Dr. Mamphela Ramphele with some of Tickeyline villagers, who she worked with while at Ithuseng, the health project she started in Lenyene. Photo courtesy of Dr. Mamphela Ramphele. (courtesy:https://carolinanewsandreporter.cic.sc.edu/if-not-us-who-how-one-woman-fights-for-social-and-political-equality/)
Hassen Lorgat – a member of the Peoples Media Consortium, writing in his personal capacity
The recent suspension of SABC anchor Juliet Newell following a heated on-air exchange with Dr. Mamphela Ramphele has sparked controversy, but instead of it winning support for ending the war on Palestinians, it seems to have become an end in itself.
Focusing on this incident fails to see the underlying causes of chronic underfunding of the public broadcaster which compromises the integrity of the messaging. This incident, as important as it is, is thus a symptom of a deeper crisis at the national public broadcaster. The crisis includes: shortages of staff, appropriate training, and so on. The crisis is underscored by the deafening silence surrounding a major ethical scandal: the South African Jewish Board of Deputies’ (SAJBD) sponsorship of undisclosed media junkets to Israel for major publications. I have tried to find out why the public broadcaster, and a few other media houses, eNCA and Primedia for instance, have stayed away from a story that is out there, and in the ambit of the Press Council of South Africa.
Rolene Marks, national spokesperson of the South African Zionist Federation made remarks about human suffering at the public broadcaster, and the form and nature of human suffering that cannot go unchallenged. In a media release she backs the interviewer and reiterates that the Holocaust is a unique – historical crime where 6 million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany. By comparing it to other cases, she argues it is malicious, distorts history, and harms the Jewish people. As a redress measure the Zionist Federation demands that the SABC not to bow down to outside lobby groups and reverse the suspension of Juliet Newell and apologise to her. They also demand an independent review of the incident.
A call for an independent Media Ethics Inquiry – for different reasons – was made by the Peoples Media Consortium, and predates this incident. Foremost in their minds was the under-reporting of the violations of the Press Code by The Sunday Times, The Citizen, and Biznews. These media houses failed in their first reports and, until they were challenged, acknowledged that they were funded by the affiliate member of the Zionist Federation, the South African Board of Jewish Deputies (SAJBD). All these papers have confirmed that the media junket to Israel – like that of the MPs – was paid for by affiliates of the SA Zionist Federation.
Revisiting the scene:SABC holocaust and genocide reporting
In case you missed this. The SABC interviewed the chair of the Desmond Tutu IP TrustDr. Mamphela Ramphele.She was interviewed by news anchor Juliet Newell, and the video can be seen here. Dr. Ramphele stated that the images from Gaza of the emaciated Jews who survived concentration camps during the Second World War. Not long into the interview, Juliet Newell loses it and takes issue with the references to the Holocaust, asking:
“Do you not see this as provocative?” Ramphele responded firmly:
“The Holocaust happened, and it will continue to happen in different forms… Do we have to wait for millions to die to call this what it is? If we wait for six million to die, then humanity has no right to call itself human.”
In the conversation Newell asserted: “I’m not quibbling over whether this is worse than the Holocaust. What I’m saying is there are two completely different issues and I think it’s mischievous of you to bring that up and use it against this. You know it’s provocative.”
This exchange raises a number of issues such as: what is a genocide, (is it different from the Holocaust) and how the media must report it. Or should the Holocaust and Genocide Centres in Natal and the Western Cape engage with this unfolding humanitarian tragedy. Other commentators on this incident tend to centre focus their ire, narrowly around the guests likening the Gaza famine to the Holocaust, whilst another headlined their critique by labeling Dr. Ramphele in their headline as a Holocaust denier.
I will not go into the specific shortcomings of these articles, suffice it to say that others like M Gessen, who in their New Yorker article In the Shadow of the Holocaust (December 2023) was attacked for daring to compare the ghettos of Poland to that of Gaza. M. Gessen wrote:
“For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”
The point here is that hasbara will contest every point, and we will not achieve anything by going toe to toe on all the points raised. What is indispensable is that we must begin with South Africa’s historic case before the International Court of Justice (Dec 2023/ January 2024). In this case before the ICJ, South Africa pointed out, and warned, about the starvation programmes, ethnic cleansing and the genocidal intent by the Israeli leaders. Despite this, a few contemporary holocaust educators still cling to this view that what is happening is not a genocide or that it needs the time of history to determine this.
In early August the the Durban Holocaust and Genocide Centre, explained why it does not do contemporary reflections on genocides thus: “The problem with contemporary issues [is] they’re not history yet … but in time, we’ll have a distance to do the critical history,” Less than two weeks later, a member of South African Jews For a Free Palestine (SAJFP) criticised the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre for their failure to speak out against the genocide in Palestine. She argued that to remain silent on the horrors unfolding in Gaza, the centre had “flagrantly misappropriated the memory of our ancestors who resisted, fled and died in the Nazi Holocaust in Europe to participate in the most egregious genocidal complicity by genocide denialism.”
These conceptions that a genocide can only be determined after it has happened is reactionary in more ways than one.
The genocide denialists took another knock, when most recently, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, passed a resolution on 31 August 2025, that Israel is committing a genocide. The IAGS is a global non-partisan organization that promotes research and teaching about the nature, causes, and consequences of genocide. They make the critical point that these deaths / killings are not just the tragic consequences of war but it is being perpetrated with the necessary “genocidal intent” (mens rea). The South African government before the ICJ (2023/4 ) warned this when the war on the Gaza strip was barely 3 months on. They called for intervention from the court and the international community to heed the warning signs, that is, the hateful statements from high-level Israeli officials that had a clear intention to make Gaza uninhabitable.
Long before them, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, named after the lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” emphasizes that prevention of genocides their mandate. In their 11 Principles for Genocide Prevention, they assert that genocide prevention must be a grassroots effort, driven by ordinary people and international cooperation.
I now want to address the supposed confusion about the concepts of holocaust and genocide. The offence that Newell felt about Ramphele’s provocation is misplaced. The holocaust was not about Jews only or particularly, nor can it be owned by Jewish people, let alone Zionists. I will return to these points later suffice to say that the genocide is about all humans as I will explain in this necessary detour about the SABCs failure to report on media corruption fully, and the issue of media sustainability.
The Primary Violation: The buying or the sponsorship of The Sunday Times, The Citizen and BizNews
The case I am referring to is a matter before the press ombuds awaiting final adjudication on the nature and form of the apologies rendered, and the redress measures sought.
The Sunday Times, The Citizen and BizNews as indicated, did not declare their sponsorship by an outside lobby group, and some aspects of the complaint are still playing out at the Press Council of South Africa. Simply put, I amongst others, believe that the violation of not declaring external influences on the media is basic journalism 101, and there is no way that it could have been an error. In the complaint, I argued that there was a conspiracy amongst the three media houses not to declare their sponsorship. It is not a small error but a major transgression of the press code, something the former Press Ombud who wrote the journalists ethics bible DECODING THE CODE (adopted 2019) called a scandal.
These media houses remain opposed to the redress measure of holding a public meeting to discuss what went wrong and how it may be corrected in the future.
The Secondary Violation: The Silence of SABC, eNCA, and Primedia
By staying silent on this the SABC, eNCA and PriMedia and others do not educate us the readers, viewers and listeners about the ethics and standards of news media. They could be accused of being complicit in these atrocities and genocide.In the face of such silence twoleft-leaning media groups, the Media Review Network and the Peoples Media Consortium, have called for a fully fledged inquiry into media ethics because of this and other cases where journalists were apparently subject to external pressures in their work.
It is important to bear in mind this timeline. Many active listeners and callers to the SAfm stable of the SABC, have found that interventions by screen-callers could amount to a form of censorship, when they call in to raise the issue of the SAJBD sponsorship. . One community presenter from Voice of the Cape, called the SABC’s coverage as sanitized reporting.
I have been trying to understand the silence or the black-out because it speaks to underlying and unresolved issues of the power and influence of the Zionist lobby, as well as the commercial pressures an ailing public broadcaster has to endure. Whilst we are discussing the minimizing of the reporting on the genocide in Gaza, we must recognise the courage of many individual journalists who continue to speak out organizations’ collaboration. Many, sadly go with the line of their bosses and their sponsors / funders/ share-holders.
We must continue to support these brave journalists who hold themselves accountable. After World War II, post Nuremberg, where soldiers were tried for war crimes – for “just following orders” – but they were compelled to exercise their conscience and a duty to do what’s right. Similarly, journalists must not blame their editors or bosses – for not speaking out, ethically. If they remain silent, they could be accused of complicity.
SABC – our broadcaster?
The SABC, as South Africa’s largest public broadcaster, has a crucial duty to be transparent and hold all power accountable. This role is especially vital to amplify the marginalised voices in the country and internationally, including the genocide in Gaza, Palestine. To do this, it must be able to report accurately and effectively on Palestine, but is undermined by several structural problems:
- Lack of Protection: Journalists have no strong democratically worker-controlled trade unions, and have been weakened by industry retrenchments and mergers in the media sector.
- Chronic Underfunding: The SABC is only 55% funded for its public mandate, creating a R7.03 billion shortfall which in this period seems unlikely to be met because of the declining license fees collection owed to the sabc. This makes it 80% reliant on advertisers, leaving it vulnerable to corporate influence and accusations of being “captured” by private capital.
- Lobbyist Influence: The pro-Israel South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) and its members have been historically active in shaping public sentiment and reducing criticism of Israel.
- Weak Political Opposition: The declining power of democratic unions and the Left Progressive Forces has reduced pressure on the government to act more decisively in solidarity with Palestine and other international solidarity causes they hold dear. The ANC has been forced to go into a Government of National Unity, which has not been good for these causes.
The Media Junket
This piece will focus not on all these underlying causes but will hone on the ideas on media integrity and sustainability of the public broadcaster. Simply put, we are talking of funding, and how the lack of sustained arms length funding compromises media integrity. This played itself out in the case about the SAJBD media junket as reported (Elitsha News and MuslimViews) and later a number of community media organisations specialising in radio and television.
Local activists on some radio stations have called in, in an effort to raise these issues with the public. What is clear, but under-discussed is the lack of moral, political and financial infrastructure by the SABC to discuss Palestine without fear of favour. Does this explain why the SAJBD story or any robust discussion on their role in the genocide could not be discussed? I will now return to explore the uniqueness of Jewish suffering claims made by Marks and Newell.
“Uniqueness”- Genocide is a Lesson for all – Not a Trophy
On Monday August 25, 2025, I and others wrote to the SABC about their silencing of voices on the matter of SAJBD sponsorship and the necessity of public discussion on it. The idea was that it was clearly newsworthy but was ignored by the Public Broadcaster.
On Tuesday August 26, 2025, the SABC interviewed Desmond Tutu IP trust chair as we have discussed above.
On 29 August the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (Cape Town) in their media release argued that “It is unacceptable that a public broadcaster would consistently adopt language that mirrors Israeli talking points.” Other groups later including the ANC Parliamentary Study Group through its Whip, Comrade Imraan Subrathie regarded the breach as severe and demanded swift action by management.
On 29 August 2025, the SABC issued a statement regarding the interview with Dr. Ramphele by Newell. The broadcaster explained the suspension as necessary to uphold its editorial policies and maintain public trust. This action is being opposed by the SAZF.
I want to return to the key arguments that underlay these exchanges as I have already stated why these discussions are not taking place in the SABC in particular.
Holocaust: Not a privatised concept
Marks reiterates Newell’s assertions of the uniqueness of Jewish suffering and by doing so undermines her argument. Her words confirm an insult to others: “The Holocaust was a unique historical crime, the systematic extermination of six million Jews, and millions of others, by Nazi Germany. Comparing current events to the Holocaust is an extreme and malicious claim, designed to harm and hurt Jews, and to inflame prejudice.
They misrepresent Dr Ramphele who recognises the tragic, brutal Nazi atrocities were a lesson for the whole world, and are captured by the phrase “Never Again.” I quote her:
“The Holocaust happened, and it will continue to happen in different forms…”
The killing of any human is an affront to all our humanity and seeking to private or set a hierarchy of suffering is counter-productive.
By privatising this concept we undermine other people who were genocided, such as the the genocide of the Herero and Nama, the Armenians genocide, Rwanda, Cambodia, Srebrenica, and not to forget those who perished in the transatlantic slave trade and the indegenous peoples of what is now called the Americas. The slave trade involved the capturing of Africans and their brutal enslavement, and subsequent dehumanization. The numbers of those stolen from Africa ranges between 12-15 million Africans. Millions more, it is reported, died during the horrific Middle Passage across the Atlantic, and if they survived that, they had to die or survive the indignity of the American plantations.
The holocaust predate the Nazi genocide
The term “holocaust” (from the Greek holokaustos, meaning “burnt offering”) predates the Nazi genocide. It has historically described large-scale atrocities, as when Winston Churchill referred to the Armenian mass killings as an “administrative holocaust.”
This history contradicts claims that the term should be used exclusively for the Jewish experience. Such a view also undermines the Genocide Convention’s purpose: to prevent future atrocities by recognizing that genocide is a recurring crime, not a unique, one-time event.
Churchill’s own record demonstrates this callousness towards non-European life, most notably through policies that exacerbated the Bengal famine of 1943, leading to over three million deaths where his inaction in the mass starvations was harshly criticised. His use of the concept however can be traced back to 1929 and to the mass killings of Armenians by Turkish forces as a holocaust thus: “massacring uncounted thousands of helpless Armenians, men, women, and children together, whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust—these were beyond human redress.”
The Holocaust not only about Jewish victims of the genocide
The innuendo that the Holocaust refers only to the genocide of Jewish people is factually incorrect. While the Nazis sought to eliminate all of European Jewry, murdering six million, they were also systematically targeting other groups.
This narrow interpretation of genocide and victims also undermines the purpose of the Genocide Convention, which was created to prevent future atrocities by recognizing that genocide is a recurring crime, not a one-time event.
As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum points out: “As many as 500,000 Roma and Sinti individuals were murdered by the Nazis. Other groups were also targeted… People with disabilities, Soviet Prisoners of War… gay people, socialists, communists… were oppressed and imprisoned in concentration camps, where many died.” The Holocaust was a catastrophe, or shoah, for multiple groups, not one.
It is worth pointing out that the term “holocaust” is the English version of Hebrew “Shoah” which is used to describe the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany during World War II. According to Aboutholocaust, both terms “a theological or cosmic dimension” and as I explain elsewhere, “Holocaust” are derived from the Greek word for destruction by fire. “Shoah,” on the other hand, has biblical roots in the “term “shoah u-meshoah” (wasteness and desolation) that appears in both the Book of Zephaniah (1:15) and the Book of Job (30:3).” For the record, this comes not from the Leftist groups but is mainstream aboutholocaust.org is a project jointly founded by the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
EDITORIAL power and share-holders
These examples I have spoken to above are meshed up with the need for media sustainability that is at arms length. The management says that “The SABC’s Editorial Policies are aimed at building trust with the public and in ensuring that our content, in all its formats, continues to resonate with the prescripts of our public mandate, and more so in providing universal access to credible content.” I agree but want the SABC to look at other forces that also undermine public mandate and public trust such as the failure of their journalists – after being alerted to these stories – to write or talk about it.
When The Citizen, BizNews and The Sunday Times took the junket from the SAJBD it was the editors who failed to declare that they were funded by a lobby group. I know that I had said that they had 90 years of journalistic experience but I had omitted to include Brendan Seery (deputy Editor) who was involved in communicating The Citizens new position on junkets. This brings the collective experience of their editors to well over a hundred years and this is affirmation that they did not make a mistake. They conspired with either each other or with the SAJBD to keep this matter silent until they could not do so any longer.
So, our crisis in the media is not the juniorisation of the media, but the lack of sustainability to provide an infrastructure where truth, accuracy and justice reporting can flourish. The riveting Newell-Ramphele TV show has revealed much for us to learn. This action of Newell could have been avoided if the SABC workers, management and the board had undergone human rights training workshops or briefings on the Genocide Convention and related matters following the South Africa’s ICJ case in December 2023 /January 2024. If workshops were convened, then Newell broke ranks and did not keep the line and composure befitting their role as African journalists.
The SAZF wants an investigation and we agree that it is necessary. It will allow us to put both public and private power under the microscope. It will also remind us about our constitutional and public mandate to speak truth to power, especially during a live-streamed genocide, and not be cowed by lobby groups or financial interests.
To end on a hopeful note. Both words, in the the Jewish Shoah (catastrophe of the Holocaust) and the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe of their displacement in 1948) mean catastrophe. They are recognized as historical tragedies and alongside other genocides and history confirms this. The key take-away is that the Palestinians were not responsible for the Jewish Holocaust but have nonetheless become “the victims of the victims,” in the words of Robert Fisk. People-driven action the Lemkin Institute advocates for grassroots education and organising to avert genocides, and I agree.
