The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) filed for hate speech charges to be brought against a former student leader. Mcebo Dlamini, the ex-president of the University of the Witwatersrand Students’ Representative Council, had called Jews “devils”.
“They are devils. They are good for nothing,” Dlamini said on a radio program about the Jewish community. “They are hypocritical, just like [Wits University Vice Chancellor] Adam Habib. They are uncircumcised in the heart.”
"Dlamini’s comments are the latest in a series of offensive public statements that he made about South African Jews over the past nine months,” SAJBD Communications Director Charisse Zeifert, said.
The Jewish umbrella body considers Dlamini's comments, which he made on a radio station during a discussion ten days ago, as racist and defamatory.
The new complaint will be added to an existing one with the South African Human Rights Commission, which was based on him proclaiming his admiration for Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler on Facebook earlier this year.
In a post, Dlamini had written: “I love Adolf Hitler… There is an element of Hitler in every white person”.
Dlamini explained that when he “broke the issue of Adolf Hitler”, he wanted to challenge academics to think beyond what was being written in newspapers. “It is an issue of transformation itself. We are not ignorant of the human atrocities that Adolf Hitler committed over there.”
He said that after apartheid, black people, and especially black youths, were not free.
