Fabricius call on South Africa to support Iranian anarchy in obedience to Israel is stupid, dangerous & insulting.

by Iqbal Jassat

Chairman: Media Review Network

South Africa’s Independent Group of Newspapers seems unable to ensure that it’s columnist Peter Fabricius comes to terms with the fact that this country has successfully overcome racist apartheid policies of the pro-Israeli National Party.

The majority of its population has firmly placed this country on a democratic path, which has also allowed it to re-examine and re-position its foreign policy objectives. In the case of Israel, Nelson Mandela defined these policies when he declared that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians. That and the fact that our long and arduous freedom struggle was bitterly resented and resisted by allies of apartheid such as Israel, the United States and Britain while veterans of our liberation movement shared the same trenches with brave Palestinian warriors, also shaped South Africa’s international relations.

Fabricius’ most recent column splashed across the pages of the Independent stable throughout various provinces, is a futile attempt embodying the ideas of a colonial mindset urging the ANC government of President Zuma to embrace Israel’s malicious efforts seeking the isolation of Iran as a forerunner to militarily attack it’s “enemy”.

The most outrageous aspect of his deranged argument is that South Africa would be endeared as “democratic” and “neutral” by Israel. Imagine how immensely greater our beloved country will be if we turn our backs on the plight of the Palestinians. We will “burnish our democratic credentials” if we ignore and remain silent on the corollary of Zionism’s need to root Jews in Palestine: the uprooting of the native population!

The embedded views of Fabricius are undoubtedly skewed to Israel’s benefit. His faulty rationale in seeking to secure South Africa’s “neutrality” in relation to Israel and intervention in the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran is absurd.The fact that over many decades Israel has developed and refined policies to disperse, imprison and impoverish the Palestinian people in a relentless effort to destroy them as a nation according to Jonathan Cook, author of “Disappearing Palestine – Israel’s Experiment in Human Despair”, means that countries such as South Africa who value their independence, cannot remain neutral.

Peter Fabricius may be viewed as a veteran diplomatic correspondent but his over-spiced anti-Iran rhetoric is an excruciating excursion in pursuit of anarchy in one of the world’s most strategic energy regions in the service of what James Petras of Binghamton University would describe as the Zionist power configuration. His allegation that it is “common cause” that Mir Hussein Mousavi “won the popular vote but that Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei doctored the results” is an endorsement of the vitriolic position adopted by pro-Israeli lobbies in America and elsewhere. The need to authenticate and verify complaints lodged by Mousavi is less important than the fanaticism and rage inherent in Fabricius’ nonsensical argument that “the theft was so blatant”. No surprise therefore that his self-righteous squabble with Iran under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is informed by what he describes as amongst others, “racing to develop nuclear weapons” and continuing to “support Hezbollah and Hamas”. 

In other words the acceptable face of Iran’s leadership for Fabricius and his ilk has to be one that abandons support for resistance against the devastating impact of Israel’s Zionist settler colonialism and remains subservient to the rulers in the US Empire. This in essence is the superficial rhetoric contained in a piece which can best be described as a specimen of an Israeli-embedded columnist in South Africa’s leading group of national branded newspapers. Disgraceful and shameful that fifteen years after the official demise of apartheid, South African media still finds it necessary to retain the services of journalists blissfully caught up in a Rip Van Winkle mode. The leap in transformative policies is evident everywhere despite Fabricius’ columns being a constant reminder that media transformation in South Africa remains incomplete.

Unlike Fabricius, even Barack Obama has recognized that American policy makers came to view nationalist movements or left-leaning policies through the lens of the Cold War, meaning that potential threats outweighed his country’s professed commitment to freedom and democracy.  “For decades we would tolerate and even aid thieves like Mobutu, thugs like Noriega, so long as they opposed communism. Occasionally U.S. covert operations would engineer the removal of democratically elected leaders in countries like Iran – with seismic repercussions that haunt us to this day”, wrote Obama in his book, “The Audacity of Hope”.

The challenge facing analysts and media commentators is to investigate the extent of covert Mossad/CIA operations in the current thrust for regime change in Iran using the false pretext of “stolen elections” as a convenience to confound a global audience. The power of this thrust is demonstrated in the extent the Western media has been mobilized by the pro-Israeli political machinery and their pressure to force a reluctant Obama to finally issue a statement siding with the protestors. This regrettable pronouncement by an American president keen to re-image his country’s severely dented reputation especially in the Muslim world, will undoubtedly undermine his efforts to secure an even-handed rapprochement with Iran.

Grandstanding as Fabricius does makes his column more eligible as a neocon blog rather than serious commentary in the respectable pages of the Independent’s stable of newspapers.