Mandla Mandela: Terror incitement for the Paris Olympics

Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s most famous son, had the unique ability to engage multiple sides of a conflict, comfortably engaging leaders across the spectrum, from China and Tibet, from the USA and Cuba, and as well as Palestinians and Israelis.

Highlighting this character-filled skill born of years of conflict and pain, South African Israel journalist Rolene Marks, writing in the Jerusalem Post in November 2018, noted that the very mention of Mandela’s name evokes respect and inspires recognition and a sense of awe.

Nelson Mandela left a dignified legacy as a champion of human rights and warrior for equality.

But, a short decade after his death, Mandela’s rogue grandson, Nkosi Zwelivelile ‘Mandla’ Mandela, has ruined his grandfather’s legacy and destroyed the Mandela tradition. The former South African parliamentarian who has turned, since South Africa’s elections in May, into a fulltime one-issue ambassador for terror supporting organizations like Hamas, incessantly brandishes his grandfather’s name as a weapon in his publicity toolkit on behalf of the Hamas terror organization in the wake of their brutality on 7 October 2023.

In a video posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday 23 July 2024, an anonymous man speaking Arabic with an unusual accent, his face masked with a keffiyeh and wearing a black bullet proof vest marked with a Palestinian flag, addressed the people of France and President Emmanuel Macron. English subtitles were provided: “You invited the Zionists to the Olympic games; you will pay for what you have done! Rivers of blood will flow through the streets of Paris. This day is approaching, God willing. Allah is the greatest!”, he said holding up a gruesome plastic severed head of a woman.

This video was one of many violently threatening Israel’s Olympic team and Israeli presence at the Olympics.

Iran has condemned the welcoming of Israeli athletes and demanded their exclusion. “They do not deserve to be present at the Paris Olympics because of the war against the innocent people of Gaza,” it said, referring to Israel’s defense of its civilians against Iran’s proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis to name a few.

A group describing itself as the People’s Defense Organization said the Israeli team was “not invited to Paris 2024” and threatened to repeat the events of Munich 1972. “You will be awaiting attack at every moment – in the airport, the hotel and the streets which belong to us. Even a wave of arrests against our organization won’t stop us from seeing our plan through. Prepare for the intifada!” they said in written warnings last week.

With the Israeli Olympic team locked into the Athlete’s Village, surrounded by security and against the general backdrop of a surge in antisemitic incidents in France, the country’s security forces and Parisian police are on high alert throughout the city, fearing the possibility of anything from a coordinated terror to a lone wolf attack by someone responding to global incitement.

The Paris 2024 organizing committee has implemented unprecedented steps to secure the Games, including the deployment of 30 000 police and gendarmes reinforced by about 20 000 soldiers alongside an equal amount of private security agents.
In this volatile climate, what the French specifically and the world generally can do without is Nelson Mandela’s rogue grandson implicitly inciting violence in pursuing his campaign calling for Israel to be refused a place among the family of nations in Paris.

As is his lavish wont, Mandla Mandela, who is chief of the Thembu people in the poverty-stricken Mvezo region of the Eastern Cape, has been jet setting around the world, whipping up support for his pet campaign while his own rural community back home continues to live without basic resources.

The past month has seen him in Algiers, Russia, Turkey, and Switzerland before arriving in France. “I want to call on all activists across the world to make our call go viral. Let us pull out all stops to ban Apartheid Israel from the Paris Olympic games,” he said in Lausanne at the IOC headquarters before moving on to Geneva. In Paris this week he “call[ed] on the entire international community to converge on Paris and call for the ban of the Zionist usurping entity from participating in the Paris Olympic Games”.

He was speaking in unison with the Palestinian Olympic Committee and hard-left French lawmaker Thomas Portes of the France Unbowed (LFI) party who called for a boycott of the Israeli team and anti-Israel mobilization in Paris.

“I condemn in the strongest possible way all those who create risks for these athletes and implicitly threaten them,” Macron countered.
Mandela, who converted to Islam in 2015, conducts himself with the dogmatism of the recently converted.

His conversion was no private journey. It followed five years of Islamic learning, under the guidance of the Sheikh Ebrahim Gabriels (also known as Ibrahim Jibril). Gabriels is the former president of the Muslim Judicial Council of South Africa.
He is publicly associated with several entities designated as terror organizations by the United States but which operate freely in South Africa. He currently serves as head of the South African branch of the Al-Aqsa Foundation, the international organization established in 1992 which was outlawed in the US in 2003 for supporting terrorism. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Saudi-based Itilaf Al-Khair (The Union of Good) of South Africa, an umbrella organization of over fifty Islamic charities and funds. Also known as the Charity Coalition, it was founded in 2001 by, among others, Islamic Relief Worldwide, and funnels money to organizations belonging to Hamas. In 2002, Itilaf Al-Khair was blocked by Israel from operating in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; and in 2008 it was designated by the US government as “an organization created by Hamas leadership to transfer funds to the terrorist organization” and banned outright by Israel and the US Treasury. On different occasions in 2001 and 2004, in his capacity as the Head of Islamic Courts Council of Cape Town, South Africa and Higher Judiciary Council, Gabriels joined the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas leaders in signing Itilaf Al-Khair petitions condemning US and Israeli actions in Palestine and Iraq.

Three months after his conversion, Mandela was welcomed into the Muslim community in a different way – via marriage to Rabia Clarke, daughter of Aslam Clarke, a well-known Muslim businessman in Cape Town.

Mandla Mandela has had multiple partners and Clarke, his most recent, twenty years his junior, is his fourth wife. (In 2004 he married Tando Mabuna; in 2010 Anais Grimaud, and in 2011 he married Swazi royal princess Mbalenhle Nodiyala Makhathini. Grimaud took her son home to Reunion after Mandela denied the boy’s paternity, claiming she had been impregnated by his brother).
Mandela married well; his new father-in-law made him a director of his medical equipment company Bioworld, a health technology specialist servicing three hundred outlets worldwide.
The couple were married by Gabriels, his mentor as well as Clarke family friend, in an Islamic ceremony at Cape Town’s Kensington Mosque Hidayatul Islam Masjied.

Gabriels considered the Mandela/Clarke wedding to be “a momentous occasion” with the potential to transcend cultural barriers in South Africa.

His interest is not only Mandla himself; he reveled in the association with the groom’s famous grandfather, milking the posthumous association from the outset. “I was very honored to officiate at the wedding ceremony between Nkosi Zwelivelile Mandla Mandela, the grandson of our great leader, the father of South Africa, and Rabia Clarke,” he told local Muslim community radio station, Radio Islam. “There is no racism in Islam … Mandela would have been a very proud man on Saturday for his grandson to get married into the Muslim community,” he said.
Disinterested in the problems associated with cultural appropriation, Ebrahim’s proselytizing delight was not shared by Mandela’s family and traditional community. They, in contrast, felt betrayed by his conversion and marriage to a Muslim woman which they considered a contravention of his Xhosa heritage. The Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contralesa), called on Mandela to step down from his position as Chief of the Mvezo Traditional Council. “It means now he is no longer a chief of AbaThembu in Mvezo (because)… the Mvezo people are not Muslim‚” Contralesa stated.

Mandela was unphased. Less than a week after his wedding to Clarke, he appeared proudly among fellow politicians and other leaders attending then President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation address at Parliament in the company not of his new, young bride but with his third wife Mbalenhle Makhathini on his arm. The couple wore matching traditionally-inspired outfits.
Unlike Gabriels and his new associates in the mosques of Cape Town, Mandela’s political peers were unimpressed; they booed his arrival. “He was jeered as a traitor and sell-out,” Johannesburg-based Sowetan newspaper reported.

“He lost the family’s respect. He no longer practices our religion and sometimes does not even attend family events,” a Mandela relative later told the South African press. As a devout Muslim who no longer consumes alcohol, he “refuses to perform key family practices of our tradition,” the relative said.

In fact, Mandela had already lost respect at the Mvezo royal house on account of his abusive spousal behavior towards Makhathini.

“[Makhathini] was completely neglected and treated like a worthless wife. Mandla would take decisions without consulting her as the Queen. She would lock herself in the house and cry while Mandla was out gallivanting … At some point in December 2015, she was neglected by Mandla, who, at the time, as per the family tradition, we were all in Qunu, but she was left alone in Mvezo with no groceries nor electricity… and no one could do anything because everybody feared Mandla,” the Daily News reported. (Mandela has a reputation for rage: in 2014 he was charged with an armed road rage incident, having allegedly pointed a weapon at a school teacher).

Their marriage did not survive his polygamy, and the couple officially divorced in 2017. (Five years later, Makhatini, who was unable to have children with Mandela, remarried and had a child. “I am happy for Nodiyala. We loved her very much, and it pained us to see her in pain when she was married to the chief [Mandela],” a community member told the South African press).
Gabriels made short shrift of any concerns people might have had about the twenty-year age difference between Mandela and Clarke, and the groom’s messy and abusive relationship history; all paled in the face of the significance of the usefulness of the memory of his iconic grandfather.

Mandela’s conversion to Islam was never intended to be a quiet, personal matter; Gabriels had big plans for Mandela’s brand name. “Sometimes it’s difficult for us to give the message of Islam in South Africa as people have different cultures. So it’s much more better for us to have a person like the calibre and the status of Mandla to deliver the message of Islam”, Gabriels told the BBC shortly after the wedding.

Mandela’s botched relationship with his rural community and his failed parliamentary career are irrelevant; his symbolic credentials as the grandson of South Africa’s iconic first democratic president are alone sufficient to get him a seat around global Islamist tables of influence and leadership, and to propel him as a globe-trotting, lavishly funded pro-Palestinian, terror-supporting celebrity where he uses the iconic Mandela name domestically and internationally to actively spread the Brotherhood’s call and ideology.

Gabriels supervises Mandela in his religious embrace of Islam and Islamist political activism, and looms large in his life.

He has not been disappointed by the dividends. Mandela has adopted Gabriels’ radical message of Islam as his own, and is frequently rolled out to deliver it.

And his delivery is powerful.
On 11 November 2023, for example, he led tens of thousands of people marching in the streets of Cape Town. “Free, free Palestine! … From the river to the sea! … Palestine will be free! … Takbir! [Crowd response: Allah is the greatest] … Viva Al Quds! … Viva Hamas! … Viva the Palestinian resistance! Viva!” he chanted, mobilizing the mass crowd, and inciting them to fever point.

Mandela chants “Takbir” in many of his terror-supporting speeches. In the contemporary Islamist movement, the black flag with the shahada (Islamic testimony of faith holding that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger) or takbir (the words “Allahu Akbar” or “God is great”) is used to evoke notions of jihad and of re-establishing the Islamic Caliphate. The chant “Allahu Akbar” is almost always heard by Palestinian terrorist moments before they commit acts of terror, as can be heard in video evidence from the October 7, 2023 massacre committed by Hamas and others on innocent Israeli citizens.

In a video released as recently as Tuesday July 23, 2024 by Hamas terrorists in Tulkarem, a Palestinian controlled city, a group of weapon-brandishing terrorists attempting to fire a rocket into central Israel were similarly chanting “Takbir”.

At every possible opportunity, reference is gratuitously made by himself or the people around him to his iconic grandfather, using his reputation to bolster their own initiatives in mobilizing support against Israel and for Palestinian causes, and indeed, for the terror-driven causes themselves.
When, in May 2023, the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN) hosted Mandela as their guest of honor and tour keynote speaker, they advertised the event as “featuring the grandson of Nelson Mandela”. Based in Washington D.C., CAIR, a non-profit organization concerned with representing Muslim civil rights in the US, defended and justified Hamas’s 7/10 terror assault as legitimate resistance to Israeli occupation.

Mandela was appointed an executive member of the League of Parliamentarians for the Liberation of Al-Quds, headed by Yemenite businessman and strong Muslim Brotherhood figure Hamid Abdulla Al-Ahmar who lives in exile in Istanbul and is close to Turkish President Racep Tayyip Erdogan.

Erdogan, who staunchly backed the Muslim Brotherhood and Mohamed Morsi during the Egyptian crisis and gave fifteen hundred Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members asylum in Turkey after the 2013 Egyptian coup d’état, is a strong supporter of Hamas.

Visiting Turkey frequently, Mandela meets Erdogan and senior Hamas members including the terror leader Haniyeh. He is embedded in an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood; Hamas is an offshoot of that organization, carrying out their operational terror activities globally.
Mandela attended the 5th summit of the Al Quds Committee hosted by Erdogan in April this year.

Weaponizing the iconic Mandela brand is a key tool in Mandela’s promotion of the Palestinian right of return, coordinated in Mustapha Barghouti’s Global Campaign to Return to Palestine, with its logo of the key and map of Israel symbolizing the intention of the total takeover of the State of Israel, to which, as he openly states on his Instagram account, he has been appointed the Campaign’s Ambassador.

Shortly before the South African elections in May that ensured he was removed from Parliament, speaking in support of the Turkish Freedom Flotilla that was scheduled to leave Istanbul to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, Mandela confirmed this appointment. “I am a member of Parliament in the Republic of South Africa. But I am also the ambassador of the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine,” he said.

Mandela has often said; “we understood very well during our own struggle for liberation that we would not defeat the apartheid regime through armed struggle alone”. He has also been noted to say in several video posted on social media; “We will ensure that we mobilize the global community in their support”.

Mandela is worth observing. As his Islamist handlers intended, he has become the face of a radical, global Muslim Brotherhood-aligned movement which should not be underestimated.
Together with the expanding role South Africa has assumed in delegitimizing Israel since 7/10, including the approach to the ICJ and ICC and ensuring a seat for Iran at the BRICS table, Mandela’s significance has ballooned in the last few months.

Mandela attended the first global Israel anti-apartheid conference held in Sandton, Johannesburg, in May this year. Present also was Barghouti who appointed Mandela as his ambassador to his Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. Across the conference aisle were Hamas leaders, Basem Naim and Emad Saber.

The three Palestinian men from opposite sides of their own divide sat in front of then foreign affairs minister, Naledi Pandor who, in her plenary conference address, emphasized the need for reconciliation among the Palestinian factions in order to sit around the day-after negotiating table.
Two a half months later, on Tuesday 23 July 2024, in a visit to BRICS-member China, senior Hamas official Musa Abu Marzuk confirmed the terror group has indeed signed a national unity declaration with other Palestinian groups including Fatah. “Today we sign an agreement for national unity and we say that the path to completing this journey is national unity. We are committed to national unity and we call for it,” he said.

Sandton conference proceedings hinted at the role South Africa, fronted by Barghouti and his ‘ambassador’ Mandela, is playing as geopolitical facilitator on behalf of BRICS which manifested in China earlier this week.

The sustained capacity of Iranian proxies Hamas and Islamic Jihad to continue wreaking terror has been considerably weakened in Gaza. They will most likely continue their terror activities albeit at a significantly reduced level for the foreseeable future.

Since 7/10 however, playing to the South African international anti-apartheid solidarity song sheet, they have become perversely emboldened. Promoted by a combination of rogue states and other terror and anti-Zionist organizations, they have been globally embraced rather than roundly condemned.

The July 23 2024 announcement of an agreement of national unity represents the BRICS consortium lifeline provided to Hamas. Motivated by Russia, sponsored and facilitated by South Africa and celebrated by Iran, it was delivered by China, the BRICS powerhouse.

As things now stand, Hamas will be seated around the ‘joint venture’ table set by Pandor. Barghouti will likely sit at its head, with his loyal global brand name ambassador, Mandela, at his side. The PFLP will continue to serve up their lawfare campaign, waitered on by their NGO servants Al Haq. All will be united around the table in their goal to pursue the destruction of the State of Israel.

As the American presidential race focuses minds on their domestic arena, get set for volatile times. The BRICS agenda is growing apace. Calling for a ban on Israel participating in the Paris Olympics when viewed against his strident anti-Zionist rhetoric, Palestinian activism and outright Hamas support is dangerously inciteful and incendiary. Complacency is ill-advised. Mandela should be called to account before it is too late.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: The material used in this article was researched by the think tank Shield Z.