South African Jews To File Charges Against Union Official Who Called For Violence
A South African Jewish group said it would file charges for alleged hate speech against a trade union leader who accused it of complicity in murder in Gaza.
The South African Jewish Board of Deputies, or SAJBD, decided to take legal steps against Tony Ehrenreich, provincial secretary of trade union umbrella body COSATU, after he wrote about the group on Facebook Wednesday.
“The time has come to say very clearly that if a woman or child is killed in Gaza, then the Jewish board of deputies, who are complicit, will feel the wrath of the People of SA with the age old biblical teaching of an eye for an eye,” he wrote. “The time has come for the conflict to be waged everywhere the Zionist supporters fund and condone the war killing machine of Israel.”
The board said it was instituting criminal and civil charges against Ehrenreich for alleged hate speech and incitement to violence against the community’s representative body.
In a media statement issued Thursday, SAJBD chairman Mary Kluk said the post was “a flagrant violation of South African law prohibiting hate speech and incitement to cause harm” and inflamed “an already volatile situation.”
Ehrenreich said that he stood by his statement, that he was not anti-Semitic and was not calling for violence against Jews, the daily Cape Times reported. His focus was on the SAJBD for what he described as condoning violence against the Palestinians.
“The killings in Gaza by the Israeli army have never been condemned by the Jewish Board of Deputies,” he said, adding he was laying charges against it “for supporting crimes against humanity in Gaza.”
The Facebook post comes in the wake of another statement by Ehrenreich warning the SAJBD to cease its “Zionist propaganda” in Cape Town by Aug. 7 or face a COSATU-led campaign of strikes and boycotts against its members, supporting companies and organizations.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
