No, Jo Bluen. You Do Not Speak for Me.
Earlier this week, Jo Bluen, spokesperson for “South African Jews for a Free Palestine” (SAJFP), published an open letter addressed to the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD).
The letter is the latest instalment in what has become a predictably angry liturgy of fake morality, ideological depravity and self-righteous denunciation dressed up as a conscientious rebuke of the South African Jewish community for its failures to uphold traditional Jewish values by supporting genocide by Israel in the Gaza war. Many commentators have identified this sick inversion of victim and oppressed. Calling Jews Nazis being a favourite one. Psychologists call it transference.
The writer does not usually respond to theatrics or vulgar grandstanding to win over the support and solidarity of Israel’s Islamist Jihadist enemies including the vociferous anti-Western fringes of society. The social media pages and the posters displayed by SAJFP are replete with graphic and crude slogans of hatred, violence, and radical ideology.
However, when a marginal group attempts to appropriate the identity of a community and speak out as legitimate flag bearers of Judaic tradition and South African Jewry, such an outrage is an affront which cannot be disregarded. Talk is cheap especially when there is no skin in the game: No commitment to Jewish observance, culture, education, tzedakah (welfare) or community involvement as exhorted by the Ethics of our Fathers.
The time has come to set the record straight. Having spent decades in South African Jewish communal leadership and human rights law during and after the Apartheid era this writer was among those who worked for a just and free society. Not through words, cheap social media posts and narcissistic protest events but through genuine support for the disadvantaged and disenfranchised people of South Africa. It was an honour to work and associate with people who were truly progressive and went on fulfil leading roles in society as jurists, business, and community leaders. It is disgraceful to witness the degradation of Jewish activism by charlatans and bigots such as Ms Bluen, and SAJFP purporting to represent Jewish humanitarian values.
SAJFP, is not a representative Jewish body. It has no mandate, no communal backing, and no credibility within the South African Jewish community. Its membership consists of obscure and morally blemished people who have not distinguished themselves in the communal, business or professional world – in society generally. They seek glorification among unpeaceful Islamist activists and extremists who pursue undemocratic and destructive campaigns against Israel and free Western societies.
They scoff at Jewish institutions, ridicule our communal leaders, and offer a twisted mirror image of morality in which supporting terror becomes virtue and self-defence becomes a crime.
Look closely at the photograph of Czesława Kwoka, a 14-year-old Polish Catholic girl murdered in Auschwitz on February 18, 1943. The inverted red triangle sewn onto her uniform identified her as a political prisoner. This simple geometric shape was turned into a tool of dehumanization, used to classify, mark, and ultimately destroy human beings. Czesława’s story is tragic beyond words. She had just lost her mother, could not speak the language of her captors, and according to witness accounts, was executed with a phenol injection directly to the heart.
It is grotesque that in 2025 Jo Bluen openly uses the very same inverted red triangle. It is the identical symbol now employed by Hamas “War Media” to designate targets for violence and death. In Nazi camps, it marked the condemned. In Hamas propaganda, it serves the same purpose, weaponized against Jews and Israelis. That Bluen wears and promotes this emblem while posturing as a moral authority exposes the moral bankruptcy and historical amnesia of her cause.
This is not Judaism. This is not justice. This is not who we are. Far from defending Judaism SAJFP makes a mockery of Judaism. Bluen and her cohorts have no respect at all for the Chief Rabbi of South Africa, the spiritual leader of an overwhelming majority of South African Jews. He has been insulted and defamed by SAJFP but has kept his peace in silent dignity.
It is an ideologically extreme formation, closely aligned with the Jihadi terrorist organisations, Hamas, and Hezbollah as well as the secular Marxist leaning Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. This is not hyperbole. SAJFP members have appeared under Hamas banners, praised and hosted convicted terrorists such as Leila Khaled, and collaborated with individuals who have either been investigated or are openly affiliated with radical organisations.
Among them is Heidar Eid, a Gazan born BDS activist based in South Africa, who was greeted at OR Tambo International Airport in December 2023 by none other than Zane Dangor, the Director General of DIRCO. This was not a benign gesture. It was a signal.
Then there is Ramzy Baroud, a figure celebrated by SAJFP, who is reportedly under investigation in the United States for several violations of federal law, including material support for a designated terrorist organisation, tax fraud, and failure to submit lawful declarations.
These are not trivial matters. They speak to the low calibre of individuals this group associates and platforms with as moral authorities.
The SAJFP has attempted to co-opt Jewish ethical discourse and tradition to camouflage its essentially self-hating agenda. It is a sad spectacle to see Jews marching alongside people who hate the Jewish people and deny their sovereign right to a national home.
We have seen it all before and it did not end well. Jewish self-hatred has a long history, but nothing is more striking than the emergence of the Yevsektsiya – the Jewish section of the Communist Party of Russia in the early 1900’s. These twisted “progressives” declared they were not anti-Semitic but just anti-Zionist. They closed-down synagogues and tried to shut down Jewish communal life. They even imprisoned, tortured, and killed Jews. Rabbis were humiliated in show trials staged on Jewish holy days for maximum effect. Hebrew was outlawed. Moyshe Litvakov, a writer, demonised Rabbis in a Yiddish newspaper. Esther Frumkin (granddaughter of a rabbi), Shimon Dimanshtein were diligent activists who relentlessly pursued Jewish “enemies of the revolution”. Litvakov died in prison, Frumkin died in a gulag and Dimanshtein was executed in Stalin’s great purge.
In her open letter published on Meta, Jo Bluen invokes the image of Abraham, praising his kindness to strangers. But what she omits is what followed. Jewish tradition does not merely celebrate kindness. It demands discernment. It commands memory. It insists on justice.
The Torah is explicit. We are not called to stand with those who rise against our people. We are commanded to remember what Amalek did, to reject the spies who undermined Israel’s resolve, and to denounce Korach who challenged Moses’s leadership not out of conscience, but out of ego. In the International Court of Justice South Africa has seized on and distorted the Biblical lesson of Amalek used by Mr Netanyahu as proof of genocidal intent. This is a disingenuous misinterpretation of what is simply allegorical. A reminder of our tragic heritage of overcoming our mortal enemies since Biblical days. These are not quaint fables. They are moral instructions grounded in history and relevance.
Bluen does not speak for this writer nor the tens of thousands of South African Jews who value justice but not at the expense of their own faith, and who understand that true morality requires loyalty, not betrayal. We are appalled by her malevolence. She has stood beside those who chant for the annihilation of the Jewish state and she too calls for this. “Death to the IDF” is the calling card of SAJFP and Bluen. Jewish cowards and traitors are felicitously spared the brutal treatment that their Jihadi comrades practice and are free to espouse their venom with impunity.
She has been seen sipping Israeli wine in Israel one year, and the next, signing her name to propaganda documents that repeat Hamas terror talking points. Her version of solidarity is selective, and her outrage is performative. Avowedly anti colonial in her critique of Israel, Bluen gives a free pass for the annihilist, imperialist Jihadi Moslem Brotherhood ideology of Islamist conquest.
She and her group claim to care for Palestinians, yet they remain silent when Hamas steals aid, shoots at convoys, using civilians as human shields. In short violations of all humanitarian norms and human rights. They speak of famine, but have no criticism for those who divert flour to weapons. They cite unverified statistics and ignore the documented atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Their allies mock the word “Hasbara” (advocacy) as if defending the truth were something shameful. While they are entitled to their speech, let it be known they do not speak in our name.
If SAJFP marches in lockstep with the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, the staffers at Gift of the Givers, or the ideological and lawfare architects at South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO). Perhaps they can also ask those same parties why none of them have done anything meaningful to secure the release of the deliberately starved Jewish Israeli hostages and allow the bodies of those Hostages murdered to be buried with dignity.
The South African Jewish Board of Deputies, the South African Zionist Federation, and the Office of the Chief Rabbi will continue to speak on behalf of the vast majority of South African Jews.
We do not apologise for defending Israel. We do not owe explanations for our existence. And we will not be shamed into silence by those who trade on their Jewish identity to curry favour with those who hate us.
When the history of this period is written, it will not be Jo Bluen’s letters that are remembered. It will be the courage of those who stood firm with their people, in a time when truth was twisted and loyalty was mocked.
Enough is enough.