explicit in the teaching of the Prophet ﷺ, who said: “Whoever inaugurates a good practice shall obtain its reward – as well as the reward of those who act upon it after the one who started it, without diminishing their reward.”

Suliman Ghoor was also deeply drawn to Islamic Sufism and the tradition of self-purification. In the 1990s he and his brothers sponsored the translation into English of the works of Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (470–561 AH / 1077–1166 CE), the world-renowned Persian scholar, preacher, and founder of the Qādiriyya Sufi order. Through his patronage, several volumes were translated by Muhtar Holland and published, bringing this treasure of Islamic spiritual writings to new generations of readers. Shaykh Saʿdullah Khan, the Chief Executive Officer of Islamia College in Cape Town, also a native of Vryburg, but never a permanent resident after his childhood, recalled “Uncle Solly as a kind and pleasant man with a heart of gold.” Endearing in his soft-spoken nature, Khan recalls conversations with Suliman Ghoor about translations of significant Islamic literature. It is during these “sittings at his home,” Khan said, “that I realized the remarkable insight of this quiet, unassuming man from a small town who had this incredible passionate interest in enlightening people the world over.”

All Suliman Ghoor’s siblings had predeceased him. He is survived by two children – Bashyr and Asima – five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. A middle son, Samir, died in a tragic accident in 1990.

With the passing of this great South African figure, all communities are the poorer. Yet none more so than South Africa’s Muslim community, for which he was a pillar, but whose height was largely invisible to those who stood under its shelter.

أَعْدَى الزَّمَانَ سَخَاؤُهُ فَسَخَا بِهِ

وَلَقَدْ يَكُونُ بِهِ الزَّمَانُ بَخِيلَا

His munificence has infected time itself, making it generous, though time, were it not for him, would be a miser.

— Abū al-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī (d. 354/965)

*Ebrahim Moosa is the Mirza Family professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies at the University of Notre Dame in the USA.

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On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel entered an illegal, immoral and reckless war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The decision was not compelled by necessity but by hubris: the claim to universal political legitimacy and the belief that non-compliant regimes could be dismantled by force. Even in Western criticism of the latter, the former persists, as a subtle colonial reflex; they read the present dangerous war with Iran as a deviation from modernity, from rationality, from some imagined norm of political progress. What is especially lost in this mode of analysis is a proper engagement with the theoretical underpinnings of Iranian revolutionary political thought, that which binds the intellectual architecture of its political order and sustains its durability. The Islamic Republic is a political formation with its own history, its own internal logic, and an intellectual genealogy that runs deeper than most Western commentary has cared to trace. Understanding what political Islam in Iran actually is, genealogically, conceptually, and historically, matters precisely because it is a system far more embedded than that which can be dissolved by any single intervention.

The revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah in 1979 was the culmination of decades of opposition to a regime synonymous with corruption, repression, and dependence on Western power. The Pahlavi state had been restored by the CIA and MI6-orchestrated coup of 1953, which removed the elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. It governed through the SAVAK secret police and systematically eliminated political opposition across the ideological spectrum. By the 1970s, nationalists, communists, Islamists, and liberal constitutionalists had converged not around a shared vision of what should replace the Shah, but around a shared conviction that his rule was illegitimate. The revolution was broad precisely because that illegitimacy was felt across class and ideology. It was also, as the scholar Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi has argued in Revolutions and its Discontents (Cambridge University Press, 2019), the product of an ideologically plural intellectual formation, drawing on clerical jurisprudence, Marxist sociology, Third Worldist anti-colonialism, Shia theology, and Persian literary culture. To reduce it to a single ideology, whether called fundamentalism or theocracy, is to misread the intellectual history on which its institutions were built. Once the Shah fell, the question of which current would define the new order was settled, rapidly, by force. Two figures above all had shaped the intellectual terms of that contest: Ruhollah Khomeini, whose juristic reconception of clerical authority provided the revolution’s institutional architecture, and Ali Shariati, whose synthesis of Islamic theology and Third Worldist anti-colonialism gave it its most powerful popular idiom.

Khomeini and the juristic tradition

Ruhollah Khomeini’s central theoretical contribution was velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. This was not a return to tradition but a decisive rupture within it. Traditional Twelver Shia political theology had counselled quietism: during the occultation of the Hidden Twelfth Imam, the faqih might exercise limited delegated authority in judicial and social matters, but direct governance was another question entirely. Khomeini’s lectures at Najaf in early 1970, later published as Islamic Government (Hukumat-i Islami), made a radical claim: that in the Imam’s absence, the most learned jurist must not merely advise but rule, and that this was not an innovation but a recovery of Islam’s original political logic. However, no Shia thinker before him had explicitly argued that only senior clergy had the authority to govern the state nor the corollary that previous monarchies were illegitimate.

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Khomeini’s intellectual formation was itself deeply layered. Trained in both jurisprudence and mysticism, he engaged philosophical traditions stretching back through centuries of Shia thought. The broader currents of twentieth-century Sunni political Islam also shaped the Iranian revolutionary milieu. A young Ali Khamenei, later to become Supreme Leader, translated the Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb’s work into Persian in 1967. Qutb’s arguments for Islamic sovereignty and against both Western liberalism and Soviet communism were arguably absorbed and reworked within a specifically Shia and specifically Iranian framework.

What emerged was a peculiar and novel political architecture: juristic authority embedded over elected institutions, while retaining republican forms, elections, parliament, and presidency, that gave the system its claim to popular legitimacy. The 1979 constitution was not the codification of a pre-existing consensus but the political victory of one current within a plural revolutionary moment.

Shariati and the intellectual left of Islam

Ali Shariati represents a different strand of the revolution’s intellectual genealogy, no less important for having been partially absorbed and partially suppressed after 1979. A sociologist trained in Paris in the 1960s, Shariati worked at the intersection of anti-colonial theory, Marxist sociology, and Shia theology. He was the principal theorist of Islamic Third Worldism: the argument that Islam, properly understood, was a liberation ideology capable of articulating the struggle of the mostazafin, the oppressed, against imperialism, capitalism, and colonial modernity. The Quranic term mostazafin became his rendering of Frantz Fanon’s les damnés de la terre, the downtrodden, a concept he wove throughout his lectures and writings.

Those lectures, delivered at the Hosseiniyeh Ershad in Tehran and later transcribed into some fifty pamphlets and booklets, captivated the educated youth of the 1960s and 1970s precisely because they refused the choice between secular modernism and clerical conservatism. His speech “Red Shiism/Black Shiism,”  delivered in 1971, distinguished between the true Shiism of Ali, characterised by martyrdom, resistance, and agency, and the Safavid institutionalisation of religion as mourning ritual, a quietism that served entrenched power. He was openly anticlerical, deeply suspicious of the clerical establishment as guardians of an inherited Shiism that had evacuated its own emancipatory content. Shariati died in 1977, before the revolution he helped generate. His intellectual legacy was consequently available to be selectively appropriated. With Khomeini incorporated some of the political language of the mostazafin into populist addresses.

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The entrenched structure of political Islam

What these two genealogies together illuminate is that political Islam in Iran is not a surface ideology imposed on an otherwise secular society, nor a medieval residue awaiting displacement by modernity. It is a form of modern political thought emerging from the region’s own reformation with unique intellectual contours. It is also a form of political organisation that has had close to five decades to embed itself in institutions, educational systems, military structures, and patterns of social life. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not merely a military organisation; it is the organisational embodiment of the doctrine that the revolution must be protected from within. The seminaries of Qom are sites where the political theology of the state is continuously reproduced, debated, and contested.

The ongoing intellectual debates within the Islamic Republic, about the scope of clerical authority, about the relationship between divine and popular sovereignty, about the role of religion in governance, are themselves evidence of how the system functions. None of this is to foreclose questions about the system’s past Islamic legitimacy or future survival. It is rather to insist that those questions can only be correctly purveyed on the basis of a serious account of what the system actually is. Political Islam in Iran is not an interruption of Iranian history but a chapter within it, one produced by specific intellectual formations, shaped by transnational currents of thought, and institutionalised across decades. It will not wither away through the logic of modernity, nor dissolve under the pressure of any single moment of conjuncture. Understanding it requires taking seriously what its architects actually thought and engagement with Iran can only proceed by recognising that only the Iranians get to choose who they want to be.

*Dr Ayesha Omar is a British Academy International Fellow at SOAS, University of London and a Senior Lecturer in Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is the author of The Pluralistic Frameworks of Ibn Rushd and Abdullahi An-Na’im (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

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A Time for Condolence and Moral Clarity

The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the recent United States and Israeli bombing of Iran marks a grave turning point in our global moment. Condolences are extended to his family and to the Iranian people, and to every civilian who has lost loved ones in these attacks. Condolences are also due to all innocents killed in this imposed war and in the widening geography of violence that now stretches across continents. What unfolds in headlines and security briefings is experienced in homes as shock, fear, and irreversible loss.

War is narrated in strategic vocabulary. It speaks of targets, deterrence, precision, and dominance. It does not speak of a mother gathering her children into a darkened street as the walls tremble from distant blasts. It does not speak of a child pressing hands against ears while sirens tear through the night. It does not speak of elders clutching medication that may run out long before the bombing does.

In Tehran, Isfahan, Gaza, Khartoum, Goma, Bamako, and beyond, war enters kitchens, bedrooms, markets, and schools. It reduces life to waiting, to rationing, to vigilance. The loss of life in these places is not merely tragic; it is a civilizational rupture, a devastating assault on human dignity whose stain will linger across generations.

Negotiations as Prelude

For months, the world was assured that diplomacy remained possible. Nuclear negotiations were discussed, technical teams convened, and statements of cautious optimism circulated through diplomatic corridors. The language of restraint suggested that catastrophe could be averted through patient engagement.

The sudden unleashing of overwhelming military force, therefore, raises a profound question. Were these negotiations intended to culminate in agreement, or were they a strategic interlude while military machinery was positioned? The choreography of dialogue, followed by rapid escalation, suggests that talks may have served as political cover, a way to project reasonableness while preparing for bombardment.

When diplomacy becomes instrumental to war rather than an alternative to it, trust in international processes erodes. Negotiation becomes a spectacle, and the spectacle becomes a prelude to destruction. Nuclear diplomacy, long presented as the safeguard against catastrophe, appears in this instance to have been folded into the theatre preceding war.

The Doctrine That Travels Across Continents

The assault on Iran does not stand alone. It belongs to a longer imperial doctrine that has travelled across Europe, Africa, and Asia. Iraq was invaded on the claims of weapons that were never found, leaving behind a fractured state and enduring instability.

Afghanistan endured decades of occupation under the promise of liberation, only to witness the collapse of that project into uncertainty and renewed authoritarian rule. Libya was dismantled under humanitarian rhetoric and descended into militia fragmentation and regional spillover. Syria became a theatre of proxy conflict, while Yemen absorbed relentless bombardment with global complicity.

In Eastern Europe, war unfolds amid great power rivalry, with towns reduced to rubble and families scattered across borders. Across Africa, from the Sahel to the Horn, foreign military bases, mercenary forces, and competition over minerals and strategic corridors are reshaping fragile states, while ordinary villagers navigate insecurity that never leaves.

Each conflict is narrated as exceptional, framed by its own justifications and security claims. Yet taken together, they reveal a consistent pattern in which threat is magnified, diplomacy is marginalised, and military escalation becomes policy. Civilians absorb the cost. Iran stands within this expanding cartography of intervention, another node in a system that presents itself as guardian of order while leaving behind fractured societies and displaced populations.

Gaza and the Architecture of Annihilation

The bombing of Iran unfolds alongside the ongoing devastation of Gaza. Under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel’s assault on Palestinians has reduced entire neighbourhoods to dust. Hospitals, schools, and residential blocks have been obliterated. The scale of killing, mass displacement, and systematic destruction of infrastructure constitutes genocide unfolding in full public view. The images that emerge from Gaza depict not only military confrontation but systematic devastation of civilian life.

In Gaza, war is experienced in profoundly intimate ways. It is a mother searching through collapsed concrete for a child’s belongings. It is children learning the sound of drones before they learn the rhythm of play. It is families displaced repeatedly, carrying fragments of a home that no longer stands.

This devastation is sustained by military supply lines, diplomatic protection, and political endorsement that link Washington to Tel Aviv. Security rhetoric accompanies overwhelming force, and regional escalation becomes normalised. The attack on Iran signals that the theatre of violence is widening, and the small lives inside these large events carry the deepest scars.

Epstein, Oligarchic Impunity and the Culture of Power

Beneath this militarised order lies a deeper moral corrosion. The global political class that authorises these wars operates within oligarchic networks whose impunity has been publicly exposed. The Epstein scandal revealed a world in which wealth shielded predatory paedophilia, sexual exploitation, and abuse from consequence. It exposed elite circuits of protection and silence, demonstrating how power insulates itself from accountability.

This culture of impunity does not remain confined to private wrongdoing. It shapes public policy and international conduct. The same insulated networks that evade scrutiny in matters of exploitation authorise violence abroad.

Power protects itself across domains, and borders and bodies become instruments within a system resistant to moral reckoning. The tentacles of this culture extend into European financial centres, American political institutions, and parts of Africa and Asia, where capital flows intersect with governance.

For elites, war is a strategic calculus conducted in secure rooms. For ordinary families, war is the closing of schools, the collapse of hospitals, the silence after a blast when one waits to see who will emerge from the dust. The distance between those who decide and those who endure defines the injustice of our time.

Sectarianism, Silence, and Sovereignty

Many Arab governments respond with complicity rather than clarity. Imperial alliances remain intact, and strategic cooperation continues while Gaza burns and Iran is bombed. This posture has been decades in the making. From facilitating the invasion of Iraq to silence over Libya’s destruction and participation in the devastation of Yemen, segments of the Arab political order have repeatedly chosen accommodation over accountability. The Abraham Accords formalised a trajectory that privileged economic corridors, security pacts, and intelligence coordination while Palestinian dispossession deepened and regional militarisation intensified.

Today, this accommodation is visible in the maintenance of foreign military bases, the opening of airspace, intelligence sharing, and muted diplomatic language in the face of bombardment.

Sectarian rivalry further distorts moral clarity. Residual anti-Shia sentiment mutes condemnation of the assault on Iran, turning theological difference into a political filter. This fragmentation serves domination by signalling to imperial actors that escalation will encounter limited resistance. The devastation that follows does not distinguish between Sunni and Shia; it engulfs communities across doctrinal lines and narrows moral imagination to factional identity.

Iran’s internal political tensions are real. Many Iranians desire reform, greater accountability, and wider political participation. Those aspirations are legitimate and belong to the Iranian people themselves. They must be debated, shaped, and realised through processes grounded in Iran’s own history, culture, and social realities.

When imperial foreign powers intervene militarily, the space for political reform narrows as national security imperatives come to dominate public life and overshadow debates about renewal and accountability. External attacks tend to consolidate hardline positions and place civic actors under intense strain, making gradual, peaceful change more difficult to sustain.

The political future of Iran should be shaped by its own people through internal deliberation and reform rather than by external military pressure. Sovereignty is a universal principle, and it retains its moral force only when consistently upheld rather than selectively applied.

A Shared Global Responsibility

The wider crisis lies in the normalisation of annihilatory force across continents. Cities in Europe are militarised, villages in Africa absorb warfare, regions in Asia witness escalating naval tension, and the Middle East endures bombardment and blockade. Each theatre is justified within its own narrative, yet the cumulative effect is a world habituated to violence and desensitised to suffering.

The bombing of Iran must be condemned, as must the destruction of Gaza and the culture of oligarchic impunity that underwrites such actions. Sectarian division must be rejected, and negotiations must never be weaponised as a prelude to war. Sovereignty and human dignity must be upheld consistently across all regions.

Lives lost in Iran, in Gaza, and across Europe, Africa, and Asia demand more than mourning. They demand ethical clarity and principled action. History records not only events but moral posture. In this season of expanding conflict, a politics grounded in justice, accountability, and shared human dignity must be reclaimed. The geography of imperial war is vast, but the smallness of war in homes and hearts runs deeper still.

*Aslam Fataar is a Research Professor in Higher Education Transformation in the Department of Education Policy Studies, Stellenbosch University.

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The declaration of Israel’s Chargé d’Affaires, Ariel Seidman, as Persona Non Grata has elicited yet another extraordinary diatribe from Warren Goldstein, Chief Rabbi of SA, in early February. His expulsion from South Africa indeed had an unmasking effect.  But it did not, as Warren Goldstein asserts, unmask the South African President, the government he leads, or the ANC as captured by a variety of forces who are anti-West, Islamist or Iranian.  The unmasking was in forcing the real representative of Zionism and its political project, Israel, to step into the breach, directly and unfiltered, dispensing the onerous and inconvenient mask of “Chief Rabbi”. 

Indeed, Warren Goldstein has been juggling these two personae, Chief Rabbi and Chief Representative, throughout his tenure to manage the moral tumult that Israel has been at the centre of, and that Zionism, as a political–colonial ideology, has inspired.  A political problem needs a politician, but a moral conundrum needs religious sophistry.  But we’ve all been too polite to call him out, partly because it is imperative that we redeem – mostly for our own humanity – Judaism and Jews as a noble religion and indeed a people who have been victims of a holocaust perpetrated by Western Europe. 

In the demeanour of Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein, the Chief Representative emerged.  The only clue to his rabbinical role, in the nine-minute diatribe, was the reference to Genesis 12:3 that those who bless will be blessed and those who curse will be cursed.  Although the reference is to Abraham, the appropriation is for Israel.  He then anoints himself as God’s appointed blesser and curser and proceeds to curse President Ramaphosa, the Government and the ANC for the temerity to expel the Israeli diplomat, discovering belatedly that this is reserved for serious misdemeanours like bordering on espionage.  Such cursing is the sound and fury of fundamentalist extremism, which would be irritating only if it were not so severe in the Middle East, where such extremism has power and is not afraid to exercise it perniciously on the vulnerable.

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Balancing his personae, he froths moral outrage at how the expulsion of the diplomat has now cursed the children of the Eastern Cape to a life of deprivation of potable water and sanitation – when Israel is the global leader in water management; to a life of compromised health care as a consequence; and endangered the country’s relationship with President Trump and the USA who will visit economic doom on us.  Let’s examine whether Warren Goldstein’s  “moral outrage” is that of a naïve Chief Rabbi or a calculated Chief Representative.

Israel is the global leader in water management! Indeed.  It is so good that Israel has perfected the art of ensuring 100% access to Israeli Citizens to water and sanitation – even in the northern Negev Desert – by intercepting the aquifers into Palestine from the mountains, by diverting water with pipes, tunnels, and channels from, among others, the Sea of Galilee, and restricting and limiting Palestinian water drilling for wells and development of water infrastructure.  The result is that Israelis receive about 137 litres per person per day – for household and agriculture – whilst Palestinians can barely manage agriculture on 76.4 litres/person/day!  A stark example is in the establishment of a Jewish settlement in northeast Jerusalem, where, in addition to the appropriation of Palestinian land, the Palestinian villages lost access to its springs, wells and other water resources.  Since October 2023, persisting right into the ‘ceasefire’ in 2026, the Israeli Defence Force has repeatedly bombed and shelled Gaza’s water infrastructure and prohibited access to water sources in Gaza and limited the entry of water and other humanitarian aid, resulting in 96% of Gazans becoming water compromised.  No wonder UN experts declared:  “Israel is using thirst as a weapon to kill Palestinians.”  In South Africa, it appears, the Chief Representative is using thirst as a diplomatic weapon to mask a genocide.

The people in SA will suffer dire health consequences.  Quite rich coming from the man who in February 2025, is quoted in The Times of Israel as saying “…we should welcome the Trump administration’s interventions…” and later only admitting that Trump was mistaken to only allow white Afrikaners as refugees into the USA.  It is not ironic that he feigns concern about our health but welcomes Trump’s cutting of PEPFAR funds that combat HIV/AIDS – not only in SA, but Africa;  cuts USAID Programmes; defunds the WHO, and many others, that, in one night’s executive orders, bequeathed death and disease.  This is the cynicism of a Chief Representative, not the morality of a Chief Rabbi.

How do we take his warning about ‘endangering’ SA’s relationship with Trump, and jeopardising the African Growth and Opportunities (AGOA)?  That boat has sailed.  Before any word was said in anger, SA lost all its aid, had 30% tariffs imposed (together with the rest of the world), and AGOA’s renewal was delayed.  All of this based on a lie about a white genocide!  The Chief Rabbi could be moved to call out this lie, but the Chief Representative would revel in the delicious symmetry:  SA charges Israel in the ICJ with Palestinian genocide and land occupation and, in retaliation, Trump accuses SA of white genocide and white land confiscation!  The only reason AGOA is still being considered for SA, is because our diplomacy has amplified the point that while, sadly, black workers’ livelihoods will be imperilled, the main victims will, ironically, be the white owners of the farms, mines, and factories that Trump purports to defend.  Hopefully, unfair as it is, this will be enough for the morally dubious to defend and renew AGOA.

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Chief Rabbi Goldstein in 2017, was included in the Algemeiner’s Top 100 in the religious category – for denouncing Jacob Zuma’s corruption.  Some were exiled from the ANC and government for precipitating this at Polokwane in 2007 already.  But the Chief Rabbi was absolutely and morally correct!  This research was easy to find and would prove morally consistent with his fervour in his 9-minute address, charging the ANC with corruption.  Yet the search for his moral outrage regarding the corruption charges against Benjamin Netanyahu is hard to find.  I thought I would find scriptural admonition from Deuteronomy 31:29 with Moses predicting “utter corruption” for Israel:  “evil will befall you in the latter days, because you will do evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke Him to anger through the work of your hands”.  But not much in the face of Netanyahu being indicted on breach of trust, accepting bribes, and fraud! Nothing about Case 1000 (taking gifts & presents), Case 2000 (conspiring against a competitor), Case 4000 (the telecommunications industry), …. Maybe the Chief Representative persuaded the Chief Rabbi that a corrupt and flawed leader who could bring wrath to the Palestinians must, perforce, get a free pass – just as support and admiration for a leader accused of paedophilia is okay!

The problem with interchanging a yarmulka and a political cap is that politics tends to undermine your professed morality and compromise your ethical judgement and connect you to causes and leaders for which there is no defence.  Take the Chief Rabbi’s correct empathy for Iranian protestors’ deaths and compare that with the Chief Representative’s stoic denial and defence of a Palestinian genocide. The problem is that when you attach the name of your faith to a political project and thus legitimise it, you open your entire moral-ethical foundation to the vicissitudes of that project:  when the Taliban prohibits women, when ISIS kills and maims, when Al Qaeda bombs civilians, etc it takes a Muslim community decades to overcome the damage even, if there’s ambiguity about the original sin.  Similarly, if a Chief Rabbi endorses Israel as a “Jewish State”, then that Chief Rabbi has to be that State’s Chief Representative to defend or deny atrocity – even if there’s ambiguity about the original sin.  The Chief Rabbi can no longer dissemble whether an eye for an eye can be interpreted to mean that 2400 eyes on October 7^th justify 200 000 eyes ever since.  The debate is mathematical, polemical, political, not moral, religious or ethical.

*Ebrahim Rasool is a former ambassador to the United States.

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Watching the debate in South Africa on international issues is like watching the same movie over and over in a relentless loop.

One faction, mostly white and generally self-identified as liberal, roundly condemns states that are in conflict with the United States and demands that South Africa has no contact at all with these states. Sometimes it collapses into conspiracy and makes assertions for which it has no evidence, such as the claim that Iran bribed the ANC to take Israel to the International Court of Justice.

Another faction, more racially diverse and generally identified as nationalist or left-wing, condemns the US and other Western states with equal passion while staying silent on the failings of the regimes opposed to the West. On occasion, it also collapses into conspiracy theory, denouncing all opposition to these regimes as a Western plot.

Both sides are often simply propagandists and this endlessly tiresome and pointless exercise that takes us exactly nowhere. The uncritical cheerleaders for the West cannot be taken seriously until they acknowledge that the West supports and collaborates with authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. They also need to acknowledge that the West has repeatedly engaged in unlawful and wantonly destructive bombings, wars and coups against many countries, and that it has backed Israel’s assault in Gaza, which has resulted in the mass killing of civilians.

Those who uncritically support all the regimes opposed by the West need to acknowledge, for instance, that labour conditions in Chinese factories are atrocious, that Russia locks up its dissidents, that Zanu-PF runs a rapacious regime in Zimbabwe and that the last election in Venezuela was clearly stolen.

Getting past this sorry state of affairs requires, as a first step, that the empirical facts of each situation need to be taken seriously. We must acknowledge that powerful states in and outside of the West use ‘fake news’, or just plain lies, as part of their political strategy. This is as true of the US and Israel as it is of Russia or Zimbabwe.

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If we use Venezuela as an example, the widely documented facts are that the fentanyl that has done such damage to US society is made in Mexico with chemicals imported from China and not Venezuela. It is also clearly true that Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) – the alleged cartel US prosecutors previously claimed Maduro led – does not exist. There is also no doubt that the US violated international law when it kidnapped Maduro and his wife.

However, it is also true that Maduro stole the last election, ran a corrupt government, locked up some political dissidents and presided over a police force that regularly kills darker-skinned and poor young men.

Any political position that does not acknowledge all these clearly confirmed facts is not credible. Similarly, it must be acknowledged that the West is waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine that followed a Western-backed coup and that the Russian state has violated international law and committed war crimes. It must also be acknowledged that China has done extraordinarily well to end absolute poverty and that it runs a massively exploitative labour regime and represses dissent. At home, we must be clear that the ANC has been complicit with authoritarianism and corruption in Zimbabwe and that it took a principled position on Palestine and in support of international law when it approached the ICJ.

Both the left and the liberals must, if they are to be taken seriously, deal with the factions in their midst that just line up behind one side or the other in the new Cold War. 

Liberalism has many currents, some of which hold consistent positions, but figures such as Greg Mills on its right-wing happily support the West at all costs and under all circumstances. This must be addressed.

The left also has many democratic currents, but the inheritors of the old Stalinist tradition happily support any authoritarian regime that opposes the West. They are known pejoratively as ‘tankies’ after the Stalinists who supported the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 by Soviet tanks. In South Africa, the SACP invariably takes the ‘tankie’ position. The radical nationalists in the EFF and MKP do the same.

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 There is a ‘tankie’ current in the trade union movement, with its origins in the SACP, but the most principled positions on international politics in our public life are taken by the democratic components of the trade union movement with their origins in ‘worker democracy’. Zwelinzima Vavi is one of the few public figures who has both noted that Maduro was an authoritarian leader and that his kidnapping by the US is unlawful and an outrageous violation of sovereignty. 

Liberalism in South Africa has been dragged firmly to the right in recent years and while there are left liberals who hold states on all sides of the geopolitical divides to the same standards, there is no organised expression of this kind of liberalism. It does not have a party or its own NGOs or media.

In party politics, Songezo Zibi of Rise Mzansi is the only significant figure willing to be critical of both the US and Israel and its enemies. However, his party has only one seat in parliament and while his voice on international affairs is welcome, it has limited numbers behind it. It is only the democratic currents in the independent trade unions that offer a principled position on international affairs backed with numerical support. 

But even though our politics has few voices that do not just uncritically line up behind one side on geopolitical issues, our commentariat have no excuses for continuing with crude forms of comment and analysis. We should all be opposed to all human rights violations and all forms of authoritarianism, not to mention illegal state actions and mass killing of civilians, whoever the perpetrators may be.

*Dr Buccus is director of a study abroad program, research fellow at UJ and editor of Al-Qalam.

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I denounce the Iranian regime’s lethal repression on largely peaceful protestors and, with equal moral clarity, unequivocally reject imperial calls for bombing or foreign intervention, because history shows that violence, whether imposed by the state at home or by powerful outsiders from abroad, has never delivered peace with justice, protected human dignity, or brought genuine freedom.

It is this same ethical commitment to justice and human dignity that compels an unambiguous condemnation of the Iranian regime’s violent crackdown on its own citizens. The killing, imprisonment, and intimidation of Iranians demanding dignity, accountability, and meaningful socio-political reform constitute grave violations of human rights and stand in direct contradiction to core Islamic principles of ʿadl (justice), karamah (human dignity), and amanah (moral trust and responsibility). Any state that claims Islamic legitimacy is therefore both religiously and morally obligated to uphold these values. Calls for radical and structural reform are not only understandable; they are necessary for Iran’s social healing and long-term stability. 

At the same time, any credible condemnation of state violence inside Iran requires the unequivocal rejection of violence imposed from outside. I categorically oppose threats by external powers to bomb Iran or to impose regime change through coercion and force. Such actions would constitute clear violations of international law, undermine the foundations of a rules-based global order, and risk deepening human suffering rather than alleviating it. These positions are not driven by genuine concern for the well-being or agency of the Iranian people, but by geopolitical agendas that have, time and again, devastated societies and undermined authentic struggles for justice. From a peace studies perspective, imperial interventions do not advance liberation or positive peace; they instrumentalise civilian populations and reproduce cycles of structural and direct violence.

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To oppose repression inside Iran while endorsing violence from outside is a moral contradiction. It is precisely the rejection of imperial coercion that allows the genuine, indigenous voices for justice and reform within Iran to be heard on their own terms. These voices have emerged organically from within Iran’s own religious, intellectual, and political traditions. For decades, respected Iranian figures such as the late Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, Ebrahim Yazdi, and Mohsen Kadivar have publicly challenged coercive state policies, recognizing their deep incompatibility with justice, freedom of conscience, and the ethical spirit of Islam itself. Ironically, and tragically, many of these principled reformist voices have been subjected to harassment, marginalisation, and repression. Their treatment exposes the regime’s profound intolerance of faith-grounded internal critique and its reliance on coercion rather than moral persuasion. Islamic ethics emphasize education, wisdom, and voluntary moral commitment, not state violence, as the pathway to cultivating genuine belief and ethical practice.

It is this long-standing tradition of internal moral critique, combined with the courage, discipline, and agency of ordinary Iranians, that makes the current protest movement one of the most significant challenges to authoritarian rule in decades. Genuine democratic change must therefore emerge and grow from within, rooted in the aspirations, strategies, and leadership of Iranians themselves, not imposed, engineered, or hijacked from outside.

Historical experience and comparative scholarship consistently show that foreign military strikes do not advance internal movements for freedom. In the Iranian context, threats of attack or external military pressure, whether framed as limited strikes or as “assistance” to protestors, are already being used by the regime to delegitimise the uprising by portraying it as foreign-orchestrated. Rather than weakening authoritarian rule, military escalation predictably strengthens regime narratives and measurably undermines nonviolent, indigenous movements for political change.

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The path forward must therefore be shaped by Iranians themselves. I call on the legitimate leaders emerging from these grassroots, nonviolent protests, not Western proxies or agent provocateurs, to seize this moment with wisdom, restraint, and courage. This is an opportunity to apply sustained, principled, and nonviolent civic pressure on the Iranian authorities to commit to deep and irreversible reforms: an end to lethal repression, the release of political prisoners, meaningful protections for women and minorities, and the opening of genuine civic and political space.

Justice will not come from bombs dropped on Iran by external powers, nor can freedom be indefinitely postponed by a regime that governs through repression and force. Meaningful and enduring change can only emerge through moral clarity, sustained nonviolent action, and reforms grounded in the lived realities and aspirations of the Iranian people themselves.

*Dr. A. Rashied Omar is an Imam of the Claremont Main Road Masjid; Associate Teaching Professor of Islamic Studies & Peace Studies; Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame

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The fact that the United States Ambassador -designate to South Africa, Lee Brent Bozell III, was sworn in in the USA, may indicate that his appointment to, and acceptance by, South Africa as the US Ambassador is now a foregone conclusion. Would he have taken the oath of office if there was no prior agrément by South Africa? 

Has South Africa decided to ignore his odious positions in the past on South Africa’s liberation struggle, outrightly labeling it as terrorism? Maybe he changed. Did South Africa decide to ignore his remarks in the Senate when interviewed for the job? He doubled down on all the positions espoused by President Trump and his administration: BEE is racist; a white genocide is taking place; South Africa must be punished for charging Israel with genocide; and trying to prescribe South Africa’s foreign relationships, etc. 

In weighing up Bozell’s historical position on South Africa’s struggle, and what he purports his mission in South Africa to be, President Ramaphosa may well find himself in a bind. Can he afford to reject Bozell’s credentials and endanger further the relationship with the Trump administration? Should he accept Bozell’s ambassadorship and hope Bozell can be bracketed from overreach? Or does he hope that reality in South Africa, such as no evidence of a white genocide, will result in honest and sober reports that will change Washington’s stance and reverse the punitive measures? 

There is indeed a school of orthodox diplomacy in South Africa that believes better diplomacy will produce better results. If this is so, then the recipe should be shared with those who may fear the Madura treatment to avert, in their countries, the regime change formula evident in Venezuela. They should also share it with Greenland, who never once called Trump a bad name, but is threatened with a takeover. They should also share it with the 8 countries that voice concern over Greenland, who, at worst, were obsequious in Trump’s presence – and now have additional tariffs imposed. 

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Of course, the appointment or designation of Bozell coincides neatly with the passing of the African Growth and Opportunities Act, AGOA, by the U.S. House of Representatives. This has obviously compromised President Ramaposa’s hand, because were he to voice the popular sentiment of rejecting Bozell, does he endanger South Africa in the further passage of AGOA to the senate, and then to Trump himself? This is a risk for South Africa. South Africa could reject Bozell, and Trump could remove South Africa from AGOA. Or they could accept Bozell, and Trump could still remove South Africa from AGOA. 

The problem is that trying to anticipate Trump is like trying to control the external environment to limit the damage of an abusive partner. You could look nice, cook nice, talk nice, play nice. But the trigger is not in the external environment. It’s in the character of the bully. Changing the environment is like self-blame. Taking responsibility for the behavior and abuse of the bully. 

Our memories are short. Before any word of critique or criticism of Trump was uttered by any official of South Africa, South Africa was already under attack and subjected to punishment, either collectively with the world, or individually as South Africa. On Trump’s first evening in power, we lost all the HIV funds, as well as those flowing through USAID, the World Health Organization, etc. After Agri-Forum’s visit in February, the remaining aid was lost, including those for the just energy transition, ostensibly because of “bad things happening in South Africa.”By the so-called Trump Liberation Day, we had 30% tariffs imposed despite an SA strategy of appeasement with Trump that included the visit by President Cyril Ramaphosa to the White House. The appeasement from South Africa continued, despite the boycott of South Africa’s G20, which started early 2025 with Rubio and Bessent from G20 meetings.  It culminated with Trump’s boycott and resulted in South Africa’s disinvitation to the USA G20 in 2026. 

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By September, AGOA itself was in a tenuous situation because supply lines, employment levels, freight logistics, and order books required predictability long before the decision as to whether AGOA would be renewed. Hopefully, some faith can be maintained as to whether AGOA’s passage will be soon and successful. Does this need more appeasement? 

For a moment in November 2025, the G20 saw President Ramaposa shift strategy from appeasement to what I call contingency. He took out insurance policies to mitigate the USA boycott. South Africa raised finance from other sources for health and climate investments. It strengthened relations with its BRICS, Global South, and EU partners. It used the US absence to push policies that may have been more cautiously put with the USA present, and it stung the US, especially Trump. He stated his anxiety about de-dollarisation, threatened greater tariffs against BRICS, and is now acting recklessly with NATO and the EU. 

So how does a strategy of contingency play out with the appointment of Lee Brent Bozell III, as ambassador to South Africa? I would suggest that President Ramaphosa says to President Trump: I will credential your ambassador if you credential mine. He should then put forward a name, whether Mcebisi Jonas, Alastair Ruiters, or whoever. Put the ball in Trump’s court, and let him jeopardize the appointment of his own ambassador-designate.

*Ebrahim Rasool is the former ambassador to the USA 

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Just like the dispute in Israeli-Occupied Palestine, the Indian-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IOJK) dispute spans over seven decades, and in both these Muslim-majority regions, the occupation forces continue to inflict atrocities without meaningful intervention by the international community. 

While the entire Muslim world is highly disturbed and indignant over what Israel is doing in Palestine, the situation is no different in Indian Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (IOJK).

We also see India forcibly changing the demography and geography of IOJK through illegal actions like the revocation of Article 370 and 35a of the Indian Constitution, which gave a very limited autonomy to 1OJK under the Indian occupation. Under these provisions, IOJK had a special status and no non-Kashmiri person, i.e., any Indian national, could have property or get jobs in the State. However, India shamelessly abolished it to invite Indian nationals to populate the I0JK region. Their objective is to occupy its lands in order to change its demographic and geographic profile. This Indian move is completely illegal in the backdrop of UN Resolutions on Kashmir.

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As India revoked Article 370 on 5 August 2019, the decision was internationally condemned and even challenged in Indian courts of law. However, on 11 December 2023, the Indian Supreme Court endorsed the Indian Government’s decision of 5 August 2019 to revoke Article 370, making it convenient for the Indian government to alter the Islamic profile of I0JK and gradually make it a Hindu majority area.

The decision of the Indian Court was not unexpected: the BJP, which is hell-bent on obliterating Muslim identity and history from India, is notorious for using its judiciary to get IS anti-Muslim verdicts, such as in the case against the demolition of the historic Babri mosque, Hindu atrocities in Gujarat and many sensitive matters related to Islamic jurisprudence.

The BJP government, which is the political face of the Hindu extremist organisation RSS, has been particularly uncomfortable with the Muslim majority IOJK, which has never accepted the Indian occupation and is continuously campaigning for the plebiscite to determine its political future as mandated by the UNO. Therefore, now, by abrogating Article 370, India has started the disgusting process of altering the demographic profile of the State from a Muslim majority to a Hindu-dominated area, with the Kashmiri lands stolen and jobs taken by the Hindus and non-Kashmiris from India.

This Indian strategy is similar to Israeli policies in occupied Palestine. India is taking advantage of the fact that today’s world is almost completely inactive on the plight of Muslims, however India is living in a fool’s paradise – the people of Kashmir and the world will never accept Kashmir as part of India.

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The history of the Kashmir Freedom Movement tells us that no matter what, Kashmiris have never accepted the Indian occupation of their lands. History also indicates that Jammu and Kashmir were never and will never be a part of India. Just like in Palestine, the Kashmir freedom movement is continuing and will continue with even stronger force until the complete end of the Indian occupation, and all Kashmiris have the right to self-determination. All that is needed is a sustained campaign against the Indian and Israeli oppression of Muslims and international efforts to take collective measures against these rogue states.

The history of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa exemplifies that only international pressure can force both Israel and India to stop their atrocities and give the Palestinians and the Kashmiris their due rights.

South Africa has already taken the lead in taking legal action against Israel at the ICJ. A similar action IS needed in the case against India. It is therefore important that, as we express our support and solidarity with the struggling people of IOJK, we also ask our government to raise its voice in favour of Kashmiris and force India to implement UN Resolutions on Kashmir. 

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