Danger Alert – words once said can be forgiven but never forgotten.
By Marika Sboros
Words are “our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it,” JK Rowling writes in one of her best-selling Harry Potter books,
She could have been describing words and magical thinking of anti-Israel lobbyists, who show more intent on inflicting rather than remedying injury.
Israel’s critics routinely abuse, misuse and weaponise key words in a relentless barrage of global attacks in its war against Hamas. They lob these words mindlessly, like grenades into safe rooms and bomb shelters.
They don’t just distort the words’ meanings. They incite violence and spread hatred with potentially fatal consequences – not just for Jews who are their intended targets.
Prime examples of their weaponised words are “genocide” and its close companion, “holocaust”. “Rape” is another example locked in lethal embrace with “resistance”, a word that once evoked noble defiance against tyranny.
Today, critics use it to whitewash mass rape, torture and genital mutilation of women, children and men by Hamas as weapons of war.
“Revolution”, a word once linked to liberation and justice, now glorifies terrorism and erases moral boundaries. “Occupation”, “colonialism”, “settler”, “ethnic cleansing”, “starvation” and “famine” have become shadows of their former selves.
In this lexicon, Jews are genocidal “baby killers”. When they move to Israel, they are “settler colonialists”. Jewish babies are “occupiers”. Terrorists are “freedom fighters”.
“Zionist” is a swear word and the lobby’s code word for Jews. “Antisemitism” is the modern euphemism for the “world’s oldest hatred” – Jew hatred.
The backdrop to these semantic missiles is, of course, the killing fields strewn across southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
On that day, more than 3000 Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorists and assorted Gazan civilians infiltrated the country by land, sea and air. They targeted mostly unarmed civilians at 22 mostly civilian sites, including the nearby Nova music festival held for peace.
They slaughtered over 1,200 people dead and left more than 5,000 wounded, many grievously to this day. The terrorists mass raped women, children and some men, tortured, shot, beheaded, burnt alive whole families and mutilated children and babies in front of their parents and parents in front of their children.
They kidnapped 250 people, including the elderly, children and infants as hostages to Gaza where 50 still languish in captivity in tunnels. Most are presumed dead, according to reliable intelligence sources. Those who have survived cling to life under hellish conditions.
The scale of gratuitous savagery on the day was so unprecedented that British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore compared it to a “medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies.” Others have called it a “pogrom” and “the worst terror attack in history.”
The terrorists set it apart by videoing themselves committing and celebrating atrocities and uploading these in real time online for posterity. Despite this, the denialism of the mass atrocities perpetrated on Jews on October 7 and the demonisation of Israel continue.
If Israel’s critics acknowledge the slaughter at all, they use language and logic to understate and misrepresent it. It’s as if they believe that Hamas had no choice other than to act as it did; as if the victims (not all of them Jews) somehow “deserved it” or “brought it on themselves”.
Mainstream and independent journalists collude and commonly call October 7 simply an “attack”. Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival CEO, called it an “event” after reversing his decision not to screen an October 7 documentary.
Bailey’s reason for initially banning the film? The filmmakers had not secured permission from Hamas to use its videos of atrocities.
Presumably, he would have required copyright clearance from ISIS before airing footage of its beheadings, or from Hitler and his SS before screening Auschwitz images.
They ignore the many, more expert Jewish voices vigorously disputing these claims with facts. They ignore the basic principle that if 50 million people say a stupid thing, it’s still a stupid thing.
In South Africa, the first prominent Jew to raise his voice publicly just days after October 7 was former African National Congress (ANC) government Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils.
Kasrils distinguished himself – if that’s quite the right word – by calling the slaughter “a brilliant, spectacular guerrilla warfare attack… damn good.” He went on:
“They swept on them, and they killed them, and damned good! I was so pleased and people who support resistance applauded.”
Not only Jews found Kasrils’ sentiments “grotesque”.
In May this year, Kasrils celebrated wildfires raging across nature parks in Israel as “resistance”. He expressed the fond hope that the country would burn to the ground.
South Africa’s female Ronnie Kasrils – Jo Bluen, chief spokesperson for South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) – expresses similar sentiments.
If Bluen has distinguished herself at all, it is by using SAJFP as a vehicle to take Kasrils’ lack of moral compass to new heights or more appropriately in this case – depths.
Lawrence Nowosenetz, a retired human rights and labour lawyer that has served as an Acting Judge of South Africa’s Hight Court, and now lives in Israel, describes the SAJFP as little more than:
“ a fringe, unrepresentative group, with no communal mandate or credibility. Its members are “obscure, morally blemished people who have not distinguished themselves in the communal, business or professional world – in society generally.”
Bluen and fellow SAJFP members cozy up publicly to Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, a controversial founder and CEO of the global Muslim charity Gift of the Givers. While ostensibly doing disaster-relief work, Sooliman remains dogged by claims that his charity has been channelling funds donated for humanitarian work to Hamas in Gaza.
Bluen and co routinely ridicule the Jewish community’s leaders, groups and organisations, including Tikkun Africa, which contributes to South Africa through genuine humanitarian work and not as a façade to cover nefarious activities.
To boost their numbers and impression of relevance further, they partner closely with extremist Islamist, anti-Israel and anti-West groups. Among these are the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, MJC (South Africa’s Muslim Judicial Council), and other pro-Palestinian factions that support Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
In September 2024, the morning after Israeli soldiers found six young hostages executed by Hamas in Gaza, MJC president Sheikh Riad Fataar publicly declared:
“I am Hamas! Cape Town is Hamas! Viva Hamas, viva!”
Freedom of speech is one thing. Such sentiment from a respected member of the Muslim community is another.
But then, Fataar takes his lead from high up South Africa’s political ladder, as does Bluen. The country’s ruling ANC party has a well-documented animus towards Israel and Jews who support it.
Bluen thinks nothing of massaging biographical details to boost her standing and relevance. She claims to be a journalist, citing a stint as a columnist for Business Day.
The newspaper published only a handful of columns under her name in 2016. It does so routinely on a fee-free basis with others in various industries who appreciate the free exposure.
Genuine South African journalist and satirist David Bullard dismisses Bluen as a “work-shy rich kid” in an opinion piece in Daily Friend in 2019. Thanks to “daddy’s money”, Bullard writes, Bluen “got herself a couple of degrees” and was “trying to bag a PhD” through the London School of Economics (LSE).
Bluen started her PhD in 2017. Eight years later, aged 38, she’s still trying to bag it.
In the immediate wake of October 7, she claimed the existence of a “near-universal consensus among international lawyers” that Israel was committing “textbook genocide.”
No such consensus exists.
On LSE’s website, Bluen lists her expertise as “crimes against humanity, Nuremberg Trials and international criminal law”. She would be more honest to list chief propagandist for terror against Israel as her expertise.
Bluen’s rhetoric at anti-Israel protests is routinely, robotically incendiary. It includes de rigueur chants of “death to the IDF” and “Free, free Palestine”.
Her armoury of invective against the Jewish state includes:
– “settler colonisation of Palestine since 1948”
– “a fascist Zionist hegemony”
– “an apartheid project”
– “whole entity that must be unsettled”
“Unsettled” and “Free Palestine” are Bluen’s code words for Israel “judenrein”, the Nazi term for a Germany “cleansed” of its Jews. She hyperbolically accuses Israel not just of genocide but on a scale reaching “the threshold of almost every single crime in the (Genocide Convention) statute,” including “war crimes, apartheid, deliberately starving Gazan civilians by impeding relief supplies.”
She ignores the Hamas charter that is explicitly genocidal towards Israel and Jews, and Hamas leaders’ boasts that they’ll commit more genocidal October 7-style attacks until Israel is destroyed.
Bluen ignores the tsunami of publicly available evidence that:
– Hamas hijacks aid in Gaza
– shoots civilians trying to access it
– uses civilians as human shields
– uses starvation of its own people as a deliberate strategy.
A recent Gatestone Institute report headlined “The Famine That Wasn’t” notes that behind this narrative lies a cynically calculated strategy of:
“…weaponisation of humanitarian suffering, orchestrated by Hamas – the entity that controls Gaza and its distribution of aid … amplified by willing accomplices in the United Nations system and global media.”
The report exposes the goal which is:
“Not to report the truth but to smear Israel, rally international condemnation and shield Hamas from accountability.”
Perhaps the most egregious sign of Bluen’s obsessive desire for Israel’s destruction is her use of inverted red triangles in her social media posts.
The Nazis used red triangles to mark Jews and political prisoners in concentration camps. Hamas has appropriated them to designate Israeli targets in its propaganda videos and its supporters use red triangles to identify, target and harass Jews online.
Bluen relishes using red triangles to celebrate the killing of Israeli soldiers in Gaza evidenced by the accompanying big grin and a keffiyeh draped around her neck.
Bluen offers, says Nowosenetz, “a twisted mirror image of morality in which supporting terror becomes virtue and self-defence becomes a crime.”
Joshua Schewitz, a researcher and analyst specialising in African and Middle Eastern security-related issues and blockchain technology, captures the character of Jo Bluen, describing her as a “vulture” in a “grotesque political theatre” that lurked in South Africa’s wings until October 7. For Schewitz, DIRCO – South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation – is the star director of this political theatre.
DIRCO, says Schewitz is backed by a “suspect cast” of terror-sponsoring states, full-time activists, bureaucrats and journalists, some of them Jews. Among those Jewish journalists is the Daily Maverick’s Kevin Bloom who routinely slings genocide and other arrows of blood libels at Israel and Jews. He claims that Israel is deliberately targeting and assassinating journalists in Gaza despite all evidence to the contrary.
He did so again when Al Jazeera “journalist” Anas al-Sharif was killed in recent Israeli airstrike. Bloom blithely dismissed extensive evidence showing Al-Sharif celebrating the October 7 massacre, taking selfies with Hamas leaders and generally acting more as propagandist than journalist.
He naively believes that a PRESS vest magically transforms Hamas sympathisers and active members into journalists.
The Daily Maverick gives Bloom a platform and extraordinarily free rein for emotive attacks aimed at demonising and delegitimising Israel. The publication is now attempting public damage control after being exposed for its “Jew problem”.
The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) consultant and former associate director David Saks, notes the Daily Maverick’s “pronounced pattern of singling out the Jewish community for special attack.”
Adam Louis-Klein, a Yale graduate in philosophy, writer, anthropologist and musician, has an interesting take of the situation seeing such patterns as “projection-inversion”.
If the crime of genocide was, after all, meant to safeguard the continued existence of diverse peoples, anti-Israel lobbyists now, according to Louis-Klein “invoke it to preserve a political formation committed to the erasure of another people”. They use it to “paralyse the very mechanisms by which that erasure might be prevented.”
Such rhetoric, as Louis-Klein and others note, is not an aberration; it’s the logical extension of normalised discourse in activist and academic circles today.
Expert voices with sharply contrasting views and grounded in battlefield realities are steadily undermining the foundations on which that discourse is built.
One voice is John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point in the US. Spencer argues that Hamas’s strategy from the outset of October 7 was meticulously planned for decades to lure Israel into an “asymmetric” war deliberately engineered to provoke such claims and to kill as many civilians as possible.
With over 724 km of tunnels embedded beneath civilian infrastructures across Gaza over decades, Hamas has created a “subterranean urban warfare” system designed to shield fighters while cynically maximising civilian exposure.
This tactic according to Spencer is central to Hamas’s doctrine of:
– prolonging conflict
– manipulating media narratives and
– inviting international condemnation of Israel.
While Hamas’s tunnel strategy complicates Israel’s military response and fuels the rhetorical battlefield, Spencer reframes Israel’s war against Hamas as a war of survival against an enemy that cynically weaponises urban density and civilian shielding.
Among prominent Jews who echo this view are the University of Florida’s distinguished Holocaust historian Norman Goda, Jerusalem-based writer Sherwin Pomerantz and British barrister and international law specialist, Natasha Hausdorff.
All regularly critique the rhetorical, polemical misuse of genocide. All argue that the high civilian casualty rate in Gaza, while tragic, does not constitute genocidal intent under international law.
Such accusations, they argue, deliberately distort legal, historical and moral frameworks of war and turn political outrage into a substitute for evidence.
Brice Couturier, a French journalist who is not Jewish, puts it succinctly:
“Israel cannot win this war because it was not designed to be won. Not because (Israel) is militarily outmatched but because it is caught in an equation deliberately made insoluble.”
In essence, as sages through the ages remind us, language is never neutral. It shapes perception, policy, and possibility.
And as the late UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote:
“Words are the vehicles of meaning. They can heal or hurt, uplift or diminish. Language is the architecture of peace – or its undoing.”
About the writer:
Marika Sboros is a South African freelance investigative journalist with decades of experience writing fulltime for the country’s top media titles on a wide range of topics. She started her career as a hard-news reporter in the newsroom of the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, a campaigning anti-government newspaper during the worst excesses of the apartheid era. She commutes between South Africa and the UK.
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).
