Naledi Pandor – The South African Jihadi Emissary
An open letter to the US government by the writer about the visit of Naledi Pandor to the USA appeared in a ToI blog on 10 November 2025. Her support for Islamist radical ideology has drastically impacted on South African foreign policy and diplomatic relations with the USA. Detailed below is an assessment of this malign activist.
Dr Naledi Pandor, former South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation (foreign minister), current Chair of the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF), who hosted US sanctioned Francesca Albanese in October 2025, will be a speaker on Friday, 14 November 2025, at the Milwaukee Premiere of Muslim Network Television (MNT) in Brookfield, Wisconsin, USA. Her hosts are allegedly tied to the Islamic Circle of North America (INCA) which is part of the Islamist, Hamas network in the USA.
Pandor’s recent public remarks about Israel, which include explicit references to “jihad” and a statement that “armed struggle may become a necessity,” in the context of calls for Palestinian political unity to secure sovereignty. These are coupled with her ongoing statements that the US and other counter-terror aligned countries should be brought to trial on war crime charges are of serious concern. Pandor labels the US as “a threat” and its government machinery as “monstrous and menacing”
Pandor’s remarks are consistent with the Hamas terror organization. Hamas’s ideology is fundamentally rooted in the concept of jihad (holy war) for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state over all of historic Palestine, not just the territories of Judea Samaria and Gaza. Hamas leaders have made numerous statements over the years, and as recently as 2024 and 2025, calling for continued jihad and resistance. https://www.gov.il/en/pages/the-covenant-of-the-hamas-main-points.
At a Cape Town Mosque during 2025 Pandor stated that “Muslims are a peace-loving people but were permitted to engage in jihad when necessary”. Pandor has reportedly previously expressed these sentiments about jihad when she was in the United States.” In this context, Pandor’s invocation of jihad was not couched in the reformist or inner-spiritual sense sometimes used in modern Islamic discourse. Her own juxtaposition of the term with “armed struggle” and “political unity” makes clear she was referring to violent resistance, jihad in its literal form as “holy war” or religious warfare. This interpretation aligns her rhetoric with militant and terror-supporting frameworks rather than theological or pacifist readings.
Statements from South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) underline Pandor’s central role in steering the ICJ proceedings against Israel. Her presence in The Hague during the provisional-measures phase and her subsequent government communications positioned her as the political face of the campaign.
On 10 May 2024, multiple sources photographed and recorded Pandor in direct conversation with senior Hamas figures Dr Bassem Naim and Emad Saber at a conference in Sandton, Johannesburg. The event echoed the ideological tenor of the 2001 UN Conference against Racism Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and related Intolerance held at Durban, South Africa. It was described by organizers as a forum for “solidarity with Palestine.” This engagement demonstrates continued and overt contact with proscribed terror actors inside South Africa’s borders. Notably WELT reported on the 10 October 2025 that Mohammed A. Naim, son of Basser Naim was arrested in London less than two weeks ago after receiving weapons from other terrorists who was also detained in Austria. He will be extradited from Britain to face charges in Germany.
In October 2023, days after the October 7 massacre carried out by Hamas, Pandor travelled to Tehran and met with Iranian officials; in November 2023, she was in Doha, Qatar and in December 2023 she participated in the “Solidarity with Palestine” conference convened by Mandla Mandela in South Africa. Public photographs and press reports confirm that Palestinian factions affiliated with the PFLP, Hezbollah, Fatah, and Hamas were present.
In June 2025, Naledi Pandor appeared in London and at least three additional venues in the United Kingdom as a featured guest of the Friends of Al-Aqsa (FOA) Foundation. FOA has long-documented organizational and ideological ties to the Muslim Brotherhood network in Britain.
In her subsequent visit to the United States, Pandor appeared at events organized by the Chicago-based NGO Justice for All and was promoted and hosted by Nihad Awad, Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR has been widely documented by congressional investigations and U.S. court filings as an entity established out of early Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations in North America. Awad’s hosting of Pandor places her within a network of US activists and advocacy groups ideologically adjacent to the Muslim Brotherhood’s global political infrastructure. This mirrors her prior engagements with Brotherhood-aligned fronts in South Africa and the United Kingdom, reinforcing a consistent pattern of proximity to Islamist political structures.
The United States declared South Africa’s ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool persona non grata and expelled him following remarks interpreted as hostile toward President Trump and the US The action was publicly announced by the US Secretary of State and reported widely. This establishes a near-term diplomatic baseline for US intolerance of inflammatory rhetoric by senior South African officials. Rasool who has recently announced his resignation from the ANC and says he has signed a contract with a “global entity” (unnamed).
Pandor’s`s engagement with Hamas and public invocation of “jihad “and “armed struggle” cannot be viewed in isolation; these must be weighed against her documented contact with Hamas leadership immediately after the 7 October 2023 massacre in southern Israel.
On 8 October 2023, the Hamas political bureau released an official communiqué stating:
“The head of the Hamas political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, received a phone call from the South African Foreign Minister, which she affirmed South African solidarity with the Palestinian people and with Gaza in the Al-Aqsa Flood battle, and expressed her sadness and regret for what the Palestinian people are experiencing in Gaza.”
The phrase Al-Aqsa Flood is Hamas’s own operational codename for the coordinated attacks on 7 October 2023 that murdered more than 1,200 Israeli civilians in one day. By using Hamas’s preferred framing and offering “solidarity … in the Al-Aqsa Flood battle,” Pandor placed South Africa’s foreign ministry within the propaganda vocabulary of a proscribed terrorist organization only hours after the atrocities.
When the same political figure subsequently told South African and foreign audiences that “armed struggle may become a necessity” and that Muslims are “permitted to engage in jihad when necessary,” the language acquired an entirely different weight. These were not abstract theological reflections, but statements issued by a senior former minister who had already established direct communication with Hamas’s wartime leadership. The overlap between diplomatic authority and militant terminology creates tangible dangers:
Her rhetoric validates Hamas’s claim that violent “resistance” is a lawful or moral extension of political grievance, eroding the international norm that proscribes terrorism against civilians. She mirrors and normalizes the vocabulary of a designated terrorist entity.
Her stature as a former foreign minister and current chair of a respected philanthropic institution gives her messaging authority and legitimacy far beyond activist circles. The repetition of jihadist framing by an established public official emboldens sympathetic audiences and lower the rhetorical barrier to incitement to violent mobilization. Her solidarity with Hamas in response to its own press statement, substantiates the assessment that Pandor constitutes a potential security threat to the West and particularly within the USA.
Pandor’s “jihad” and “armed struggle” statements, combined with a scheduled, high-visibility public appearance in the USA, raise a credible prospect of mobilizing hardline and radical activity. Her record as the political face of the ICJ case against Israel, her adversarial commentary directed at US leaders, her threats against the US to bring it to account for complicity in war crimes, increases the probability of conflict and protests triggered by her presence on US soil. The US administration surely cannot allow her to spew her dangerous and inciting narrative on US soil.
