Monday, August 22, 2011

South African Liberation

[Nelson Mandela retired in 1998. He is now 93 years old.]

Remember when the end of apartheid in South Africa was going to mean the spread of democracy throughout Africa? Instead South Africa traded what it had, political clout, legitimacy, and mercenary soldiers, for what the Khadaffi regime had, which was, well, money. And oil.

Now that Khadaffi is discredited and all but overthrown, surely the South African government has seen the error of it ways and recognized its hypocrisy? Well, no.
JOHANNESBURG—The spreading rebel control of Libya on Monday appeared to deal a diplomatic setback to South Africa and other African nations that had argued a change in Libyan government should happen at the negotiating table and not on the battlefield.

South Africa, a continental power broker, has sought to bring rebels and Col. Moammar Gadhafi's forces together for talks to end the conflict. That stance hasn't changed.

Even as rebel trucks streamed into the Libyan capital of Tripoli on Monday, South Africa gave no indication it would recognize a rebel-led government. The U.S. and the U.K. are among more than 30 countries that recognize the rebel body, known as the National Transitional Council, as Libya's legitimate government.

Pretoria instead has supported an African Union plan for a transitional government once there is a "durable cease-fire." The transitional government should include elements from both the rebel forces and the current regime—but not Col. Gadhafi—and move toward drafting a new constitution and holding elections, according to the South African Minister of International Affairs, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane.

"If this government falls, there is no government," she told reporters at a briefing.

She said there were plans "afoot" to form such a broad transitional government in that case.

So we have the heirs of Nelson Mandela supporting a brutal primitive military dictatorship, even after it has been overthrown by the revolt of its own people. Cool, huh?

This is morally consistent with the heirs of the revolution against apartheid sponsoring the overtly racist Durban I and Durban II anti-racism conferences, with their open anti-semitism, both held in Durban, South Africa.

This got so primitive and extreme that one of the main organizers of the conference, Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, was obliged to disavow the conference she had herself organized.

Let it not be said that this is just a failure of the ANC (African National Congress) party which has ruled the country essentially without opposition for more than twenty years now. The tenor of social life in South Africa can be estimated from the repeated lynchings of Zimbabwean immigrant workers by South African mobs.

5 comments:

  1. Israel, which has been so skewed and immature in its response to the Arab awakening – why on earth did its leaders not welcome the Egyptian revolution, opening their arms to a people who showed they wanted the democracy which Israel always boasts of, instead of shooting dead five Egyptian soldiers in the latest Gaza shoot-out Jack?

    Ben Ali gone, Mubarak gone, Saleh more or less gone, Gaddafi overthrown, Assad in danger, Abdullah of Jordan still facing opposition, Bahrain's minority Sunni monarchy still suicidally hoping to rule for eternity. These are massive historical events to which the Israelis have responded with a kind of appalled, hostile apathy. At the very moment when Israel might be able to claim that its Arab neighbours are only seeking the freedoms that Israelis already possess – that there is a brotherhood of democracy that might go beyond frontiers – it sulks and builds more colonies on Arab land and continues to delegitimise itself while accusing the world of trying to destroy it.

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  2. Gee, I dunno, Tony. Conceivably it had something to do with the fact that Muslim terrorists had just murdered eight Israeli bus passengers on Israeli territory minutes earlier. That, and the simultaneous rocket attacks from Gaza, just might have had something to do with the IDF soldiers taking a dim view of Arabs carrying guns at that same border.

    And taking you "Tony" as an example of what the world thinks, that while Israel is having her citizens murdered on buses and missiles launched against her towns, that you cannot think of anything more intelligent to say than to blame Israel for the violence the Palestinians initiated, suggests quite clearly why Israelis have not the least respect for people like you nor your so-called opinions. Nor do I.

    Your pals in Gaza murder civilian bus riders and shoot rockets at Israel cities and you think that deligitimizes Israel rather than Hamas? Let me guess, Tony, has anyone ever told you you were smart? No, I didn't think so.

    Seriously "Tony", I am trying not to regard you as stupid, nor as a ridiculous bigot, but you are not making it easy.

    If you are going to write comments, you really do have to try harder not to make a fool of yourself.

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  3. http://rt.com/files/online-exclusive/galleries/muslims-christians-square-tahrir/stuffed-newspapers-effigy-enemy/cimg0322.jpg

    Do you think pictures like this from Tahrir Square could have something to do with lack of Israeli enthusiasm for the new Egyptian regime?

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  4. Jack, how dare you slander me with terms like stupidity and not have the courage to put serious words behind your convictions. You are a weak man with weak ill-founded opinions. Your allegations are baseless and all you can do is talk about extremists bourne out of the depravity the Israeli state burdens on them. So lets not talk about the extremists. Hamas, a by-product of Israeli terrorism, is not what we are discussing here, we can discuss the cause of all this that another time. However, we are talking about Israel's apathy to democracy in the middle-east and hostility, recently exemplified in Egypt.

    Unfortunately for the people of Egypt, Israel has indeed been busted for spying in their nation, running complex large-scale operations to import hair care products that cause infertility and, to make matters worse, the slaughter of Egyptian police in a cross-border raid.

    According to a MENA report published on Saturday, it was shown that the deaths of Egyptian security personnel were violations of the peace-treaty of 1978 due to Israeli forces entering Egyptian territory and then firing upon Egyptians and others on Egypt’s side of the border.

    Israel, just like you Jack, have claimed that they were pursuing militants involved in the recent cross-border attack in Israel, but the Multinational Force and Observer report did not say if there were grounds for Israel’s claims.

    It has been reported that a total of eight Israelis were killed in a series of attacks near the Egypt-Israel border near the Eilat resort by the Red Sea.

    These attacks were supposedly carried out by militants who used the Sinai Peninsula to cross over into Israel. Israel has yet to prove any of these claims.

    Interestingly, the Israeli news agency Haaretz is reporting today that the “Israel-Egypt” crisis has apparently eased after “intense diplomatic efforts,” which included the United States.

    Egyptians demanded an apology from Israel for their murder of at least three Egyptian security personnel, and even threatened to remove the Egyptian ambassador from Israel.

    Israel has not even supplied a formal apology for their actions. Since an apology would imply responsibility, it is apparently out of the realm of possibility for Israel to own up to their actions, as per usual.

    There is supposedly going to be a military investigation of the incident first, after which there will be an inquiry conducted along with the Egyptian Army.

    It might just be me but this seems a little bit suspicious and far from fair.

    This would be like having a suspected murderer conduct his own murder investigation, after which the police are allowed to be involved.

    If there was any concrete evidence available in the preliminary investigation it would almost certainly be gone by the time the second inquiry is conducted.

    The statements coming from Israeli officials in regards to the killing of the Egyptian policemen completely skirt the blame, clearly in an attempt to declare the Israeli Defense Forces innocent without a single shred of evidence to support their claim.

    Your defence, if you could call it that Jack, is absurd, given the fact that even Israeli construction crews have no problem running over young women with bulldozers, crushing them to death.

    As you preach on this blog, if you’re in the way of Israeli interests, you can expect the worst to come your way; and they have proven this to be the case time and time again.

    Clearly public sentiment is not on Israel’s side and the Israeli “apology” (which was far short of an apology by any rational metric) for the killing of Egyptian soldiers is not going to cut it when it comes to the people of Egypt.

    Hopefully the Israeli government, and you Jack, can scrape together the decency to actually apologize for their actions and take responsibility for the deaths, instead of passing off the blame and playing the victim as you just did in your silly ranting argument.

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  5. What actions would we apologize for "Tony"? Perhaps the terrorist murder of eight people on a bus? Wait, that was you and your Palestinian friends. And of course neither they nor you apologized. For mass murder, did they?

    So for you to complain about anyone else's decency is just ridiculous. Until you can recognize that, you are both a moron and a monster. That is not slander - that is a fact. You are condemned by your own words.

    You cannot condone murder and claim any moral standing whatever. Having done that, none of your subsequent arguments are any more than the rationalizations of a criminal.

    And you have the gall to accuse anyone else, anyone else at all, of depravity? Which means that to your despicable condoning of murder, one necessarily adds the vilest sort of hypocrisy.

    Rationalize as you will, the fact is that the Israelis, both civilians and soldiers, were minding their own business on their own side of the border when they were attacked by Palestinian terrorists. Terrorists whom it was Egypt's responsibility to control.

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