Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) reacted Wednesday to South Africa’s accusations of “genocide” against Israel by accusing the African nation of hypocrisy: “Maybe you ought to sit this one out!”
South Africa presented its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, on Thursday. Many of its arguments echoed Palestinian propaganda; a portion of the argument even misquoted the Bible to use against Israel.
“Maybe you ought to sit this one out!”
A fiery @SenFettermanPA responds to the libelous claims made against @Israel by South Africa at the International Court of Justice.https://t.co/7pKvOr1eKA pic.twitter.com/1I9BJoSAdW— Dovi Safier (@safier) January 11, 2024
Fetterman appeared to be referring to South Africa’s own dubious record on human rights issues.
After nearly a half century of apartheid, South Africa adopted a new, human rights-oriented constitution in 1996 — only to turn around and impose new forms of racial discrimination against the country’s white population and other minority groups.
As Breitbart News noted in 2018:
Radical South African politician Julius Malema confirmed President Donald Trump’s concerns Thursday, declaring defiantly that the point of the country’s proposed new “expropriation without compensation” policy would be to take land from white farmers.
“Through land expropriation, we are forcing white people to share the land which was gained through a crime against the humanity of black and African people,” Malema said in a press conference, referring to the racist land policies of colonialism and apartheid.
…
While not the “white genocide” claimed by some on the American right, the situation has provoked many South Africans — black and white — to worry that the ANC could soon emulate neighboring Zimbabwe, where farm seizures led to economic collapse.
South Africa was a pariah state during the apartheid era. But rather than embrace international norms in the post-apartheid era, the South African government has sided with rogue regimes.
It tried to protect Gaddafi’s Libya and Saddam’s Iraq; it shielded Robert Mugane’s tyrannical regime in Zimbabwe; it is close to the Chinese Communist Party; and it recently defended Sudan and Russia from international criminal charges related to war crimes against civilian populations in Darfur and Ukraine, respectively.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed out South Africa’s hypocrisy in a statement Thursday (translated via Government Press Office):
We are fighting terrorists, and we are fighting lies.
Today, again, we saw an upside down world, in which the State of Israel is accused of genocide at a time when it is fighting genocide.
Israel is fighting against murderous terrorists who committed horrific crimes against humanity: They slaughtered, they raped, they burned, they dismembered, they beheaded – children, women, the elderly, young men and young women.
A terrorist organization carried out the worst crime against the Jewish People since the Holocaust, and now someone comes to defend it in the name of the Holocaust. What brazen gall. The world is upside down.
And the IDF, the most moral army in the world, which does everything to avoid harming non-combatants, stands accused – by the representatives of these monsters – of genocide.
South Africa’s hypocrisy screams to the high Heavens.
Where was South Africa when millions of people were being murdered and uprooted from their homes in Syria and Yemen, by whom? By Hamas’s partners. The world is upside down. Where were you?
We know where we are. We will continue to fight the terrorists. We will continue to refute the lies. We will continue to uphold our just right to defend ourselves and to ensure our future – until total victory.
Israel will have the opportunity to defend itself at The Hague on Friday.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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