Out of favour news network Al Jazeera resurrects limelight seeking Ronnie Kasrils to demonise Israel
It’s an old cast, old script of Israel bashing and ‘Red Ronnie’ as he was once known for his Communist affiliations has found an audience with Al Jazeera, who these days itself is battling “to be seen and heard”.
Where once Al Jazeera’s daily mantra was: “Can Israel survive?”, today the talk is “Can Al Jazeera survive?”
Few are holding their breath! Mainly because few care.
This past June, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt subjected Qatar to unprecedented diplomatic and economic sanctions, followed by an aggressive blockade and threats of further action if Qatar failed to meet a list of demands, one of which was to shut down the once “darling of the Arab media” – the Al Jazeera network.
Funded and launched through loans and grants from the Qatari government, it has always been hard to determine where the Doha-based Al Jazeera ends and Qatar’s political interests begin.
Ronnie Kasrils – FMR Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry and FMR Minister of Intelligence. “The Jewish Top Spy Who Advised Hamas” (Al Jazeera)
Much of the Arab world today believes the two are synonymous.
The ‘Gulf’ Widens
The Gulf nations severed ties with Qatar on the 5th June, accusing the country of “supporting extremism”. Saudi Arabia closed Al Jazeera’s offices and withdrew its broadcast licence, saying:
– it promotes terrorist plots
– supports Houthi militias that Saudi Arabia is fighting in Yemen
– and has attempted to break the Saudi internal ranks
Al Jazeera responded that it is “not partisan to any ideology, group or government” but few were buying that including the Egyptians.
Egypt’s government was outraged about an Al Jazeera 2016 documentary.
“It’s obviously poorly done work that is trying to shake the confidence of the Egyptian citizen in his army,” a spokesman for Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the New York Times.
The unflattering documentary only added insult to an already tense diplomatic relationship as the Qatari government had supported Egypt’s ousted ‘Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, and has been accused of undermining the presidency of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
Al Jazeera was not reporting politics, it was playing politics!
What many Arab countries were only just learning, Israel had known for quite some time.
Tool of Terrorists
With the Middle East’s political landscape in a state of flux, Israel found itself on common ground with some of her former enemies, facing similar concerns of security.
In the West, Al Jazeera’s reputation was still coloured by the aftermath of 9/11, when the network was perceived as providing a platform for leaders of Al Qaeda, particularly Osama bin Laden. If questions were asked then about its motivations; many more were being asked now and mostly by Arab leaders, who viewed the network as meddling and inciting their citizens. As one observer noted, “they are no less culpable of causing death to people in the region that those with guns and bombs.”
Note the irony when Israel’s Druze Minister of Communications, Ayoub Kara said that “Lately, almost all countries in our region determined that Al Jazeera supports terrorism, supports religious radicalisation, and when we see that all these countries have determined as fact that Al Jazeera is a tool of the Islamic State, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, and we are the only one who have not determined that, then something delusional is happening here.”
It was a transformative milestone in Middle East relations, when Israel and its Arab neighbours could identify with each other’s’ concerns over the danger of a network’s bias and incitement.
When lies and deception could harm one country, it could harm others!
In the Field
Appearing in September’s Al Jazeera’s programme – In The Field – was an interview with Ronnie Kasrils entitled:
“The Jewish Top Spy Who Advised Hamas”
Just the title already sends the message that Hamas – a terrorist organisation committed to Israel’s destruction and that has no compulsion in firing rockets intentionally into Israeli cities – can’t “be so bad” because it is being advised by a ‘Jew’.
So, who is this ‘Jew’?
Kasrils only trades on his Jewish roots when it suits him, that is, when he wants to sign up South Africa’s Jewish community to join him in his favourite activity – demonizing Israel.
It is the only surviving issue that he finds a following – and keeps him in the spotlight.
Vanity trumps over morality with Kasrils.
South Africans might recall his 2002 “Not In My Name Campaign” when he was then South Africa’s Minister of Forestry and declared regarding Israel, “When we see this barbarism, this criminality that Israel perpetrates…I am forced to say: Not in my name.”.
His argument that “Since Israel purports to speak and act in the name of Jews, I must cry out, as I do with other like-minded South Africans of Jewish descent.”
Jewish ‘descent’ indeed. How low can one go?
Kasril’s found a way.
Truth be Told
Kasrils, like Al Jazeera, is hardly one to be distracted by the truth.
The Park Hotel, Netanya after a Palestinian suicide bomber exploded himself during Passover meal killing 30 civilians and injuring 160 others.
In 2002, a Palestinian suicide bomber walked into the Park Hotel in the Israeli resort city of Netanya on Pesach (Passover) night. One of the most important festivities on the Jewish calendar, Jews worldwide celebrate ‘freedom’ rooted in the biblical story of Moses freeing his People from Egyptian bondage. Fast forward some 3000 years, a Palestinian mass murderer chose this night deliberately – with all its symbolism and resonance – so that Jews in the future will have other reasons to remember on Passover. The result was a dining hall splatted with the burning remains of thirty dead vacationers, mostly elderly.
In Israel’s operation to clean out the terrorist group responsible – called ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ – 30 Israeli soldiers were killed because it so carefully went from door to door to avoid Palestinian civilian casualties as much as possible. Taking time out from his duties as South Africa’s Minister of Forestation, Kasrils described Israel’s operations as “reminiscent of the bloody suppression of the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War.”
What a warped and depraved mind to describe those brave Israeli young men – trying to protect their country from mass murderers – as Nazis!
Selective Morality
Interesting how this deluded dunce was then elevated to South Africa’s Minister of Intelligence – an oxymoron if there was one!
Some of Kasrils’ verbal onslaughts of Israel transpired during one of the worst periods of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe. While seeing fit to castigate Israel, he championed and signed an agreement to strengthen intelligence ties with its northern brutal dictator.
At the signing ceremony in Cape Town, Kasrils said:
“Our two countries share a common world view and would march shoulder to shoulder.”
What “common world view” was Kasrils referring to?
There were continuous assaults in Zimbabwe on the media, the political opposition, civil society activists and human rights defenders. Opposition gatherings were frequently the subject of brutal attacks by Mugabe’s henchmen.
Is this the same “world view” that Kasrils felt South Africa shared?
Kasrils was fine with embracing a rogue regime internationally criticized for its trampling of human rights.
After being taken to task by a reporter, who asked how South Africa, with a “good human rights record”, could sign agreements with Zimbabwe, which has “a poor human rights record, he replied:
“I find it rather insulting that you should level such a question at us.”
Clearly Kasrils, who will demonise Israel at every contrived opportunity, had no qualms about marching “shoulder to shoulder with the man who viciously transformed his country from Africa’s “Bread Basket” to a basket case!
Wipe Israel Off the Map
Like an ‘Interview with a Vampire’, both Al Jazeera and Kasrils smelt blood and they were reveling in it from the start. The opening sequence of the interview showed battle scenes from the Six Day War of 1967 with the opening narration: “With the war in 1967 many countries started questioning its support for Israel”
Israel is presented as the uncompromising aggressor with no mention that it was a war forced on Israel, which threated its precarious existence.
Here are some quotes prior to that war that began in June 1967 and judge who is the aggressor:
On May 22, 1967 the Syrian President, Dr. Nureddin al-Attasi said:
“We want a full scale, popular war of liberation… to destroy the Zionist enemy”.
A few days later, Egyptian president, Gamel Abdel Nasser at a press conference did not hold back on his venomous intentions:
“We will not accept any…coexistence with Israel.…Today the issue is not the establishment of peace between the Arab states and Israel….The war with Israel is in effect since 1948.”
Leaving no doubt on the Palestinian position – and this was before there were any Jewish settlements on the disputed West Bank – Yasser Arafat’s predecessor, chairman of the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization), Ahmed Shukairy said:
“Those who survive will remain in Palestine. I estimate that none of them will survive.”
Frightening, isn’t it?
Israel faced a war that even the leader of the Palestinians believed “none will survive.” In effect, it was not only what he “estimated” but that he hoped “none would survive”.
Yet, throughout Al Jazeera’s interview of Kasrils was Israel’s existential concerns presented? No, not once!
The interview was propaganda and bias – hardly the attributes of a ‘respected’ news network.
The Real Ronnie
Kasrils has a history of hate when it comes to Israel.
His address at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign at the St John Vianny Church in London in 2012, was described in one report as “an evening painting Jews as demonic”.
He directed his venom to Jews both in South Africa and Israel.
He began his London frothing with:
“The Jews took that land from the Arabs who had been there for over 1,000 years…The mythology of the establishment of the state of Israel is ‘The Lord Our God acting as an estate agent….”
He compared the landing of the forefathers of South Africa in 1652, when they discovered “black skinned people”, to Zionists.
This was followed by a woman agreeing with Kasrils and saying that Israel “is much more than an apartheid state; it is a demonic state!”
When Kasrils says “not in my name”, Jews should take comfort, for few would want in any way to be associated with this offensive creature that says Jews perceive their God as an “estate agent”.
Whatever Israel says or does, for Kasrils, it is always in the wrong.
Note his response in the South African Mail & Guardian following the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006 which began on the 12 July when Hezbollah launched Katyusha rockets across the Lebanese border with Israel as a diversionary tactic while at the same time staging a cross-border attack in northern Israel on two Israeli Humvees, killing three Israeli soldiers, and wounding two, who were captured and taken into Lebanon.
Kasrils summed up his own feelings by quoting Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder:
“We no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the apartheid regime. We call child murderers ‘child murderers’. We do not recognize the principle of a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye.”
It gets worse.
“We do not blame Hezbollah or Palestinian resistance any more than we blamed South Africa liberation forces when civilians died. We blame ….a corrupt government that cynically places its own people in the line of danger.”
Kasrils contends that Israel’s leadership purposely placed its own citizens in danger to serve its own agenda:
“To them the terror of their own citizens, fleeing or hiding in their bomb shelters, is an acceptable part of their cynical calculations.”
Hard to believe that a man of this perverse thinking was ever a minister in an ANC government – and a Minister of Intelligence!!!!!
2017 – Al Jazeera and Ronnie
“Did you ever advise the Hamas leadership on how best to resist and win the hearts of the West?” the Al Jazeera interviewer asked Kasrils.
“Indeed, very much so. And I found them extremely receptive. I had long discussion with Khaled Mashal in Damascus and the people with him there. And with the leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, and both of them were extremely interested to know and understand, firstly our experience, as South African liberation fighters, and our view of their armed struggle.”
Kasrils says he advised them not to target civilians that “its counterproductive” – not morally wrong – and when asked what was their response:
“I can’t say, but I didn’t notice if one looks at the activities that they were directly involved in, like those suicide bombings at weddings and restaurants… I did not see that happening post our meeting.”
LIES, LIES, DISGUSTING LIES Ronnie…and worse, the Al Jazeera interviewer accepted the lies and moved onto the next question.
If this is the level of Al Jazeera’s journalism, the world can do without Al Jazeera. It can also do without Ronnie Kasrils.
Following his appearance on the Network’s – ‘In the Field’ – it is long overdue Kasrils be put out to pasture!
Egyptian cartoon calling Al Jazeera a mouthpiece of Terror
