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Appropriating "Apartheid" to Bash Israel

(Wall Street Journal) Warren Goldstein - Human Rights Watch accuses Israel of apartheid. Yet the group brazenly acknowledges that it has "detached the term apartheid from its original South African context." This is immoral. "Apartheid" has a sacred historical meaning, sanctified by the blood and suffering of millions of South Africans who were oppressed and discriminated against on the basis of race. In appropriating the word, Human Rights Watch presents a grotesquely distorted picture of the current reality in Israel. No one who truly understands the systematic racism and denial of basic human rights that made apartheid infamous could, with any integrity, apply the term to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There can be no greater desecration of the memory of the victims of apartheid than ripping the word out of South African soil, detaching it from its original meaning, and weaponizing it in the cause of another form of bigotry. The writer is chief rabbi of South Africa.
2021-05-13 00:00:00
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