Thinking aloud

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Cornelius Hamelberg

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May 25, 2025, 1:17:40 PMMay 25

to USA Africa Dialogue Series

I’m glad that Baba Kadiri is back in town

I too come in peace and from the very beginning wanna appease you with this reminder from Chinua Achebe: “Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten”

(Achebe’s influence should not be underestimated : last month my fifteen year old grandson completed “Things Fall Apart” - in Swedish and was examined on it, as a Literature assignment.)

And so, with Achebe in mind, I pray that Dr Oohay and Professor Okafor do not object to or criticise someone invoking The Ten Commandments, or the Noahide Code, or Lincoln’s “ A House Divided Cannot Stand” with regard to South African matters, either telling me that it’s not “Chess” or Omaha Poker” or that it’s “colonial mentality” or “inferiority complex” to quote Honest Abe instead of conveniently quoting some other pithy quote of some praiseworthy African political scientist / anti-colonial revolutionary / freedom fighter/ terrorist etc such as Che Guevara, or an anti-Apartheid Revolutionary such as Robert Sobukwe of “one settler, one bullet” fame, house of fame, not house of shame,

“the peace of the brave,

not the peace of the grave”

as the late great Chairman Yasser Arafat used to say.

I wonder what Chairman Arafat would have been saying today about targeted assassinations, starting with the early morning gunning down of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, what he would have been saying today about Apartheid Israel, about the ongoing Genocide in Gaza, about the Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank, about Israel’s weaponization of antisemitism to bludgeon all criticism of Israeli atrocities to silence, about Trump & his buddy Netanyahu’s new oil and gas visions of the Middle Middle East, about Trump having the temerity, the audacity & the effrontery to be questioning our Brother Ramaphosa about some false allegations such as the “ genocide” of White Farmers, in the Oval Office - apparently a matter of great concern to Trump, from whom we are yet to hear as much as a timorous mouse-squeak to his buddy Netanyahu who has so much Palestinian babies blood on his hands. War criminal Netanyahu of course would object to being tried in a Sharia Court loaded with anti-Semites and viciously biassed against him, and perhaps also in the Court of the Almighty, in his own defence is gonna say that he’s innocent and his wilful slaughter of innocent Palestinian women and children that is being witnessed by the whole world, is just another blood libel , or, the ultimate excuse, like Hitler, ”the devil made me to do it”

Post-Holocaust Theology,

and I’m reviewing these lines

From Dylan’s Masters of War :

“That even Jesus would never

Forgive what you do !”

Above all, I guess the big,

nagging question is, as He

looks down and observes

what’s going on in Gaza

what is HASHEM thinking

and what is HASHEM going

to do, in the name of Divine Justice?

Sentence them all to death,

resurrect the Hooligans

and kill them once again?

Surely, HASHEM

with all His attributes of Justice

is not looking down

with favour

on the merciless

ISRAELI WAR CRIMINALS?

And surely,

they are not going to accuse HASHEM

of “antisemitism”

when HE eventually punishes them

for their crimes against humanity?

EU’s Ultimatum to Israel: “End This Madness or Face Sanctions”

I’m perplexed that the few media comments that I have read so far about the kind of reception that Trump accorded South Africa’s President and his delegation are mostly focused on the event itself and do not even bother to provide more of a background to South Africa’ s current status in the world - the brave South Africa that by experience knows all about Apartheid and perhaps that’s why it was South Africa and not the Arab League that took Israel to the ICC for crimes against humanity.

In the comments that I have read so far there is not even mention of the ANC …