The South African Jewish Report (SAJR) last week refused to publish Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils’s right to reply to an article that questioned his stance on Israel.
This makes it the second time in recent weeks that Kasrils has been barred from expressing his radical anti-Zionist views. Earlier this month, the Goethe Institute refused to allow Ceasefire and other groups to host a lecture by Kasrils on the Middle East conflict, after pressure from the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.
SAJR editor Geoff Sifrin initially approved Kasrils’s request to reply to an article entitled ”Some Pertinent Questions to Kasrils” by Anthony Posner. Posner had concluded the article with the challenge: ”So Mr Kasrils … now is your chance to engage in ‘civilised discussion’. But perhaps this ‘kitchen’ is too hot for you? … I am sure that the readers of the SAJR will be interested to see whether you have the ability to respond in a rational manner to all the points I have raised in this letter.”
Sifrin subsequently refused to print Kasrils’s reply, arguing in an editorial that it would not contribute to constructive debate and would give offence to the SAJR’s readers. Kasrils said he suspected Sifrin had come under pressure not to publish his views.
Sifrin told the Mail & Guardian Kasrils could have responded in a way that did not cause offence. ”He could have chosen to take into account the readership of the paper.”
Kasrils responded by saying that it was ”absolutely dishonest” of the SAJR to publish Posner’s piece, as his (Kasrils’s) response was ”perfectly predictable” and had been previously published elsewhere.
Jane Duncan, director of the Freedom of Expression Institute, slammed Sifrin’s decision. ”The newspaper is engaging in contradictory behaviour by publishing an opinion piece posing questions and then denying the person to whom the questions are being put the right to answer them,” Duncan said.
The SAJR had the right to editorial independence, but this was qualified by normal editorial ethics, which included ”the sacrosanct principle of the right to reply”.
She added that Sifrin had misrepresented Kasrils’s response in his editorial. He said that the minister’s comparison of Israelis with Nazis implied that Israel should be destroyed as an ”evil entity”. Most SAJR readers would regard this as hate speech.
Kasrils has responded that he was only comparing ”certain comparable measures” of the two states, such as collective punishment. This was in line with parallels drawn by other thinkers such as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt.
Duncan disputed the claim that Kasrils’s article was ”hate speech” as defined by the South African Constitution. To qualify as hate speech, the article would have had to incite people to cause harm.
Said Kasrils: ”Clamping down on freedom of expression and open debate … undermines democratic principles and practices and is extremely harmful to individuals’ rights and society at large. It is a shameful regression to the censorship and intimidation of the apartheid era.”