DIRCO Minister Naledi Pandor showed her true colours yesterday when she scoffingly dismissed Jewish concerns over antisemitism during an address to Palestinian Ambassadors.
In the course of yet another propaganda tirade against Israel, Pandor flippantly remarked that she was mentioning the ‘two state solution’ because if she did not, many people would seek to paint her as antisemitic. By this, she not only implied that Jews level baseless charges of antisemitism in response to negative views on Israel, but that Jewish concerns over calls for the world’s only Jewish state to be eliminated need not be taken seriously.
The reality is that by her obsessive, factually distorted and morally bankrupt vendetta against Israel, Minister Pandor has shown herself to be a thorough-going bigot. Her unstatesmanlike diatribes simply parrot the line followed by those implacably opposed to the very existence of the Israeli state, without the slightest attempt even to consider the Israeli perspective. It is quite evident that Pandor has no interest whatever in learning about the true nature of Israel. Rather than visiting the country herself and engaging with the people on the ground, she chooses to obtain her information from self-evidently biased, ideologically compromised sources whose sole objective is to portray that country as a caricature of evil. Dirco does not even have an ambassador or a political consular in the country to provide factual information.
Pandor has stubborn disregard for anything that might contradict her view of the Palestinians as being no more than blameless, suffering victims of the conflict. This is despite the Palestinian leadership’s long and depressing track-record of rejecting far-reaching Israeli peace overtures, instilling grossly false and defamatory views about Jewish people and their history at all levels of their society and glorifying violence as a means to ultimately destroying Israel rather co-existing in peace alongside it.
Pandor pours scorn on the notion that she is antisemitic, but her record of unbridled hostility towards the Jewish state and contemptuous dismissal of legitimate Jewish concerns regarding the realities of insurgent antisemitism tell a different story. According to “The Duck Test”, if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then presumably it is a duck. The quacking of our Minister of International Relations and Cooperation has become so deafening as to remove any reasonable doubts on that score.