Category Archives: South-Africa

UPADTE III: The Jew Who Prosecuted Mandela: Percy Yutar Said He Was A South African Patriot

Democracy, Elections, History, Judaism & Jews, South-Africa

“Persecutor” is how my father—once a leading South African anti-Apartheid activist—used to refer to the man who “prosecuted Nelson Mandela for sabotage and conspiracy against the state in 1963 and sent him to jail for life (in the event, he served 27 years).” (The Guardian)

But Percy Yutar was his real name. And “some Jewish leaders hailed him as a ‘credit to the community’ and a symbol of the Jews’ contribution to South Africa.”

“Yutar went on to become attorney general of the Orange Free State and then of the Transvaal. He was elected president of Johannesburg’s largest orthodox synagogue.”

In the opinion of my father (Rabbi Isaacson), recent attempts to portray South Africa’s Jewish community at large as having a record of resistance to Apartheid are pure fiction. My father himself was censured many times by the Board of Deputies and other Jewish leaders—told to quit his anti-establishment activities or risk the loss of the rabbinate. Decamping to Israel, as our family did, was prompted as much by ideals as by the constant threats over the loss of a living.

While the leadership of the then-banned African National Congress was festooned with radical Jews, the truth is that most South African Jews (who have a proud and celebrated history in South Africa,) were not behind this noisy minority. If anything, I suspect them of supporting the Nasionale Party, which governed from 1948 until 1994, by the overwhelming consent of the white minority. Like it or not, white South Africans had a functioning democracy (with popular referenda conducted on most important national questions).

I came from a liberal family. Yet other than my father and my cousin (a Black-Sash activist), I hardly knew a Jew who did not vote National Party (NAT). American paloeconservatives have kibitzed about the South African Jewry’s liberalism. Where from? What do they know? Did they ever survey the community back in those days?

Online sources such as Wikipedia and The Virtual Jewish Library assert the community’s liberal voting patterns. They do not argue it. As far as I can see, they do not provide statistical support for this alleged liberal voting record. I’d like to see some substantiation of these so-called “enlightened” voting patterns.

I am convinced that these depictions are cunning, after the-fact attempts to portray the Jews as more liberal than they in fact were. Yes, Jews have always been socially altruistic, but not to the point of self-immolation. This was a community with vast wealth. Risking the riches they so richly deserved is what Goyim do; Jews not so much. UPDATED II: Risking the future of The Children: that’s not what Jews do. I bet you that, if they preached Progressive Party in public, the same Jews probably voted NAT.

Again, father and cousin aside, I did not know a Jew who did not support the Nasionale Party.

Some members of my family were business tycoons. The same family spawned pig farmers, Jews who lived on the land starting in the early 1900s. (Yeah, funny, I know; they farmed pigs, but didn’t eat ’em.) We’d get together for dinners, during which not even young, outspoken family members (invariably attending medical or law school) ever expressed dismay at the undemocratic nature of South African politics.

I recall vividly when my cousin, a land developer and a pig farmer, decided to emigrate to England after the son of his most loyal farmhand burgled the family homestead and attempted an attack on the family. My cousin was outraged. How could this young black man betray him so? (I could see a few reasons, not least of them the squalor in which farmhands and their families were housed. Free “housing,” yes, but not pretty. I would never have argued this in his company. It was just not done.)

The Jews I knew were what we called verkrampte. (Hard core)

Chris McGreal of The Guardian confirms my suspicions:

“The apartheid regime had a demographic problem and it could not afford the luxury of isolating a section of the white population, even if it was Jewish. Within a few years many South African Jews not only came to feel secure under the new order but comfortable with it. Some found echoes of Israel’s struggle in the revival of Afrikaner nationalism. … The Jew in South Africa sided with the Afrikaners, not so much out of sympathy, but out of fear sided against the blacks. I came to this country in 1946 and all you could hear from Jews was ‘the blacks this and the blacks that.'”

UPDATED I (Jan. 31): THOSE OF YOU who’ve read “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” know that the book speak favorably about the strong Afrikaner-Israel connection, and that the book thinks Percy Yutar did just fine by putting the Marxist Mandela away for his crimes against civilians (for the most).

UPDATE (Feb. 1): Percy Yutar died age 90, in 2002. As this New York Times report tells it,

“According to many South African historians and writers, Mr. Yutar’s vigorous persecution of blacks in the 1960’s was linked to his Jewish background. Glenn Frankel, the author of ‘Rivonia’s Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa,’ said that Mr. Yutar saw the trial as a patriotic opportunity, especially because some of Mr. Mandela’s co-defendants were Jews. … ‘Who better to prosecute Jewish traitors than a loyal Jew?’ Mr. Frankel wrote, describing Mr. Yutar’s thinking. ‘Who better than he to put things right and prove that not all Jews were radicals hell-bent upon overthrowing the government?'”

Mr. Yutar, one of eight children in a family of Lithuanian immigrants, was born in Cape Town on July 29, 1911. As a young man, his left hand was caught in an electric mincing machine when he was working in his father’s butcher shop, leaving his hand badly mangled.
He attended the University of Cape Town on a scholarship and was awarded a doctorate in law. Jews, however, were not welcome in the higher echelons of South Africa’s civil service, and Mr. Yutar settled for a job tracing defaulting telephone subscribers for the postal service. Still he persisted in his legal career and slowly moved up the ladder to junior law clerk and junior prosecutor. Eventually, he became deputy attorney general for the Transvaal Province and gained a reputation as an especially ambitious and energetic prosecutor.

UPDATE II: ANC Centenary Celebrations Kick Off in … America (Theron The Twit)

Africa, Celebrity, Hollywood, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Race, South-Africa, Terrorism

PBS is celebrating: “This week, the African National Congress, South Africa’s ruling political party, marked its 100th anniversary.” Drop the Newspeak. The ANC heads a dominant-party state. Not quite a one-party state, but almost.

To kick off the fun, I watched a rather well-produced, utterly one-sided, propagandist “documentary” yesterday. “Have You Heard From Johannesburg” is about the so-called Struggle. The behind-the-scenes reality popped into my head when watching the famously “exiled South Africans,” (like Oliver Tambo) suited up, and giving ponderous interviews:

“… There was certainly precious little that would have dampened Joseph Lelyveld’s enthusiasm for ‘The Struggle.’ But when the former (aforementioned) New York Times editor went looking for his exiled ANC heroes all over Africa, he found nothing but monosyllabic, apathetic, oft-inebriated men whom he desperately tried to rouse with revolutionary rhetoric.” (Page 143, Into the Cannibal’s Pot.)

Myth-making aside, the ANC’s manufactured heroes have nothing on the ascetic, self-sacrificing Salafis who man al-Qaeda (and who do not rely on European groupies for sustenance).

UPDATED I: “AFRICAN NATIONAL CORRUPTION.” A LOT TO CELEBRATE. DURBAN. I WOULD NOT recognize it today. Durban Bay is dying, environmentally.

UPDATE II: “Be a man who is not afraid to know his HIV status” broadcasts a billboard in the CBD of the once-magnificent city of Johannesburg. The image attached to the ad? A white man. HIV is almost non-existent, statistically, among whites. Such equal opportunity idiocy reminds me of that useless idiot, actress Charlize Theron, who, during a recent interview with another member of the idiocracy, Piers Morgan, hinted that South Africans should be disarmed. Her campaign against rape in SA was as vague, if not as dangerous. In addition to being a pretentious, rather poor actress, Theron is a major hypocrite: I believe her mother shot her father, all in a “good” cause, of course.

The image of your prototypical HIV carriers is at the 3:27 minute mark:

In my book I flesh out the facts about the Central Business District; what it looks like today—the JHB Stock Exchange has been forced to migrate to the suburbs, and businesses are shuttered—as compared to the time when I used to walk to work (it was in the Southern Life Building) from the bus station. I lived up the road in the once vibrant, humming, safe Hillbrow, where I used to stroll at night. A clip of Hillbrow today is below.

Have you ever heard of the hijacking of a … building? It’s a new concept. Of course, the woman in the clip is mouthing the allowable left-liberal platitudes, with her reference to the divinity “Madiba” (Mandela’s African honorific, and an adopted affectation among liberals). “Madiba” would not wish fear to replace his magnificent legacy. The old idiot interviewed seems to think that fear anchored in a fearful reality is a really bad thing. I’ve heard this pearl of wisdom repeated among many American liberals. Living life stupidly and fearlessly seems to be a great virtue.

UPDATE II: Pat Buchanan And MSNBC’s Pygmy (Like Snakes Crawling Out of Hibernation)

Christianity, Democracy, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Paleoconservatism, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Race, Racism, South-Africa

“Pat Buchanan and MSNBC’s Pygmy” is my latest WND.COM column. Here’s an excerpt:

“The ideas he put forth aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC.” So decreed MSNBC president Phil Griffin about Patrick J. Buchanan’s grand historical synthesis, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will American Survive to 2025?” Mr. Griffin was justifying the banishment from the network of one of the last authentic conservatives in mainstream media.

If I were not already persona non grata within the mainstream, I would be worried.

In an exchange with this writer, Mr. Buchanan had mentioned that his “18,000-word chapter on ethnonationalism and tribalism and the surge of both throughout the Third World—as well as our own declining world—tracks pretty much with what” I had written in my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” published in May of 2011.

Buchanan’s towering text concludes as follows: “We were one nation. We spoke the same language, learned the same history, celebrated the same heroes, observed the same holy days and holidays … were taught the same truths about right and wrong, good and evil, God and country. We were a people then. That America is gone. Many grieve her passing. Many rejoice. But we are not a people anymore.” (Page 424.)

America, as Mr. Buchanan observes, was eaten away by the acid of the 1960s revolution, “with its repudiation of Christian morality and embrace of secularism and egalitarian ideology.”

South Africa was relatively unaffected by that revolution. It was a staunchly traditional Christian country. Stores closed on Sundays. Television came late to the place but so did pornography and the gay rights movement. In South Africa, the influence of Christianity receded after the 1994 democratic transition.

Whereas “Americans are no longer a people,” by contrast, the Afrikaners, as illustrated in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” still linger as a people, clinging to what Barack Obama would indubitably deride as their bibles, their guns and their bigotries.

Dubbed the white tribe of Africa, this organic nation has, however, ceased to exist as a nation-state, dissolved by democratic decree. The sundering of state sovereignty has, in turn, exposed Afrikaners to ethnic cleansing, a familiar feature of democracy a la Africa. …

Read the complete column, “Pat Buchanan and MSNBC’s Pygmy,” on WND.COM.

The book discussed, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon. (Don’t forget those reviews; they help this cause.)

A Kindle copy is also on sale.

Still better, shipping is free and prompt if you purchase Into the Cannibal’s Pot from The Publisher.

UPDATE I (Jan. 13): Prof. Ole Jørgen Anfindsen (his Wiki bio is here) has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot on a Norwegian webzine. Prof. Anfindsen blogs at HonestThinking.com. If only I had Norwegian. (Or maybe not .)

UPDATE II: In reply to a reader (snaketrapper) on WND: Had this reader read my book, which references Prof. Hoppe’s “Democracy,” and carries advance praise from him—he might be better informed about this writer’s views and her understanding of the country of her birth, where members of her family, Christian and Jewish, still reside. But, of course, the assorted snakes that have crawled out of hibernation to comment about a book (written by a Jew) that they have in all likelihood not read (or a short column that doesn’t give the right answers to all their questions)—are more interested in asserting uninformed, unfounded, collectivist, irrational biases against the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” than reporting on the issues addressed in the book. I refer this reader to the section in the book titled, “A strategy for Survival.” I will add this: If I have learned anything from writing this book it is this: Anti-Semitism and collectivism are alive and well.

UPDATED: On ‘Mickelson in the Morning’

Ilana On Radio & TV, Media, South-Africa

I’ll be on “Mickelson in the Morning,” with Jan Mickelson, of WHO News Radio, 1040. Topic: “ITCP.” Date: Jan 10, 2012, @ 9:00 AM Pacific Time.

I’ve been eager to meet Mr. Mickelson, a legendary Iowa broadcaster.

UPDATE (Jan. 10): “Powerful stuff … Ilana has done us a service in writing one of the best books I have read; one of the most profound evaluations of human nature, in the misdirected pursuit of a multicultural soup. Into the Cannibal’s Pot should be required reading in political science courses at the university level; it’s that good.”- JAN MICKELSON, WHO News Radio, 1040

In addition to his gracious words about Into the Cannibal’s Pot, Jan Mickelson told me today what I did not know: Pat Buchanan has been fired from the MSNBC cesspool. Mr. Buchanan denies it. Does anyone know for sure?