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Open Response to Daily Maverick article by Peter Fabricius titled “ANC’s long friendship with Iran has come at a cost”:

By Iqbal Jassat 

It didn’t take long for Peter Fabricius to spin his usual pro-western imperial tale in an attempt to discredit Iran as a liability for the African National Congress (ANC).

Writing in the Daily Maverick, neither the heading nor the content makes any effort to conceal his purpose: South African government’s ties with Iran must be terminated!

Calling it a “vexed alliance”, Fabricius leans on rightwing-Zionist talking points which depict Iran as a sponsor of terrorism.

Indeed, while his tirade is far removed from an intelligent political analysis, his intent is clear: shame South Africa’s liberation movement for its historic international friendships, this time targeting the African National Congress for maintaining ties with Iran.

Absent from the headline and subtext of this piece is any acknowledgment of the imperial project that backed apartheid South Africa and the same Western powers that today finance and arm Israel as it wages its genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza.

The history of Nelson Mandela’s ANC was one of solidarity with movements confronting settler colonialism, not a strategic alignment with Western militarism.

Fabricius reduces the ANC’s principled support for Palestinian self-determination to a geopolitical liability, conveniently omitting that Iran’s support for the Palestinian cause long predates the current conflict and stands in stark contrast to Western complicity in Zionist settler violence.

The absurdity of his argument against Iran is illustrated by him repeating Trump and Netanyahu’s demands on South Africa to withdraw charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice over genocide.

To portray the ICJ case as a foreign policy misstep rather than a moral and legal imperative, is not analytical journalism. It is Iranophobia wrapped in semantics.

It is outrageous to believe that the power being named here – America – is a neutral arbiter of global stability. The same Western security state apparatus that protected apartheid and today bankrolls Israeli occupation and mass slaughter is held up as paragon of morality.

Unsurprisingly, Fabricius frames South Africa’s assertion of sovereign foreign policy as reckless nostalgia, while Western states’ own interventions from Iraq to Afghanistan go unmentioned.

This pattern of analysis reflects a broader narrative laundering project where Western media critiques of South African sovereignty are dressed as “objective thought-leaders” even as they serve the geopolitical and economic interests of imperial capitals.

South Africa’s defence of human rights and resistance to Western hegemony is not a cost, it is a continuation of the struggle against the architecture of oppression the West seeks to perpetuate.

South Africa’s place is on the side of the oppressed, and that is not up for editorial negotiation.

Iqbal Jassat

Executive Member

Media Review Network

Johannesburg

South Africa

 

 

 

Iqbal Jassat
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