Dear Emma Powell,
You probably are angered, frustrated, bitter and offended to have your recent public event disrupted and called off prematurely in such humiliating fashion.
You may have been under an illusion that holding the DA’s portfolio that deals in foreign affairs as well as being a member of parliament in the GNU, would protect you from being heckled and shouted down.
Were you?
Well as things turned out much to your disappointment, you hopefully will have realised that Israel’s apartheid and 77 years of ongoing genocide, can neither be denied nor glossed over.
Your recent trip to Israel in the company of fellow MPs that’s been exposed as a “freebie-junket” hosted by a Zionist organisation unashamedly known as “Friends of Israel”, has obviously turned out disastrous for you.
Surely you’d have been foolish not to anticipate that South Africa’s solidarity movements in support of Palestine’s freedom struggle against Zionism’s illegal settler colonial regime, would not roast you?
Equally, if the politics of the DA post you hold is unable to reconcile with the tenets of International Law especially the UN Charter on Human Rights, given Israel’s countless number of violations with grave consequences – see Gaza and the Occupied West Bank – why don’t you say so and walk away?
You ought to know, except unless the DA school of politics failed to teach you, that apartheid is institutionalised racism. And that in Israel it is legislated by acts of parliament in the Knesset.
Let me remind you that the legal system regulating Israeli apartheid is “resplendent in glory” by a number of so-called Basic Laws as well as numerous discriminatory laws.
There cannot be any reason for you to feign ignorance about the existence and extent of anti-Palestinian racism apart from the DA’s alliance with Israel – a stance which is incompatible with values of human rights, dignity and freedom.
Nor is it conceivable that as the DA’s spokesperson on Israel, you remain detached from the reality of ethnic-cleansing and the genocide in Gaza.
Surely the entire world is horrified and appalled as it watches the bloody slaughter of innocent Palestinian mothers and babies, while you pontificate lazy worn-out lines dressed as DA “policy” such as “we support two-states” etc., without a word of condemnation!
Don’t you read?
If you do let me draw your attention to Amnesty International’s reports (not Hamas) which demonstrates that Israel carries out acts prohibited under the Geneva Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.
I would venture to suggest that Amnesty’s findings pose a direct threat to your silence on Israel’s brutal acts.
These include “killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.
“Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.”
Public knowledge of Israel’s blatant war crimes has ensured global sentiments of empathy and support for Palestinians undergoing extermination, starvation and indiscriminate bombings.
Yet you pose in a picture with one of the leading architects of these gruesome crimes, and expect to be immune from criticism?
Shockingly now that your trip to whitewash #ApartheidIsrael has been exposed, you claim that it was in “a personal capacity”.
Equally shocking is your admission of silence: “I have made no public statements about it,” you belatedly claim and pass the buck on to “external organisations” for “misattributed comments”.
What are you hiding Emma?
Awaiting your response,
Iqbal Jassat
Executive Member
Media Review Network
Johannesburg
South Africa
