Islam Rises in South Africa
What’s really behind South Africa’s support for Hamas?
By Daniel Greenfield
South Africa’s militant support for Hamas and opposition to Israel might have surprised some liberals, but longtime observers of the dysfunctional failed state were a whole lot less shocked.
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) regime has deep Communist roots and despite the adulation for longtime figurehead Nelson Mandela in the United States was never a liberal party. Beyond its support for Islamic terrorists, the ANC has closely aligned with Russia and China. American liberals may have helped the ANC take over, but the party hates them and America.
ANC President Cyril Ramaphosa hosted Venezuela’s murderous socialist cartel boss, Nicolas Maduro, publicly mourned the death of Iran’s President Raisi, also known as the ‘Butcher of Tehran’, and is on friendly terms with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. And the ANC’s past leaders, who included criminals and rapists, fit in better with Iran, Venezuela and North Korea.
But beyond the ANC’s alignment with the worst tyrants in the world, it has another reason for aiming false accusations of genocide at the Jewish State. After 30 years of the ANC’s corrupt rule, its cities suffer constant blackouts, crime has turned the country into a wasteland, HIV is pervasive and nothing, from trains to water infrastructure, works anymore, voters have had enough. And while ANC elections are notoriously corrupt, this time the ANC is really afraid.
While South Africa has hurled accusations of genocide at Israel, polls show that 1 in 6 voters in its own country are prepared to back Julius Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters party (EFF) which openly proposes killing white people. Ramaphosa and the ANC have talked about forcibly seizing land from white farmers on a national scale, but the EFF might imminently do it without regard to the massive Zimbabwe-style famine that would result from such a policy.
The possibility that the ANC might drop below a majority in the upcoming election has it conducting outreach to an Islamic party. South Africa has a majority Christian population, but the Al Jama-ah Party may score 2.5% of the vote in the upcoming election which in a close race could make all the difference.
The ANC’s false accusations of genocide are not just part of the movement’s global solidarity with dictators, but also represent a calculated outreach to Muslim colonists living in South Africa. The ruling party needs every vote and failing that it may well need the support of the Al Jama-ah Party to stay in power as part of a governing coalition between Ex-Communists and Muslims.
South African Jews have become so opposed to the ANC that, in a theologically climactic move, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein changed the prayer for the state traditionally recited in synagogues from a call to “bestow Your guidance and protection upon the President” to “bestow Your guidance and protection upon all the people of this country.” Synagogues had prayed for oppressive and antisemitic regimes in the past. Withdrawing prayers for the president is a statement that the government is beyond redemption. And few, Jews or Christians, would disagree.
But President Ramaphosa has little reason to care. There are only some 50,000 Jews estimated to remain in South Africa from what was once a large and prosperous population. South African accents are routinely heard in synagogues across Los Angeles alongside Persian ones. Both are representatives of Jews who were exiled by racism and violence from their home countries.
And it’s estimated that by the end of the decade, there may be a million Muslims in South Africa.
Islamic activists remain a distinct demographic minority, but they are gaining political influence through bloc votes and by exploiting South Africa’s corrupt ANC political culture. The ANC has taken great pains to drive out the country’s Jewish population and replace them with Muslims.
Johannesburg has been governed by Muslim mayors for the last two years beginning with Al-Jama-ah’s Imam Thapelo Amad. The formerly storied city’s government is ruled by a coalition of the ANC, the genocidal EFF and Al-Jama-ah. There are signs that such a coalition could be duplicated at a national level if the ANC falls far enough behind in the national election.
There are nearly a hundred mosques in Johannesburg with the minarets of mega-mosques like the Nizamiye or the Habiba Soofie scarring the placid blue sky. South African Christians struggle with the morning prayer calls howling from loudspeakers in the early morning. To some they are a sign that South Africa is slowly exchanging one form of supremacist apartheid for another.
If the Al Jama-ah Party becomes one of the bases of the ANC governing coalition, not just in Johannesburg but across the country, South Africa will draw even closer to Islamic tyrannies while becoming that much more corrupt and dysfunctional.
And there’s one more reason that the ANC needs Islamists to prop up its corrupt regime.
The CapeXit movement has been growing in popularity in the Western Cape of South Africa. The argument in the least tribal of the country’s region is simple enough: “South Africa cannot be saved, Cape Independence is our only hope.” The multiculturalism of Cape Town is its strongest asset against the racial and tribal hegemony of the ANC, but it also hosts the largest Muslim population in the country. And that is why the ANC also needs Al-Jama-ah.
The ANC fears that if given an actual choice, much of the population would vote to break free of the entire failed experiment. Al-Jama-ah has stayed true to its current role as a front for the ANC by vigorously opposing CapeXit. While the ANC continues to dominate South Africa, its growing failures and weaknesses mean that it will become more reliant on even worse groups, like the EFF and Al-Jama-ah, to sustain its rule. And that means life in South Africa will only get worse.