Relocated to the US, a popular South African journalist switches media platform to further outreach her antisemitism.

By Lawrence Nowosenetz

Relocated to Washington DC, South African journalist Redi Tlhabi broadcasts to a third of a billion people for the Qatari based network Al Jazeera.

For four months she has recited the oldest conspiracy theory in Europe, named it as antisemitism, and then told her audience it is true. Measured against the two screens the United States itself uses, the IHRA working definition and Natan Sharansky’s 3D test, an identifiable and fully documented body of her output stops being simply criticism of Israel.

Before leaving for overseas, Redi Tlhabi worked for many years as a broadcaster on Johannesburg based station Radio 702. She hosted her own programme called the Redi Tlhabi Show for about 10 years. Radio 702 is part of Primedia a broadcast media group founded by Issie Kirsch and his son William in 1994. Besides having Jewish management in its formative years, Radio 702 also featured well known and popular Jewish radio personalities John Berks and Stan Katz. This era also saw the new democratic South Africa formed and Radio 702 led the way as a talk radio station where openness and freedom of expression on radio flourished.

Funded in large part by the government of Qatar and chartered as an arm of the Qatari state, Tlhabi presents its popular current affairs programme UpFront. This is despite that the US Department of Justice ordered in 2020 for Al Jazeera to register as a foreign agent after concluding that it operated at the direction of the Qatari government. Viewed as the mouthpiece of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Jazeera is banned across most of the Middle East, including Egypt, Israel, Bahrain, the Palestinian Authority controlled areas and other countries. It refused, arguing that it reaches out to more than 430 million consumers over 150 countries. To that outreach, Tlhabi adds roughly 700,000 followers on X.

There is a gospel Redi Tlhabi has preached with regularity this year that it now functions as an obvious self-evident truth. She takes the oldest conspiracy theory in European history – the belief that Jews secretly control the money, the media and the machinery of government – and calls it before anyone can object, exactly what it is – an antisemitic trope. Then, despite revealing exactly what it is by her own admission and acknowledgement, she falsely imparts to her viewers it to be true.

She comes to this conclusion following scrutiny.

Really?

Regrettably, Tlhabi neglects to also inform her audience that her present Qatari employer is far from being Jewish and that when she worked for a South African Jewish media company earlier in her career, she enjoyed success without any reproach against her apparent Jewish ‘controllers’.

Bigotry is seldom logical or fair, but always harmful and dangerous. Tlhabi has overstepped the antisemitism red line and now presents an affront to human dignity and freedom not only of Jews but to democratic society of all races and creeds where respect, truth and justice still matter.

Like happiness, antisemitism means different thing to different people. Yet antisemitism mutates. It has shifted from being hatred of Jews to hatred of the Jewish state. This reality is strongly contested by anti-Israel and anti-Zionist voices but nevertheless the standard definition has found traction. Let’s begin with the standard, even if Tlhabi will say the standard is rigged. The United States government itself uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition. The State Department has applied it since 2010; Executive Order 13899 made it a reference point for federal civil-rights enforcement in 2019; the 2023 National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism adopted it; and more than half of the states in the USA have endorsed it. The definition carries its own brake, written into its text: criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. (My emphasis)

The IHRA definition offers, as its textbook illustration, the making of “mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective, such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.”

That is the classic canard, named by the authors of the definition.

On 4 June, Tlhabi proudly proclaimed:

• “Control the whole world… I thought this was an antisemitic trope.”  She clearly identifies with this old timeworn lie.

• On 11 May 2026 she asked her followers whether it is an “antisemitic trope still” to say Israel “wants to control social media.”   

• On 21 March 2026, she dropped any vestige of a bland façade:

        “So can we say the Israeli lobby uses money and power to  control the US and its lawmakers? … I think we must.”

• On 5 June 2026, she instructed her audience to stop caring what they are called, because words like “control, influence, money” simply describe the truth.

This is the defining moment and the turning point when the certainty of prejudice allows no questioning or doubt.   We have seen it before and we thought it was dead and buried after the Nazi era: Sheer and unadulterated anti-Jewish hatred and vilification.

Natan Sharansky’s older 3D test draws the same line and names the three markers of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel animus: demonization, double standards, and delegitimisation. A writer may despise the Israeli government, reject Zionism as a political ideology, call the conduct of the war in Gaza criminal, and still sit on the safe side of every line. The bar is set high by design. Criticism is not silenced. Obsessive discrimination is not lightly inferred. Tlhabi comfortably clears these hurdles and effortlessly enters the terrain of vicious hate filled antisemitism.

The machinery does not vary. She recites the conspiracy theory, names it as a conspiracy theory so that nobody can accuse her of ignorance, and then asserts that it is accurate.  Tlhabi has done it across dozens of posts, openly and brazenly from a desk in Washington DC. She speaks with the voice of undisputed authority.  “Those who know, know” she posted on X on 30 June 2026. No fact checking, no proof just sheer certainty. It is hard to reconcile such crude irrational dogmatism with a highly educated journalist and influential public model.

On 13 March, she ran the charge as sarcasm, reciting “it is antisemitic to say Israel controls US politicians” in the voice of someone tired of pretending it is false.  The conduct matches the IHRA definition’s own example of the world-conspiracy myth, and it matches Sharansky’s demonization criterion.  Absurd too and equally insulting of the sovereignty and power of the USA to suggest that its politicians are unduly influenced by a foreign government or individuals.   

Tlhabi’s response to a blog in the Times of Israel (ToI) by a private identified contributor is illustrative of her conspiracy theorising.  The article titled “Africa Must Fragment, South Africa First” argued that South Africa should be broken into ethnic successor states. A Tlhabi social media user posted this blog on Tlhabi’s comment section adding that (undefined) “they”, were “behind this nyaka nyaka (a colloquial African term for chaos) and “will stop at NOTHING.” Tlhabi quote-tweeted that post with a resounding affirmation:

 “Nnete,” she wrote in Sesotho, her mother tongue (meaning true) and: “Mossad is GOOD. I hope our investigative journalists are working. I’m happy to give them leads”.   

A Tlhabi social media user’s comment had become, in Tlhabi’s hands, proof of an Israeli intelligence operation to fragment a continent, and she was volunteering her services to help reporters investigate and expose this evil plan. The IHRA definition speaks of the myth of a world Jewish conspiracy. Here is that myth, transposed to Africa, named as Mossad and offered to journalists as a tip.

Tlhabi’s second category of demonization shifts from the Jewish State, Israel to individual Jews in South Africa. Her most sustained personal campaign of the year is against a respected rabbi. She has called South Africa’s Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, “a divisive, hateful man.” She has charged that he “whips up fear and uses hyperbole to create the impression that Jews are in danger, from the rest of us.” She fails to acknowledge the real and existential dangers Jewish communities have faced worldwide since the 7 October 2023 atrocities and the incitement – including actual physical attacks – on Jewish civilians in Western cities.  Instead, she attributes to the head of Orthodox Jewry in South Africa his concern for his congregation as paranoia and a fraudulent accusation against ordinary society.

This malicious instinct extends to private Jewish South African citizens. Mark Saltzman, a member of the prominent family behind the South African pharmacy chain Dis-Chem criticised her over Israel. She recast his family’s philanthropy as proof of a hidden design, writing that he:

 “…inadvertently confirms that money is donated as a [form] of control.”

The old trope about Jewish money, applied this time to a Jewish businessman rather than to a lobby in the abstract, surfaced the moment the quarrel spotlighted her personal animus against Israel.  

In the USA, when a New York turbulent primary between two Jewish Democrats, Brad Lander and sitting Rep. Dan Goldman, produced a result that some Jewish New Yorkers found alarming, Tlhabi reposted a message that mocked that anxiety:

“Praying for your safety tonight, after one Jewish man was defeated by another Jewish man.”

She reposted an item declaring that “Jews are many things, but stupid is not one of them.” She is perfectly right in that observation evidenced in achievements across academic, scientific and economic spheres, but her framing of their undoubted accomplishments was meant in a disparaging and dehumanising sense by referring to cryptic and unnamed “many things” that Jews are good at. Were any other religious, ethnic or national group to be characterized in this manner, it would rightly be regarded as racist. 

In her coverage of a shooting at an Islamic centre in San Diego and the Jewish community’s caring response proving “the urgent, universal need for security protections at all faith-based sites,” Tlhabi inferred that Jewish fear of violence was a ruse. In her view, the World Jewish Congress recasts Jewish anxiety about antisemitism as a cynical tactic “at best conspiratorial.” For Tlhabi, Jewish conspiracy is a constant recurring theme in her reportage

The third category of her antisemitism is the easiest to evidence and the least contested supported by Sharansky’s unfailing 3D test.  Tlhabi has posted the bare utterance “Israel is a terrorist state” on at least seven separate occasions in four months, the way a congregation recites a creed.

She has luridly described Israeli soldiers as:

– “savages”

– “murderers”

– in “the grip of some psychosis”,

– a “genocidal state led by psychopaths” and

– “filth”.

Such is the gospel of Tlhabi.

A reader may believe that the Israeli military has committed grave crimes in Gaza and still recognise that “savages”, “psychopaths” and “filth” is the vocabulary of degradation and dehumanisation – the precise character assassination the antisemitism definitions exist to flag.

Her reply is on the record, and it deserves to be put plainly. She holds that opposition to Zionism concerns a political ideology and a state, with no bearing on Jews as a people, and that the charge of antisemitism is a cudgel used to silence her. Writing in News24, she observed that when she criticises Israel, she is called an antisemite, and added that she can “live with this title.”

The frameworks marshalled against her are, moreover, contested. The American Civil Liberties Union and others have warned that the IHRA examples can be stretched to chill legitimate speech, and many reasonable people read the Israel-related clauses in good faith and reject them.  This tired response overlooks:

– the crucial delineation between criticism and defamation

– between informed comment and character assassination

– between established facts and baseless dogmatic falsehoods.  Anyone who resists rational debate and factual challenge is not part of the enterprise called civilizational enquiry and progress.

The safe harbour Tlhabi relies on to protect criticism of Israel is “similar to that levelled against any other country.” No – it is completely different:  A double standard and hypocrisy as wide as the Grand Canyon. At present there is a genocide case against Myanmar pending in the ICJ. One does not see the leaders and supporters of Myanmar being described by Tlhabi or the media as psychopaths or the like. Similarly, those responsible for the huge human suffering, sexual abuse, starvation and death in Sudan are not singled out for dehumanisation or demonization. The deposed President of Syria, responsible for suffering, death and displacement of millions of Syrians also has not been subjected to close scrutiny or denunciation by Tlhabi – certainly not with such extreme language.

Measured against the definition the United States government itself applies and against the test a former Soviet prisoner devised to separate criticism from hatred, an identifiable body of what Redi Tlhabi broadcasts meets the egregious markers of antisemitism: world conspiracy theories, demonization delegitimation and double standards.

She flagrantly rejects the official antisemitism policy of the USA, her gracious host. 

Tlhabi enjoys the freedoms in the USA including freedom of speech which she does not accord others who challenges her views. She benefits from a platform which is a Qatari state backed broadcaster with a reach of more than 430 million people and a personal following of three quarters of a million.  She is a foreign national in Washington DC who has satisfied herself that the world conspiracy is real and that her task is to help the rest of us see it. She spotted the trope, identified and named it, and then told a third of a billion people that it was true. She is unwilling to allow her bigoted views to stand scrutiny. She should be held accountable for her contribution to the incitement and violence which has manifested in the US and across major Western countries against individuals, although unfortunately she is not alone. 

Redi Tlhabi is abusing her freedoms to deprive Jews of their right to safety and dignity.

About the writer:

Born in Pretoria Lawrence Nowosenetz obtained his BA at University of the Witwatersrand and LLB at the University of South Africa. He has been admitted as an Attorney in South Africa and as an advocate in South Africa. He practiced at the Pretoria and Johannesburg Bar and worked as a human rights and labour lawyer at the Legal Resources Centre a public interest law firm. Lawrence was Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and completed professional internship in the USA. He was a a labour arbitrator and mediator, part time Senior Commissioner at the Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) as well as a panelist at Tokiso Dispute Settlement. He was a member of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and Pretoria Chairman. He has also served as an Acting Judge of the High Court, South Africa. He now lives in Tel Aviv.

*Feature picture: Redi Tlhabi (Illustrative image: Daily Maverick | Gemini)

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).