Fatima Hajaig has disturbed my sleep, more than once.

I awoke before dawn one day this week, and the image of her face came to mind, and the vile and hateful words she spoke so recently came back to me, and the anger and shame that stirred me made rest impossible. Anger for the egregious words she had spoken, shame for the fact that she is, and seemingly will continue to be, in office as the deputy foreign minister of the country of my birth. The country of Nelson Mandela, on whose proud legacy she has spilt bile.

To quote Hajaig, speaking on January 14 2009: "They in fact control (America). No matter which government comes into power, whether Republican or Democratic, whether Barack Obama or George Bush. The control of America, just like the control of most Western countries, is in the hands of Jewish money and if Jewish money controls their country then you cannot expect anything else".

She had a receptive and enthusiastic audience, at an anti-war, meaning in this context, anti-Israel rally. Some people would not necessarily apply the term "anti-war" to opposition to the prolonged terrorist campaign by Hamas.

I covered South Africa’s parliament for several years but have only the vaguest memory of Hajaig as an MP, beyond a recollection that her performances were sufficiently underwhelming that in any long debate, she was among those (spread proportionately among all parties in parliament) whose speaking turns were ideal opportunities to put down one’s pen and take a break. Now she, unfortunately elevated to a post as a deputy minister, has said something memorable and thus audible for anyone who accesses the YouTube clip.



The response of South Africa’s government to Hajaig’s repetition of this old racist stereotype has been limp. The foreign ministry first issued a statement after some days saying that "statements in support of anti-Semitism are not reflective of South African foreign policy". Hajaig was then called in by president Kgalema Motlanthe and journalists were told afterwards that she had assured Motlanthe "that she does not harbour any anti-Semitic feelings or views". She issued what was billed as an unequivocal apology, although the South African Jewish Board of Deputies rejected it as very equivocal.

As reported by Peter Fabricius on iol.co.za, the SAJBD said Hajaig had "failed to address, let alone repudiate" her "blatantly anti-Semitic sentiments" and so it was pressing ahead with a complaint against her for anti-Jewish hate speech with the South African Human Rights Commission.

Bloggers in South Africa have joined others in taking up the debate on Hajaig, including one unfortunate exercise in which the writer defended her by dredging up and parading, out of ignorance or otherwise, a pile of rubbish he had found on the internet about the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Others countered that if the legends of Jewish success and influence were true, it should be cause for admiration, not hatred.

Or, one small example of this otherwise sterile debate, if it is true that x per cent of Hollywood producers are Jews, and some find this objectionable, would they care to suggest what would be the ideal percentage, and to which groups – Venezuelans, vegans, atheists, Japanese people, Hindus, worshippers of green tree frogs, Maoris, or members of the Dutch Reformed Church, say, to pluck a few at random out of the air – the remaining percentages should be allocated?

The ordure that Hajaig spewed was, as noted, against the background of the Israeli military action in Gaza. It is a well-canvassed point that Gaza is exploited to legitimise all kinds of verbal and other attacks on Israel and Jews, including a spate of anti-Jewish incidents in Europe and elsewhere in recent weeks. But while Gaza has brought anti-Jewish hate speech to a particular peak, it is always there.

On home soil, considering that this is being written at a desk in Bulgaria, consider these quotations: "This community has transformed itself through the ages from Pharisees and Sadduccees, to different oligarchic circles, which even today meet periodically in luxury resorts to decide who and how to have control on the markets, the resources and the fate of millions around the world."

The second quotation: "There are a lot of powerful Jews, with a lot of money, who are paying the media to form the social awareness of the people… They are also playing with economic crises in countries like Bulgaria and getting rich. These are the concrete realities".

The first quotation is from a book entitled Boomerang of Evil, published in 2002 and authored by Volen Siderov, leader of the ultra-nationalist Ataka party and the stepfather of the person who spoke the second paragraph, Ataka MEP Dimitar Stoyanov, in an interview published in the Telegraph on January 12 2007.

Golly, I am sure that Hajaig, Siderov and Stoyanov would find they had much in common should they ever get together for a cosy chat. Of which, more further on.

Then, a further quotation: "I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against, is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler… I believe there were no gas chambers (during World War 2)". That, according to a BBC account of an interview given to Swedish television, was spoken by Roman Catholic bishop Richard Williamson, and is the cause of many eagerly awaiting final clarity from the Vatican on what is to be Williamson’s fate.
Now, Switzerland, like South Africa, is a beautiful country, and especially nice to visit in April.

In Geneva from April 20 to 24 this year, a conference is to be held that will be a sequel to the September 2001 conference held in Durban, South Africa, under the auspices of the United Nations as the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.

I covered the Durban 2001 conference as a journalist and saw the unedifying spectacle of attempts to hijack it to turn it into an anti-Israeli, anti-Western hysterical operetta, tragically blowing the millions of dollars and the long days that were meant to address what continue to be some of the worst scourges plaguing our world, and perpetrated by many of those (Gaddaffi, among several others, springs to mind) who sought to force the final declaration to assert, in part, that Israel was an apartheid state. As someone who lived in the apartheid state of South Africa for more than three decades, I can say that anyone who tries to label Israel as an apartheid state is either sadly ignorant, a liar or a fool or all three.

Durban I descended into farce as various countries that had misgivings about it from the start ended up walking out – the United States among them – and the parallel "NGO Forum" came up with a vitriolic final declaration that, to her credit, the then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, declined to accept.

Now Durban II is on its way, and already there is a "draft outcome document" crafted by a preparatory body that has been dominated by those beacons of human rights and tolerance Iran, Libya and Cuba, which describes Israel as guilty of racism and calls into question the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It also contains provisions curtailing free speech as "abuse of freedom of expression", efforts to limit the media by a "code of ethical conduct", proposes the creation of a hierarchy of victims with Muslim minorities on top and a proposal to introduce laws against "projecting negative, insulting and derogatory images of religions and religious personalities" (why do I suspect that the last proposal was not drafted with the Pope, Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, head of the Lutheran church in Denmark or the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in mind?).

The Geneva meeting, known as "Durban II", will be boycotted by Israel. The Bush administration sought to deprive preparations of oxygen (arguably the only thing the Bushies ever did right in eight years), and Barack Obama’s administration has yet to make its position clear on whether Washington will be represented – although media reports have said that when campaigning for the US presidency, Hillary Clinton, now secretary of state, said that should she win the presidency, the US also would boycott Durban II. Canada is boycotting.

No doubt South Africa will be represented, a nice outing for the deputy foreign minister, and after all, South Africa was the host of the first farce. It would be nice if South Africa upheld the country’s post-1994 ideals against racism and intolerance (including Islamophobia, by the way, which is a deeply unacceptable phenomenon) but seeing as its diplomacy failed in 2001, I expect nothing better of it in 2009.

I do not know yet whether Bulgaria will be going. Probably, it will take its cue from other European Union members, although clarity is lacking. The UK, Netherlands and France have indicated that they will withdraw if the Israel issue eclipses all else.

Bulgaria was at Durban I; I attended the speech, in a hall four-fifths empty, as Sofia’s representative outlined "Bulgaria’s model of ethnic tolerance", a subject in which there was no interest, whatever the impressive label of the conference.

If Bulgaria does decide to send a representative, Siderov or Stoyanov should do; chances are they would cheer on the verbiage drafted by Iran et al. But I would not like to believe that the majority of Bulgarians, most proud of what the country did in World War 2 to save Jews on its territory from Hitler’s evil, would be happy with their tax leva being squandered on what is likely to be an event that perpetrates rather than acts against hate speech.

If someone is needed to bless the event, would anyone have any bishops in mind?

And I intend to sleep through the whole thing and any coverage of it; hate speech – even the hearing of it – is very bad for the soul.