South African Jews for a free Palestine and its poster girl Kelly Joe Bluen

From a comfortable Johannesburg middle class Jewish background, Bluen has emerged as a key person occupying the position of ‘Solidarity and Media Liaison Organizer at South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP), a hardly illustrious organization.

The SAJFP is a close sister organization of the South African BDS movement and international anti-Zionist organizations. It officially takes an anti violent position but this does not extend to the atrocities of Hamas against Israelis on 7 October 2023 and the abduction, torture, starvation, and murder of hostages which are continuing violations to present day.

It actively partners with South African Palestinian organizations including Muslim Students Association and the Palestinian Solidarity Association. These bodies are aligned with the Muslim Judicial Council of South Africa whose president Sheikh Riad Fataar has recently declared “I am Hamas”. The Western Cape Branch of the ANC was quick to endorse him.

The SAJFP enjoys cordial relations with Gift of the Givers a disaster relief and medical assistance philanthropic fund headed by Islamist Dr Imtiaz Sooliman.  He cannot even acknowledge the humanity of the Israeli victims of 7 October and is contemptuous of the grief and trauma of Hamas’ victims. “Israel likes to play the Sad Sack like they are the victim,” he said.  Several medical centers and clinics in Gaza are funded and assisted by Gift of the Givers, but have also been used by Hamas as facilities. This organization can be seen at protests such as Glencore, a supplier of coal to Israel. It mattered little that Israel provided Gaza with electricity from its coal power stations.

It declares strongly adherence to the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam (repairing the world) which embodies social action and the pursuit of social justice. . But unlike  mainstream South African Jewish organizations including ORT-JET, the Union of Jewish Women of South Africa and  Tikkun Africa (an organization recognized by Nelson Mandela who served as Patron in Chief) which actually contribute meaningfully towards social uplifting and poverty alleviation, and do so without  fanfare and grandstanding , SAJFP makes a lot of noise and achieves nothing but inciting hatred against both Jews and Zionists in South Africa.

It rejects  Zionism as a form of settler colonialism and acknowledges  the  “vast tragedy of the Nukba”.  As for settler colonialism it would be well to take heed of the International Court of Justice itself in  the dissenting minority opinion of Judge Sebutinde who wrote   “the fact is that, as the League of Nations acknowledged, the Jewish people are not settlers or colonizers on their ancestral land; they are, in fact, indigenous people in that land.”

While professing to be non violent,  SAJFP does not balk at verbal abuse . In  August 2024 the SAJFP released the following vicious rant against Chief Rabbi of South Africa, Dr Warren Goldstein:

“Goldstein has used colonialist language and racist dog whistles. He refers to Israel and its defenders as ‘civilized nations’ with ‘liberal Western values’ fighting the ‘forces of barbarism’ using this framing to justify the murder of more than 27 thousand Palestinians, almost half of whom are children and the starvation of hundreds and thousands more. This is the same rhetoric that has been used over millennia by colonial empires that dispossessed and subjected peoples they considered ‘uncivilized’. “

Clearly people such as these inhabit a dark moral universe where honor, respect and truth have no place. Insults, slander, and unfounded character attacks rule the day. Yet they call themselves Jews. There is little  Jewish about them except perhaps their birth.  The very notion of civilization is disparaged as a colonial construct despite the historic and universal truth that the moral law of the Jews handed down by Moses is the bedrock of civilization not only within the Judeo Christian tradition but among most peaceful nations of the world.

SAJFP poster girl, Bluen is an academic and  holds degrees from the University of Cape Town, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Peking University. Currently she is in  pursuit of a doctorate from the LSE in genocide studies: an examination of colonial and racist narratives in international criminal justice and its impact on the International Criminal Court. She supports the idea that the legal structures fail to grasp the complexities of genocidal violence which has its roots in colonial plunder by the Western powers. In her worldview, genocides not rooted in Western colonialism, such as the slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks, ethnic cleansing of the Kurds, persecution of Christians by Moslems seem to escape her attention.

We need to go down her rabbit hole only for as long as it takes to share several ripe Bluisms to readers.

Bluism # 1:

“Free Palestine. End this genocide. Abolish ‘Israel’ and the Zionist entity and its white internationalisms of genocide settler colonial inter-nationalisms. All power to those who resist colonial fascism in all its connected instantiations” [5 August 2024].

Read together with Bluism # 2:

“Abolish the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. Abolish the South African Zionist Federation. They do not speak for Jews, but for Zionists. They are dangerous, Islamophobic, racist and anti-Semitic” [2 December 2023].

And Bluism # 3:

“I am committed to working towards broader notions of wartime sexual violence ….beyond narrow narratives of gender violence in war, which can exclude a lot of victims and survivors of sexual and gender based violence”.

Such are her mendacious and incendiary social media posts. In Bluist La-La Land the South African organized Jewish community is wicked, racist and yes, antizemitic. Bluen resides in a world which can be characterized as Alice in Wonderland meets Julius Streicher.      

Bluen enjoys friendly personal relations not only with BDS leaders, but with Mia Swart, anti Israel South African law academic. Swart is a protegé of Professor John Dugard, an architect of the genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa in the ICJ. Bluen also enjoys close collegial relations with  Palestinian academic, Noura Erekat, niece of Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. Based in the US, she blames Israel for 7 October, 2023 and condones the actions of Hamas. Her reports alleging war violations by Israel are influential with official US policy makers.

Monumental bigotry and moral delinquency from a highly educated person is not of course unique. The Nazis had among their ranks many intellectuals, academics, and scholars. Contrary to everything she believes about herself, Bluen has placed herself as an implacable enemy not only of her own Jewish people and the State of Israel, but of humanity and decency. The ancient wisdom of Aristotle should  be taken to heart by her and her self-righteous cohorts. In his Ethics he explains that even if we differ about the ends which we consider good, the exercise of the virtues is concerned with means. In other words we are still accountable and morally responsible for our conduct in pursuing what we consider noble goals.

Presenting herself as a just and humane fighter against colonial domination, Israel apartheid, and genocide by Israel in Gaza, rejecting Zionism as a form of settler colonialism and acknowledging the “vast tragedy of the Nukba”, Bluen blithely and hypocritically disregards egregious violations of human rights in South Africa as well as gross humanitarian crises in other international conflict ravaged countries.

Bluen and her self-proclaimed Jewish social justice warriors pay scant attention to the gruesome social evils of gender-based violence, rape, and murder in  South Africa. The statistics are horrifying. Over the last quarter, 966 women were murdered, there were 1 644 attempted murders of women and 13,757 women assaulted with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. Reported rape cases saw an increase to 9,309 cases in just three months.  In addition the police report 6,198 murders across the country (an average of almost 69 murders per day). Contact crimes show an overall increase of 2.6% in South Africa. Some cigarette box calculations reveal that at the present murder rate, South Africa can expect a yearly murder death toll of at least 24,792 (excluding cases that are not reported). A toll that creeps very close to the genocide narrative falsely claimed by Bluen, Hamas and the SAJFP.

Instead, she has warmly welcomed PFLP terrorist and hijacker Leila Khaled on her visit to South Africa, treating her as a heroine. At time of writing there is a controversial proposal to rename Sandton Drive as  Leila Khaled Drive. Of all the streets to rename, it bears mentioning that the US Consulate is located in the self same street.

One may pause to reflect on the lofty avowed goal of SAJFP which is freedom for Palestine. Freedom and self determination are certainly not synonymous. The odds of Palestine enjoying freedom even if it becomes an independent sovereign state are tenuous indeed. The territories of Palestine are by no means the most unfree among Israel’s adjoining countries according to a world survey by Freedom House. Egypt and Syria score worse. Even if Israel is blamed for the lack of freedom in Palestine, there is little reason to believe that democracy and human rights will flourish there one day. True political freedom is at best a subsidiary goal of Hamas and its supporters, a significant sector of the Palestinians, rather the primary objective is fostering hatred and supporting the destruction of Israel as a Jewish State.

It is a shameful spectacle watching well educated but destructive Jewish people paying lip service to Jewish values while publicly and aggressively insulting and denigrating the Jewish community. They humiliate themselves and serve as useful idiots for the enemies of Israel who care little or nothing for Jews and Judaism. Indeed the core ideology of Islamists is the destruction of Judeo Christian civilization worldwide and replacement with Sharia law under a Muslim Caliphate.