An ANC MP cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the infamous anti-Semitic forgery used by the Nazis — as a credible document at a recent Iranian-sponsored academic seminar in Pretoria.
Farida Mahomed agreed recently she had asked a Jewish seminar delegate, Claudia Braude: ‘Are the protocols still relevant to you in today’s time? How do we apply this balanced approach to reconciliation when we read them and they are totally the opposite?â€
Mahomed was responding to a presentation by Braude reflecting on democratic South Africa’s possible role as a global reconciler. It included a call for South Africans to reject Iranian Holocaust denialism.
Interviewed this week, Mahomed said she was unaware the protocols had been exposed as a hoax. Published in the early 20th century by the Tsarist secret police Okhrana, the document purported to show a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.
Another delegate at the Pretoria meeting also questioned the authenticity of the Holocaust, citing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s dismissal of it as ‘a mythâ€.
The gathering took place a week before the Iranian government’s widely condemned international Holocaust conference in Tehran.
Asked for her views on the Holocaust, Mahomed said: ‘I don’t want to comment on something that I haven’t done research on. I wouldn’t want to be influenced by any scholar.â€
ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama said the party’s position was that the Nazi genocide should be ‘condemned with the contempt that it deservesâ€.
Mahomed made her input during a panel discussion on ‘religious thoughts in socio-cultural developmentâ€, held on December 1 and 2 at Unisa, with support from the Iranian Embassy.
The protocols, laid out in 26 chapters, purport to be the minutes of an alleged meeting of Jewish leaders at the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897 where they plotted to take over the world. Vast tracts are copied from a satire of French emperor Napoleon III and the document was famously exposed as a forgery in 1921 by The Times of London.
The work of Tsarist agents in Paris, the protocols gained currency in later decades when the Nazi circulated them to justify the persecution of the Jews.
The head of the University of Cape Town’s Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, Milton Shain, said the protocols continued to crop up regularly in anti-Semitic propaganda. They are known to have been distributed at the 2001 international conference on racism in Durban. ‘They and Holocaust denial — and they’re not distinct — circulate a huge conspiracy that plugs into every malevolent image of the Jews.â€
He added that Holocaust denialism had first surfaced in South Africa in the 1970s, during a debate about televising a documentary on the Nazi genocide. It has recently been an issue on Muslim radio stations in interviews with people such as jailed British denialist David Irving and United Kingdom-based historian Yakub Zaki.
Mahomed said that she had read the protocols on the internet but had not researched them.
Asked whether she thought they had ever been ‘relevantâ€, she replied: ‘I can’t make a comment. They must have been relevant or they would never have been written.†They did not contribute towards peace, which is why she posed the question.
She added that Braude should have made it clear at the conference that they had been exposed as a forgery.
Braude said she had done so later, when Mahomed had left. She had also told the conference she believed Mahomed’s question was hate speech.
University of KwaZulu-Natal political scientist Lubna Nadvi, who was in the audience during the exchange, said Mohamed’s question was out of context because Braude had not mentioned the protocols in her presentation. But she located the comment in the broader Jewish-Islamic discourse and said that the protocols enter the debate from time to time.
Holocaust denialism had not been central to the seminar. ‘My impression was that it was a powerful space to exchange ideas and more spaces like this need to be created.â€
South Africa has extensive economic and diplomatic ties with Iran. United States President George W Bush reportedly wants South Africa to assist him in dealing with the Middle Eastern country.
Braude warned that South Africa should be careful not to compromise its democratic traditions in developing cultural ties with Iran.