In the media, South Africa’s municipal crisis is routinely explained as a failure of leadership. The explanation centres around corruption, gangsterism and incompetence, and the language is overwhelmingly that of moralism.

There is truth in this. There are councilors who loot, officials who cannot do their jobs, considerable penetration by organised crime and political actors who treat public office as nothing but a route to private enrichment via public funds. All this must be noted and directly confronted.

But this account does not go far enough. Municipal collapse cannot be understood as only a failure of leadership or ethics. It also has to be located in deeper structural dynamics that shape what local government is, what it does, and what it is able to sustain. Without confronting these dynamics, calls for clean governance will remain necessary but insufficient.

The first of these dynamics is the political economy of patronage. Local government has become a key site for the distribution of resources in a society marked by mass unemployment and deep inequality. Municipal office offers not only a salary, but access to tenders, influence over hiring, and the ability to distribute opportunities.

In a context where millions of people are locked out of formal work, this power is intensely contested. The struggle for office is not just about politics. It is about survival. This is why, in some parts of the country, such as Durban, competition for positions as councillors results in regular assassinations.

Under these conditions, factionalism is not an aberration. It is produced by the system itself. Loyalty is organised through networks of distribution rather than shared political programmes. Decisions are shaped by the need to hold coalitions together. At the same time, municipalities become arenas of struggle between competing patronage networks, with the result that administrative capacity is subordinated to political survival.

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The second dynamic is the depoliticisation of the public. With the notable exception of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the mass movements of the 1980s are long gone and for many people participation in governance does not extend beyond voting every few years. Even more people do not bother to vote. When a space is made for civil society, it is usually for NGOs rather than membership-based organisation. In these spaces, the technocratic language of governance has displaced the language of politics. Questions of power and distribution are recast as matters of management.

All this weakens the capacity of ordinary people to act collectively in defence of the public interest. It also creates space for anger to be mobilised in destructive ways. Where there are no effective democratic channels, resentment can be redirected in toxic ways by toxic actors.

We see this clearly in growing attempts at xenophobic mobilisation. It presents itself as a defence of local resources. In reality, it expresses a politics that cannot confront the structural causes of deprivation but happily scapegoats migrants instead.

The third dynamic is the erosion of collective institutions. Trade unions, civic organisations and other forms of collective life have historically played a central role in mediating between the state and society. They have organised demands, built solidarity and exercised pressure from below.

Today, many of these institutions are weakened. Union density has declined. Some unions are deeply corrupt and authoritarian, and a senior union leader is wholly captured by a donor. Civic structures are often fragmented or absent and there has been a systemic substitution of NGOs for membership-based organisations. Where people have tried to organise, they have, as with Abahlali baseMjondolo and a number of communities dealing with mining issues, faced serious repression, including assassinations.

The consequences of all this are serious. There are fewer mechanisms to discipline political elites and fewer spaces in which collective demands can be formed. The capacity to defend the public as a shared good is weakened, and politics becomes more individualised, more volatile, and more open to manipulation.

These dynamics reinforce each other. Patronage corrodes administration, depoliticisation weakens accountability and the erosion of collective institutions removes the social foundations on which democratic governance depends.

To be clear, none of this means that leadership and ethics do not matter. They do. There are municipalities that function better than others, and leadership is part of the explanation. But even the best leadership operates within structural constraints that cannot be overcome by integrity alone. Corrupt people and practices must be dealt with as an urgent priority, but the structural issues need to be confronted too.

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This means addressing the political economy of patronage. It requires tightening procurement, professionalising administration and limiting opportunities for rent-seeking. It also requires confronting the wider reality of unemployment and inequality that drives competition for access to the state. If we do not treat mass structural unemployment as a crisis, we will never resolve our political and social problems.

It is also necessary to repoliticise the public by rebuilding forms of participation that enable people to act collectively. In much of the country, spaces like ward committees have long been captured by toxic actors but it is possible to build outside these spaces. The public can only be effectively politicised from within, and this requires a new generation of activists like those that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, including university-trained activists willing to work with ordinary people on the basis of mutual respect.

We also need to address the crisis in the trade union movement. Some unions have passed the point of no return with endemic corruption, death threats being used to contain dissent and the buying of internal elections. The unions and union leaders that sustain integrity – such as the General Industries Workers Union of South Africa (GIWUSA) and Zwelinzima Vavi – need to be supported and new credible unions built from the ground up. As with rebuilding community organising, this requires a new generation of committed activists, who can do the work that people like Jabu Ndlovu, Moses Mayekiso and many others did in the past. This also requires the commitment of university-trained activists who can do the kind of work that people like David Hemson, Neil Aggett and Jay Naidoo did in the 1970s and 1980s.

In a situation of mass unemployment, it is also imperative to connect the organised working class to the unemployed and the poor. It is an uncomfortable reality that many in the union movement look down on the poor and share the prejudices of the middle classes. Across the Global South, the urban poor have become key political actors and the fetish of the worker as the only legitimate political actor needs to be put aside.

The problems we face are ethical, but they are also political and – contrary to the assumptions of the media – moralism is not a sufficient response.

*Dr Buccus is editor of Al-Qalam and research fellow at the University of Johannesburg’s Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS).

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Each August, as we commemorate Women’s Month, we focus on the need for water across Africa and Asia. When clean water is not available, it becomes the job of the women and girls in the household to find and collect water.  This results in girls not attending school, thereby disrupting learning.

A well or borehole located in a village or on a mountain means that girls can safely and quickly collect water in the morning, and then attend school. Their education, combined with the water, allows for economic activities such as farming, sewing and basic trade to occur.  Access to clean water means that the standard of living for everyone in the area is automatically improved, which sets communities on an upward trajectory.  All made possible with water.

Our teams are often asked about the difference between wells and boreholes. 

Wells are shallower, dug to a depth of about 15m, and water is collected with a manual bucket system.  In Africa, our boreholes include a manual hand pump, but are dug much deeper than wells, and serve larger villages as well as their surrounding communities.

In Afghanistan, boreholes have electric taps, mainly powered by solar energy, to ensure that communities are not dependent on the unreliable electricity in the country.

The benefits of water go deeper…because girls can now attend school, they are less likely to become victims of child labour or child marriage.

 Throughout the month of August, AMA hosts events across the country, asking our communities to give towards the best of charities…the one that brings the greatest benefit for beneficiaries, while simultaneously bringing the greatest reward for the donor. Because behind every statistic is a story…a mother, a sister, a daughter…a life put on hold in order to find water. 

 Join our events and follow our social media pages for updates on the impact that your donations make, and contribute any amount, at any time, towards our water projects.

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Antisemitism – hatred of, prejudice towards, and discrimination against Jewish people – is real.  Jews were expelled from England in 1290; from France in 1306; from Germany from 1430; from Spain and Portugal by 1492; and after 1848  Jews fled the pogroms in Central Europe.  And no one should deny the twentieth-century genocide and holocaust wrought by fascism in Western Europe against the Jews. 

Even today, antisemitism is real. Indeed, Jews suffer antisemitic incidents ranging from slurs, online targeting, assaults, and terror.  Antisemitism is a real member of the family of bigotry, the persistent and pernicious hatred and intolerance of people who are different.  And so, in a world of revived supremacism and chauvinistic nationalisms, and increasing prejudice and discrimination, antisemitism takes it place alongside racism, misogyny, xenophobia, islamophobia, homophobia, and all other siblings in the family of bigotry.

An evolving definition

But as antisemitism remains real, its definition and application are evolving and changes in definition have accelerated with the onset of the twenty-first century.  Antisemitism in the Middle Ages remained, in definition, quite stable; its drivers were theological (like accusations of the deicide of Jesus) and economic, which could be solved through conversion or expulsion. The definition adopted a race dimension in the twentieth century as the Nazi regime prioritised ethnic origin rather than mere religious beliefs.  After the horrors of the holocaust were uncovered, the recoil from Western Civilisation tended towards inclusion in the definition of antisemitism any criticism of Jews, whether in questioning the holocaust or being remotely critical of the Zionist vision and solution. 

Resistance, brutality, and an all-encompassing antisemitism

However, the onset of the twenty-first century saw two parallel trends:  Intensified Palestinian resistance with brutal Israeli responses, accompanied by a more expansive, all-encompassing definition and application of antisemitism. Triggered by Ariel Sharon’s show of strength at the Aqsa Mosque after the scuppering of the Camp David Summit, the second Intifada (2000-2005) saw an Israeli response of assassination of Palestinian leaders, Operation Defensive Shield that occupied West Bank Cities, and the construction of a security barrier.  Following Hamas’ electoral victory in 2006, Israel blockaded Gaza in 2007, and maintains this till today, eliciting various attempts to break the blockade.  Between 2008 and 2014, three Gaza wars were conducted by Israel: “Cast Lead”, “Pillar of Defence” and “Protective Edge,” using airstrikes, missile attacks and ground invasions to destroy lives, livelihoods and infrastructure in a futile chicken-and-egg puzzle of what came first:  Hamas rockets or Israeli atrocity?  Ongoing hostility climaxed in 2021 as Palestinians rose to repel the planned Israeli evictions from Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, the raids on the Aqsa Mosque, and the incursions into, and settlements onto, the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, which today almost total 192 “officially sanctioned”, and about 350 “unauthorised” settlements by Israelis on Palestinian lands. Across these settlements, more than 780 000 Israelis are now entrenched.  This is the powder keg that was lit on 7 October 2023: the prelude to the genocide. 

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New Antisemitism – Conflating Jew, Zionist and Israeli

Shadowing this cauldron of resistance and brutal suppression is the weaponisation of antisemitism. In 2000, the Stockholm Declaration saw the need to promote Holocaust education, remembrance, and research because “humanity remains scarred by antisemitism and xenophobia, establishing that the international community shares a solemn responsibility to fight these evils.”  This further gets tightened by the European Union in 2005 as a framework for a Working Definition of Antisemitism and now includes “rhetorical and physical manifestations” against anything Jewish.  This builds towards the formal adoption in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) which evolves towards “Israel-Related Contexts” such as singling Israel out for criticism as applying “double-standards”; or opposition to Israel as “denying Jews self-determination”; with examples of antisemitism, in some cases, equating or conflating “Jews as a people, or Israel as a State”; or questioning whether Jews are “more loyal to Israel” than their national state.

The clinchers, however, are that it is anti-Semitic to draw “comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis…” and “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state or Israel.”  Ostensibly this is meant to blunt “third wave Antisemitism” because “…antisemitism is growing among those who use their hatred of Zionism and Israel as a proxy for their hatred of Jews.” (AIJAC Fact Sheet, 19 August 2021).

Weaponisation – Anti-Genocide is Antisemitism!

Such conflation of Jew, Zionist, and Israel is merely the precursor to the weaponisation of antisemitism, which becomes particularly evident in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, and the genocide it occasioned.  This period of genocide (2024-5) sees the chronicling of “cases of antisemitism” with the main prosecutors being the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) based in the USA, and the Community Security Trust (CST) in the UK.  Both agree that antisemitism had reached historic heights globally, especially because they now use the ‘weaponised’ definition.  By this application, their research fields in the West are anti-genocide protests on university campuses, the incidences of online and digital ‘harassment’ of Jews, as well as physical targeting of Jews and their institutions.

The ADL and the CSK on Third Wave Antisemitism

The ADL report (05/20/2024) on ‘Global Anti-Semitic Incidents in the Wake of Hamas’ War on Israel’, include the following as anti-Semitic: ‘Free Palestine’ or ‘Free Gaza’ graffiti; the allegation that Israel treats Palestinians as sub-humans; the accusation that Israelis or Zionists are ‘murderers’ or ‘child killers’; the demand that ‘genociders should get out of our neighbourhood’; or to be confronted with the question ‘do you support the IDF?’. The CST Report on Anti-Semitic Incidents in 2025 is a lot more detailed.  It totals 3700 such incidents in the UK.  Of this, 55% are related to the Palestine-Israel conflict, of which 1766 (48%) are “Anti-Zionist”, with “Zionist” deemed to be a proxy for ‘Jew’.  Furthermore, 1541 (42%) of these incidents are ‘online antisemitism’ of which 70% are related to ‘events in the Middle east’.  In total 2821 incidents (76%) constitute political or ideological discourses.

What both the ADL and CST reports illustrate is that such reaction to the political, geo-political, military and ideological events – and indeed the occupation, settlements and genocide – are now firmly under the “Third Wave Antisemitism” and no longer simply outrage at the death of 70 000 Gazans, the destruction of infrastructure and livelihoods, the increasing occupation of the West Bank, and the sustained incursion into Lebanon.  This has become the weaponisation of antisemitism to shield Israel from moral judgement and legal accountability, and to shield Zionism, as a political ideology, from scrutiny, when, in its name, destruction is actual and devastating.

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Antisemitism Now – Shield and Sword!

Albert Camus, in his work, The Rebel, argues that the twentieth century shows what occurs when political movements abandon moral constraints in the name of history, progress, revolution, because every genuine rebellion contains within itself a limit, a point beyond which the rebel, in destroying what it opposes, replicates it.  Indeed, the weaponisation of antisemitism is not just to shield Zionism from its excesses.  It is also a sword!  Since dubiously achieving its apotheosis – the state of Israel in 1948 – Zionism has progressively shrugged off its limits:  it has occupied beyond its mandate; it has resourced itself beyond its needs;  it has settled to create immutable facts on the ground;  it has muted and maimed journalists to hide its shame;  it has lobbied to exploit Western guilt;  it has killed and assassinated to quell resistance; and ultimately, it is in the throes of a genocide.

Zygmunt Bauman, in Modernity and the Holocaust, notes:  “…it was not illiterate savages, but graduates of the finest education systems in the West who designed the gas chambers used to burn millions …. in Germany.”  In fact, today the Muslim world – portrayed as the ‘savages’ by the ‘most moral and civilised Israelis’ – can look back at the history of antisemitism and rightfully claim that when the ‘civilised’ expelled Jews from Europe, we welcomed you in Istanbul, Morocco, and indeed Palestine! No wonder Dr Israel Shahak, who lived through the Warsaw Ghetto, survived the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, joined the IDF after moving to Palestine, and later was active in the Israel League for Human and Civil Rights, says today: “The Nazi’s made me afraid to be a Jew, and the Israelis make me ashamed to be a Jew”.

It should never be that the current genocide – with the growing and legitimate outrage globally – should be a fig leaf for real antisemitism to find a new lease on life, where bigoted slurs, caricature, conspiracy, vandalism, terror, and Nazi fantasies continue to be directed at Jews as Jews. We cannot replicate what we oppose. But we must oppose genocide in the name of Zionism and Israel, while fervently redeeming the divine and the human in Jews and Judaism!

*Ebrahim Rasool is the former ambassador to the United States and former Premier of the Western Cape.

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Across the world, the right has increasingly made xenophobia one of its central mobilising strategies. Migrants are blamed for unemployment, pressure on public services, crime, social breakdown and the failures of government. In many countries, particularly in Europe, this anti-migrant politics has become tightly entwined with Islamophobia. Migration is presented not only as an economic or administrative problem but as a threat to national culture, religious identity and civilisation itself.

South Africa’s anti-migrant politics is now following this path. The xenophobic project led by March and March and supported by other authoritarian and far-right forces is beginning to combine hostility towards migrants with hostility towards Muslims. The language has shifted from claims about migrants taking jobs and places in schools and hospitals to warnings about a Muslim “takeover”, Muslim “dominance”, an “Islamic invasion” and the introduction of Sharia law.

Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, the leader of March and March, recently asked on social media whether South Africans were wrong to oppose Muslim organisations that shelter or provide humanitarian support to migrants displaced by xenophobic violence. She claimed that foreign Muslims were seeking “dominance” in South Africa.

Speaking to the BBC, Ngobese-Zuma said that South Africa was undergoing a “very serious religious takeover”. Muslims comprise only around 1.5% to 2% of the population. The idea that such a small minority is taking over the country is plainly absurd. But the lack of any factual basis for Ngobese-Zuma’s claim does not make it politically insignificant. Far-right politics has never depended on an accurate description of reality. It works by identifying a vulnerable group, exaggerating its power and portraying its ordinary presence in society as a coordinated threat.

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Nkosikhona Ndabandaba, also known as Phakelumthakathi and closely associated with the same xenophobic mobilisation, has taken this language further. Responding to an image warning of an “Islamic invasion” and the introduction of Sharia law, he reportedly wrote: “Never ever, especially the terrorists!”

In the standard move of the right around the world, migrants, Muslims and terrorists are collapsed into one category. Muslim religious identity becomes grounds for suspicion, and the presence of foreign Muslims is portrayed as a security threat. This is a significant and alarming development in South African far-right politics. The migrant is no longer accused only of competing for jobs, using hospitals or operating small businesses. The migrant is now also presented as the carrier of a hostile religion and an agent of cultural conquest.

The expansion of the target is already visible. Xenophobic mobilisation is usually justified by saying that it is directed only against undocumented migrants. In practice, documented migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, foreign-owned businesses and South Africans who defend them are also threatened. The turn towards Islamophobia widens the target again. Muslim organisations, business owners, charities and South African Muslims who defend migrants can now be portrayed as part of the alleged takeover.

A recent post by the Pakistan South Africa Association described a visit to a church in Delmas, where it distributed food and grocery hampers to families in need. The initiative was explicitly interfaith and humanitarian. Yet some of the responses accused the association of trying to buy influence, gain control of the country or conceal predatory intentions. An ordinary act of solidarity was treated as proof of conspiracy.

The same suspicion is directed at Muslim organisations that defend migrants from unlawful arrest, exclusion or intimidation. When Muslim organisations call for due process or support migrant-owned businesses, their intervention is not treated as a constitutional position. It is presented as Muslims protecting “illegal foreigners” in pursuit of a larger religious agenda.

The argument is structured so that Muslims cannot answer it. If Muslim organisations remain silent, they can be accused of refusing to contribute to South African society. If they provide food, shelter or legal support, their assistance is described as an attempt to buy influence or impose religious dominance.

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The xenophobic and Islamophobic narratives strengthen each other. Xenophobia constructs the border as being under attack. Islamophobia constructs the nation’s culture and religion as being under attack. Ethnic nationalism adds a further claim that a particular community is losing control over territory, institutions and political authority. Together, these narratives allow a movement that emerged around resentment over jobs and public services to appeal to fears about identity, religion and national survival.

Democracy requires that questions of citizenship and legal status be decided through lawful procedures rather than by political movements, mobs or social-media campaigns. It protects freedom of religion and the right of civil-society organisations to offer humanitarian and legal support.

March and March’s politics increasingly challenge these principles. It claims the authority to decide who belongs, who may enter a hospital or school, who may run a business and which organisations may assist people under threat. Its leaders present migrants as people whose rights can be suspended and Muslims as a community whose motives are inherently suspect.

The growing danger of far-right populism extends beyond migrants and Muslims. Journalists, progressive lawyers, left learning trade unionists and radical grassroots activists are all coming under increasing attack. March and March has actively sought to delegitimise constitutional and humanitarian opposition to xenophobia.

The threat to South Africa does not come from Muslims or migrants. It comes from a far-right politics that turns the poverty, institutional collapse and kleptocratic politics that drive and justify public anger into hostility towards minorities, while leaving the political and economic forces responsible for the crisis untouched.

*Dr Buccus is an academic, political analyst and editor of Al-Qalam.

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Business Day has published a letter of complaint regarding Halal certification, which, apart from being contradictory, is deliberately conflated with what the writer refers to as “consumer awareness and transparency”. 

In addition to his attempt at mischief-making by hoping to provoke the ire of Christians through injecting a controversy on the Halal industry in South Africa, it will not be far removed to conclude that he does so in pursuit of Israel’s Islamophobic agenda.

That he represents an agency linked to the settler colonial regime which faces serious charges of committing genocide in Gaza, Daniel Jacobi and his outfit known as “South African Friends of Israel”, it does not surprise us that he would do so. 

Published on 6 August 2026, and titled “Religious certification’s role in consumer choice”, it is riddled with contradictions. 

For instance, his question about why Halal certified products have become the “default standard in so many supply chains” is explained and answered by himself. 

“Businesses are free to seek certification where there is consumer demand or export markets require it. For many manufacturers, halal certification is a commercial decision that opens access to local and international markets”, is his explanation. 

Indeed, if it is understood in such logical terms, underlined by the fact that Halal certification is purely a dietary requirement, not a bogey of any sort, nor associated with what Israeli-inspired Hasbara (propaganda) peddles as “Islamist terrorism”, why then is it necessary to politicize it as Jacobi does? 

We are confident that the overwhelming majority of South Africa’s consumers respect and accept Halal as a matter of dietary choice, health standards, and consumer transparency rather than an ideological symbol. 

It is common wisdom that the guidelines for Halal certification share similar imperatives for Kosher certification. These are, amongst others, hygiene, cleanliness, ethical treatment of animals and quality control. 

Crucially, these practices ensure food safety, which benefits all consumers regardless of faith. 

While these facts are indisputable, Jacobi’s dispute lies elsewhere. It is to politicise an Islamic imperative, which he unashamedly does by injecting red herrings. 

His fake concerns must be rejected with contempt. 

Jacobi is the same person who, on the appointment of former Minister Naledi Pandor as chair of the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF), publicly alleged that it has been hijacked by “radicals”. 

He also led a group of South African members of parliament and religious leaders on a highly controversial trip to Israel during 2025.

Jacobi confirmed that the trip was made and described it as “a mission to discover historic facts to Israel.”

The confirmation took place after the Good Party raised questions about its “secret mission.”

At the time, Rebecca Davis (Daily Maverick) critiqued it by claiming that it seemed to have been “a very one-sided ‘fact-finding mission’”.

She correctly assessed that any of the nine South African MPs who visited Israel on a recent “fact-finding mission” will testify to the media that “there was no evidence of apartheid and, to the contrary, Israel is a vibrant progressive multi-racial and multi-ethnic society, in which the rights of all citizens are protected and upheld by the rule of law”.

Her conclusion was based on the claim of the group that organised the trip in its press statement: “All delegates observed that, and will confirm with South African media, that there was no evidence of apartheid and, to the contrary, Israel is a vibrant progressive multi-racial and multi-ethnic society, in which the rights of all citizens are protected and upheld by the rule of law.”

By all accounts, it is evident that Jacobi and his pro-Israeli aligned group are invested in promoting and defending the Zionist-apartheid regime. 

The issue of Halal thus becomes a convenient decoy to raise the ire of South African consumers against Muslims at a time the country is confronted with social issues related to foreign migrants, xenophobia and Islamophobia. 

*Iqbal Jassat is an Executive Member of the Media Review Network (MRN)

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Across various parts of the country, self-appointed groups are entering businesses, questioning employers, inspecting workplaces, identifying foreign workers, and demanding to know who is legally employed. 

Regardless of the names these organisations give themselves, one question rises above all others: who has authorised them to enforce the law?

There is no denying that illegal immigration is a legitimate national concern. Every sovereign nation has the right, and indeed the duty, to protect its borders, regulate immigration, and ensure that those living and working within its territory comply with the law. South Africans are equally entitled to expect that these laws are enforced fairly and consistently.

Yet the responsibility for doing so has always rested with the state. The ANC government since 1994 has failed to adequately secure the country’s borders and enforce immigration laws. This has fuelled public frustration and a growing sense that the government has neglected one of its most fundamental responsibilities.

That failure is not an invitation for private citizens to become law enforcement officers. Border security, immigration enforcement, and the lawful deportation of undocumented foreign nationals are constitutional functions of the state. When government fails to act decisively, it creates a vacuum, and vacuums are often filled by self-appointed groups.

This is precisely where South Africa now finds itself. The grievances expressed by many of these groups are understandable. Citizens are concerned about unemployment, pressure on public services, crime, and the perception that immigration laws are not being enforced. These concerns deserve to be heard. But legitimate concerns cannot justify illegitimate methods.

When private groups enter businesses without lawful authority, interrogate workers, intimidate employers, and conduct what amount to their own immigration inspections, they move beyond civic activism into an area that threatens the rule of law.

The Constitution was never intended to permit citizens to appoint themselves as immigration officials or police officers. Our democracy depends upon due process, lawful authority, and equal protection under the law. 

Once those principles begin to erode, the consequences become increasingly difficult to contain.

Today it may be businesses employing foreign nationals; tomorrow it could be farms. The next day it could be factories, schools, shopping centres, or any institution targeted by whichever group believes it has the authority to intervene.

History shows that vigilantism rarely remains confined to its original purpose. Once groups become accustomed to exercising power without legal accountability, that power often expands.

An equally serious concern follows naturally. If businesses become accustomed to groups arriving unannounced and demanding access, what prevents future groups from demanding payment instead? 

What stops criminal syndicates from presenting themselves as community organisations? How long before intimidation evolves into organised extortion?

These are not hypothetical fears. They are risks that emerge whenever lawful authority is gradually replaced by informal power.

The silence from the government has only intensified public concern. Many South Africans are asking: Where is President Cyril Ramaphosa? During periods of heightened public tension, citizens reasonably expect visible leadership, clear communication, and decisive action. 

When that leadership appears absent, uncertainty grows, confidence weakens, and speculation inevitably fills the void.

Government now carries a dual responsibility. First, it must urgently restore public confidence by strengthening border security, improving immigration administration, enforcing existing laws, and lawfully deporting those who have no legal right to remain in the country. 

Secondly, it must make it unmistakably clear that no private group, regardless of its motives, may assume the powers of the state or take the law into its own hands.

South Africa’s Constitution protects the rights of businesses as well as individuals. Inspections and enforcement actions must be carried out by authorised officials acting within the law, not by self-appointed groups demanding access to private premises.

The Freedom Charter envisioned a South Africa founded upon justice, equality, dignity, and the rule of law. Our constitutional democracy cannot allow parallel systems of enforcement to emerge simply because public frustration has reached breaking point.

South Africa stands at a defining moment. If we excuse vigilantism because we agree with its immediate objective, we may one day discover that the same methods are being used for very different purposes. 

The issue before us is larger than immigration. It is about whether we remain a constitutional democracy governed by law, or gradually become a society where organised groups exercise authority simply because they can.

Government must take responsibility for the conditions that have contributed to this moment. It must address the legitimate concerns of its citizens through effective governance, economic growth, secure borders, and the consistent application of the law. 

But it must do so within the framework of the Constitution, because once the rule of law gives way to the rule of the crowd, everyone, citizen and non-citizen alike, ultimately becomes less secure.

The choice South Africa makes now will shape not only its immigration policy, but the future character of its democracy.

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“The dismissal of Karim Khan as the ICC prosecutor is perhaps the most significant event in the 24-year-long institutional history of the ICC,” says Sergey Vasiliev, professor of international law at Open University in the Netherlands, “and the greatest setback to the Court’s efforts to pursue justice in situations implicating major powers and their allies not party to the Court, including the US, Israel, and Russia.” 

There cannot be any doubt that the credibility of international justice is measured not by how it treats the weak, but by what happens when it is manipulated by the rich and powerful. 

A close scrutiny of the Israeli-led campaign surrounding ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan exposes a familiar pattern. Institutions celebrated as guardians of the rules-based international order become targets of political pressure the moment they threaten the interests of states that enjoy Western protection.

Regrettably, absent from much of the media coverage is the chronology that transformed Khan from a respected international prosecutor into a political liability. 

The same can be argued about the absence of the global South to ensure an impartial probe, even at this late hour to determine what apparently is driven by a highly-charged Zionist political agenda. 

For years, the International Criminal Court was embraced when it pursued African leaders, Balkan figures and, more recently, Russian officials. 

That consensus fractured after Khan sought arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

From that moment, the court itself became the subject of sustained political attacks.

The allegations of workplace misconduct against Khan deserve to be investigated independently and fairly. No public official should be immune from scrutiny. 

Equally, those allegations cannot be used to erase the wider political context. Both realities can exist simultaneously. An investigation into personal conduct does not negate the documented efforts by governments and lobbying networks to obstruct the ICC’s Palestine investigation. 

Reducing the entire issue to Khan’s personal conduct conveniently diverts attention from the institution he represents and the cases it is pursuing.

The beneficiaries of this narrative are clear. Governments determined to shield Israel from international accountability have consistently challenged the legitimacy of the court whenever its investigations touched Israeli officials. 

Political leaders, influential lobbying organisations and sections of the Western media have increasingly portrayed the ICC as overreaching, despite previously defending its authority in other conflicts. 

The objective is larger than one prosecutor. It is to weaken the credibility of any institution capable of holding powerful allies to the same legal standards imposed on others.

This pattern is neither new nor unique. International law has repeatedly encountered fierce resistance whenever it challenges geopolitical interests. 

From Iraq to Afghanistan, from Libya to Palestine, the principle remains remarkably consistent. 

However, what we face is that accountability is welcomed only when directed at adversaries but resisted when it reaches allies. 

Double standards and hypocrisy is a blatant trademark for Western imperialism. 

The language of a rules-based international order becomes conditional, dependent not on law but on political convenience.

Media coverage has largely reinforced this selective framing. To any independent observer able to read between the lines, it is pretty clear that headlines have focused on Khan as an individual while giving far less attention to the sustained political campaign against the ICC itself. 

The real issue has never been Karim Khan alone. It is whether international law can survive when its reach extends beyond the politically expendable and touches those protected by geopolitical power. 

Hence the question: Does the legitimacy of the ICC depend on the identity of those it investigates? 

In pointing out the backdrop,  Sergey Vasiliev says is “US sanctions against ICC senior officials and its campaign to dismantle the institution, as well as the Israeli government’s long-term interference and its most recent efforts to exert influence on States Parties to oust Khan”. 

Vasiliev finds himself “truly worried about the future of the Court and whether States Parties will be willing and able genuinely to protect its independence and ensure its recovery after this ‘decapitation’,“ as he calls it.

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

The post Karim Khan and the ICC – Victimisation implicates Israel, US and Western allies appeared first on Al-Qalam.

What we are witnessing in South Africa is not simply xenophobia, a general fear of foreigners. It is Afrophobia: hostility directed specifically at black African migrants from north of the Limpopo River, while white foreigners from Europe are often welcomed, celebrated, or viewed entirely differently. This selective hostility exposes something far more painful than economic anxiety: it is the symptom of a deep wound in our collective psyche, a self-hatred implanted by centuries of colonialism and apartheid, that we now turn outward onto those who most resemble us.

This is why Afrophobia cannot be explained away as nativism or economic concern dressed up in civic language. It is anti-black racism directed at fellow Africans, the internalisation of colonial and apartheid hierarchies of race and worth, now replayed by the very people those hierarchies were designed to crush. And to understand it, we must be willing to look into a mirror we have long refused to face.

What the mirror reveals, psychologists call self-projection: the unconscious process by which we take the parts of ourselves we have been taught to despise and cast them onto others, attacking in them what we cannot bear in ourselves. Three and a half centuries of colonialism and apartheid did not merely dispossess black South Africans of land, labour and dignity. They waged a sustained assault on black self-worth itself. Generations were told, in law and in liturgy, in classroom and in workplace, that blackness meant inferiority, backwardness, criminality. Steve Biko understood this when he wrote that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. Frantz Fanon had diagnosed it decades earlier: the colonised subject, saturated in the coloniser’s contempt, comes to see himself through the coloniser’s eyes. This is self-hatred in its purest form, and self-hatred, left unhealed, does not stay inside. It seeks a target.

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And the target it finds is close to home. The poison of internalised contempt does not evaporate with a new flag and a new constitution. It settles into the subconscious and waits. So when a wounded people encounters a stranger who looks like them, darker, perhaps, poorer, speaking an unfamiliar African tongue, the stranger becomes a screen onto which all that internalised shame is projected The Zimbabwean labourer, the Mozambican mechanic, the Malawian mu`adh-dhin and the Somalian shopkeeper: are attacked not because they are foreign, but because they are black and foreign. They embody, in the distorted mirror of the colonised mind, everything we were taught to hate about ourselves. The violence directed at them is, at its root, violence against our own reflection.

Once we understand this, the puzzle of selective hostility solves itself. This is why the European, American, and Asian migrant walks unmolested through our streets while the African migrant’s shop burns. Whiteness was installed at the summit of the colonial hierarchy of worth, and that hierarchy still governs the subconscious, even of those it crushed. To defer to the fair-skinned foreigner while brutalising the dark-skinned one is no coincidence. It is the colonial order reproducing itself through the hands of its former victims. Can black people internalise racism and despise their own blackness without even knowing it? The evidence burns in our townships.

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If the diagnosis is self-hatred, then for Muslims the cure begins with Divine revelation. The Qur’an, in Surah al-Rum (30:22), proclaims that “among the signs of Allah are the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of our languages and our skin colours”. Our different tongues and our different shades of skin are not accidents to be ranked, nor flaws to be despised; they are ayat, Divine signs. To celebrate this diversity is to affirm a sign of Allah in creation. To despise the darkness of another’s skin, or, through projection, the darkness of one’s own, is to turn in contempt from a sign of Allah in the universe. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, sealed this teaching in his final sermon when he proclaimed: no Arab has superiority over a non-Arab, nor white over black, except in God-consciousness (taqwa).

Healing, however, begins with honesty. We must find the courage to name Afrophobia for what it is: self-hatred turned outward. And then we must undertake the harder, slower work, decolonising our minds, reclaiming the dignity of our blackness as a sign of Allah, and rebuilding the Pan-African solidarity that carried us to freedom. The black stranger at our door is not our enemy. He or she is our brother and sister, and our mirror. Until we can look into that mirror without flinching, the fires will keep burning. When at last we can, we will see reflected there what Steve Biko declared in defiance and what Allah had proclaimed in revelation long before: Black is Beautiful, for black skin is among the signs of Allah, and every sign of Allah is beautiful.

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On July 15, 2026, my flow of birthday wishes was interrupted with news more consequential, but mournfully sad: John Louis Esposito, at the age of 86, was no more. Sombreness overwhelmed me, and I counted back the almost four decades since I first encountered him, as one of those who were curiously excited about the South African transition, the presidency of Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu’s witness, and the prospects for a new future free from all discriminations following the travesty of apartheid.

In the last decade, I had the wonderful privilege and honour (for two years) to encounter him up close at Georgetown University in the USA. He had accepted to host me as Distinguished Scholar in Residence in the Al Waleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding (ACMCU), following my stint as South African Ambassador to the USA under President Obama. Up to that moment, we had encountered each other regularly across the world, in conferences and seminars, at think tanks during the halcyon years of the Arab Spring, and anywhere else where Islam and its shadow, islamophobia, were on the agenda. 

Most memorably, in 2012, John Esposito and I were two of probably only 15 participants in Doha with key leaders of the Arab Spring who were gathered to consider Constitution-Making and Statecraft in what we hoped would be a qualitative leap out of authoritarianism. He was the only one who was not Muslim among eminent scholars like Yusuf al Qardawi, Hassan al Turabi, Jasser Auda, Tariq Ramadan, Hashim Kamali, and others. While the Muslims were cautiously optimistic, Esposito doubted that the Empire and their minions could accept a Muslim world with an alternative liberatory statecraft, and without the confirmation bias of Muslims being – without cause – naturally extreme and therefore, in need of strong authoritarian law and order regimes. These were the critical informants to a pervasive islamophobia.

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It was this dual insight – the yearning of Muslims to live with dignity, as well as the fundamental, if not deliberate, Western distortion of Islam, Islamism, and the Muslim – that made John Esposito different. He was a different Christian, a different American, a different academic, a different human being! These identities did not make an aberration of John Esposito. He would insist that because he was Christian, American, an academic, and a human being, he needed to testify to the truth inherent in each of those identities: his own faith made him recognise the profound faithfulness of Muslims; his own Americanness made him desire freedom, democracy and rights for Muslims under authoritarianism or extremism; his academic training made him uncompromising on rigour and evidence; and his humaneness created in him a deep well of human empathy and compassion. By this definition, right-wing evangelicals were the aberration; American support for tyranny and warmongering was the aberration; moral clarity produced by academic scholarship without the requisite moral courage to act was the aberration; and human silence and complicity in atrocity were the aberrations in the human condition.

In his scholarship of Islam and Muslims, in his development and mentoring of Muslim scholars, in his friendship with Muslim leaders, in his writing of over 50 books about Islam and Muslims, in his activism against islamophobia, in his advocacy for a shift in policy and law about Muslims, and in his institution-building like the Bridge Initiative, John Esposito was neither oracle nor orientalist. He was neither our source of guidance and wisdom, nor were we the exotic other to study. He did not speak for us, or about us without us. But his scholarship gave him the insight and understanding of Islam and Muslims, the sincere representation of which gave him the credibility of an insider-outsider both for Muslims and most non-Muslims. Because he studied with rigour, he understood with empathy, and he could interpret with integrity, free of the emotion that comes too easily to victims of history. So, he did not infantilise Muslims. 

But neither did he idealise us. He was a witness to the battle for the narrative and interpretation of the Quran and Sunnah; for their appropriation either for the middle ground or the extremes; and for their application under conditions of minority or majority – believing firmly that application may change but the Maqasid, the intents, remain unshakeable! Because he applied academic rigour and stood on evidence, he could dispassionately critique Muslims about the management of our own unresolved demons and ambiguities ranging from the ‘other’ to gender to politics to sectarianism. But always as the sensitive and compassionate outsider-insider. 

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But he was also a thorough insider to all things Christian and American. He shared their rituals and celebrations, but he also knew their suppositions and presumptions about Islam and Muslims. The most pernicious of these excused occupation and genocide; gave license and arms to authoritarians; allowed islamophobia to fashion travel bans and unspeakable bigotry, especially after 9.11; and wage a forever war on the Muslim heartlands. All because the theory espoused was one of the modernisation of the Muslim ‘other’– which Esposito vigorously critiqued – because its corollary, secularisation, the stripping of religious sensibility from the Muslim, was not only misplaced, but would invite resentment and blowback, and thus breed the next generation of extremists. All of this made John Esposito dangerous to the empire and the superpower. He was constantly attacked by detractors in the Western conservative ranks for seemingly endorsing our fault lines and for acting as a Trojan horse for bringing Muslim scholars to the USA, where they flourished without the burdens of violent occupation, authoritarian surveillance, and stultifying orthodoxy.

Deservedly, tributes have poured in for John Esposito and messages of condolences for his beloved Jean and their dogs. All of these have fulsomely recognised his contribution to Islam, Muslims, and humanity. These have focused on his writing and his bridge-building. Muslim tributes have cautiously tried to manage the fine line between an instinctive desire to recognise in him one worthy of the highest honour in this world and the next while managing the strictures of soteriology – the theology of salvation – which inhibits us from showering even a fraction of our prayers on those imbued with absolute nobility and impact. Yet the tributes have touched the fine line: Many have invoked the Quranic formula that we originate with Allah and we return to Allah; Anwar Ibrahim describes him as a ‘true friend of the Muslim World’; Arsalan Iftikhar muses that John Esposito ‘… did more for educating the world about Islam than most of our two billion Muslims…”; and Jonathan Brown, who succeeded Esposito at the ACMCU, prays ‘May God grant his soul mercy.’

*Ebrahim Rasool is the Former Ambassador to the USA and Senior Fellow at Georgetown University.

The post John Esposito – an empathetic truth teller appeared first on Al-Qalam.

Islamophobia in South Africa can no longer be dismissed as the work of a few misguided individuals or isolated extremists. 

The evidence points to something far more organised. Anti-Muslim prejudice is being shaped by an ecosystem of media narratives, political opportunism, imported ideological networks and social media disinformation that increasingly defines Muslims as outsiders, regardless of their history, citizenship or contribution to the country.

The recent intervention by South Africa’s Film and Publication Board following the circulation of a grotesque Facebook post depicting the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, in a vile and hateful manner illustrates both the seriousness of the problem and the urgency of confronting it. The Board correctly recognised that the material amounted to advocacy of hatred based on religion and warned that it had the potential to incite harm.

The episode exposed more than one hateful individual. It exposed an environment in which anti-Muslim hatred has become normalised.

That environment was on full display following President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Cabinet reshuffle, when Yusuf Cassim was appointed Deputy Minister of Higher Education. Within hours, a South African citizen whose family has deep roots in the country was being labelled a foreigner, terrorist, suicide bomber and associated with Boko Haram, Al Qaeda and Hamas simply because he is a young South African of Indian Muslim heritage.

Though Cassim belongs to a political party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), whose policies on Palestine we find reprehensible due to its bias in favour of the settler colonial regime, we find the abuse was not based on facts. It was based on identity.

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The campaign against Cassim demonstrated how quickly political appointments can become vehicles for racial, religious and ethnic scapegoating. What should have been a debate about governance became an attack on whether a Muslim belongs in South Africa at all.

Veteran journalist Max du Preez warned that the intensity of the hatred reflected levels of ethnic and religious bigotry not witnessed since the democratic transition in 1994. 

Absent from much of the public discussion was the fact that Yusuf Cassim is not an immigrant. He is a South African citizen who has participated in the country’s democratic institutions for years. Yet the facts mattered little because the objective was never accuracy. It was a narrative construction.

The architecture of Islamophobia depends precisely on this process. Muslims are first portrayed as perpetual outsiders. Once that perception takes hold, citizenship, history and constitutional rights become secondary to prejudice.

This process did not begin in South Africa.

Following the attacks of September 11, Muslims across the world became associated with extremism, terrorism and violence through relentless media stereotyping. Entire communities were judged through the actions of fringe organisations while the overwhelming majority of Muslims disappeared from public consciousness except when viewed through the prism of security.

These portrayals reflected more than poor journalism.

Israeli-aligned think tanks, lobbying organisations, intelligence networks and politically connected research institutions supplied narratives that were amplified by sections of the media. Anonymous intelligence briefings, speculative research and unverified claims became accepted truths through constant repetition. Those same reports were later cited as evidence to reinforce the original assumptions.

Manufactured consent evolved into manufactured suspicion.

South Africa has not been immune to these influences.

Years ago, sensational reporting claiming widespread ISIS recruitment in South Africa illustrated how irresponsible journalism can reinforce anti-Muslim prejudice. Emotionally loaded language blurred the distinction between criminal organisations and ordinary Muslim communities. The effect was to encourage readers to associate Islam itself with terrorism rather than to understand the complexities of violent extremism.

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The same mechanisms continue today.

During the recent surge in anti-immigrant protests, fuelled by economic hardship, unemployment and failures in border management, Muslim organisations appealed for calm, rejected vigilantism and warned against xenophobia, Afrophobia and Islamophobia. Humanitarian organisations provided emergency assistance to displaced migrants facing threats of violence, consistent with their longstanding charitable obligations.

Yet these humanitarian efforts were immediately recast by nationalist voices as evidence that Muslims were siding with foreigners against South Africans.

The accusation reveals how humanitarian action itself has become politicised.

Muslim organisations were criticised for assisting vulnerable migrants while simultaneously being accused of divided loyalties, foreign influence and hostility towards Black South Africans. Support for refugees was deliberately conflated with support for illegal immigration. Calls for peaceful and lawful responses were reframed as opposition to South African interests.

This narrative serves a broader political purpose.

It redirects legitimate public frustration over unemployment, crime, corruption and ineffective immigration policies away from state failures and towards visible minority communities. Muslims become convenient symbols through which wider anxieties are channelled.

History demonstrates the dangers of such politics.

Apartheid relied upon narratives that identified certain communities as permanent threats requiring exceptional treatment. Different populations were targeted, yet the underlying logic remains unchanged. Social problems are personalised, minorities are blamed, fear is amplified and discrimination is presented as common sense.

The beneficiaries of this process extend well beyond fringe activists. Political opportunists, media platforms driven by outrage, lobbying networks, ideological movements and foreign influence operations all benefit when society becomes polarised along religious and ethnic lines.

Once Muslims are portrayed as outsiders, the definition of who belongs continues to narrow. Today the target may be Muslims. Tomorrow it may be another minority community. The machinery of exclusion rarely confines itself to one group.

South Africa’s constitutional democracy was built upon the rejection of precisely this politics of exclusion.

Confronting Islamophobia, therefore, requires more than prosecuting hate speech after it occurs. It requires exposing the institutions that manufacture prejudice, challenging media narratives that normalise suspicion, scrutinising imported ideological campaigns that inflame division and refusing attempts to weaponise economic hardship against vulnerable communities.

The Film and Publication Board demonstrated that institutions can recognise explicit religious hatred. Equal vigilance is required against the more sophisticated forms of prejudice that operate through political rhetoric, media framing and digital disinformation.

The silence surrounding these deeper forces is not accidental.

It reflects an ecosystem in which prejudice is manufactured, misinformation is legitimised and political interests profit from keeping Muslims under perpetual suspicion.

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

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