President Cyril Ramaphosa may have reduced foreign affairs to five sentences in his State of the Nation Address (SONA), but make no mistake, that is not an indication of the level of priority he attaches to international relations. It is through South Africa’s foreign relations that he will seek to achieve his domestic priorities.

The SONA was a clear articulation of those priorities – improving economic growth, which has been hovering around 1%, by increasing business confidence, wooing investors and expanding trade, which will translate into job creation and poverty reduction. These objectives cannot be achieved without a robust foreign policy that focuses on economic diplomacy.

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In the great journey of any earthly life there are only two fixed points, the origin and the destination. In moments of great tragedy or loss these are the two fixed points we invoke to give comfort and meaning. We invoke it with finality – God has claimed that being! We evoke it with resignation – what can you do about it? And we invoke it with gratitude – the being has fulfilled its task.

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13 Mar 2015 08:11 GMT

The beginning of March 2015 saw again the convergence of forces that employ fundamentalist religious impulses to win support for their causes. Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, in the midst of an Israeli election, came to Washington to become the most frequent foreign head of state to address the joint Houses of Congress.

He came at the invitation, not of the president of the United States, but of the leadership of the Republican Party that dominates both Houses of Congress, the party that, in response to the 911 atrocities, launched a crusade against Afghanistan and Iraq, driven in part by a right-wing evangelical zeal.

Netanyahu did not simply come as the prime minister of Israel but as the leader of the Jewish state. The recognition of Israel as a Jewish religious state has become the precondition for any settlement in the Middle East. He came to warn his hosts that their counterpart, Islamic extremism, if armed with a nuclear capacity was a danger to both the Jewish state and western Christian civilisation.

To emphasise this point, he painted the Islamic Republic of Iran as having a “voracious appetite for aggression” and said that it already controlled Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa. To stretch the point further he declared that there is no difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL).

WWII imagery

His hosts in the United States, of course, had previously obliged his warnings about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, by unleashing the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, and allowing the further occupation of Palestine, both of which created the breeding ground for all manner of extremists who operate in the name of Islam.

As if the arbitrary connection of dots was not fearful enough, he again drew on imagery from World War II and the Holocaust to invoke Jewish suffering and the initial tardy response from the West.

All of this was put at the service of torpedoing any possible positive outcome from the nuclear negotiations with Iran. The Republican Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, immediately obliged by tabling the Iran Agreement Review Act that would compel US President Barack Obama to submit any negotiating outcomes with Iran to Congress for review and approval.

Now Senate Republicans have written to hardliners in Iran telling them that no agreement with Obama would hold water. Hardliners were provoking hardliners to erode any middle ground. The table is being laid, once again, for war.

Where seemingly different, even antagonistic, messianic or fundamentalist religious impulses converge is in their predilection for conflict and militarism as the default policy response. Where the counter-instinctive is attempted, as in the engagement and negotiations with Iran’s middle ground, the goal is to replace it with an environment of perpetual conflict.

All three have the capacity for devastating violence. All three read texts literally, whether their scriptures or constitutions. All three feed on fear and ignorance and exploit an instinctive suspicion of those who are different.

In such a conflict, Israel is freed of any obligation to facilitate Palestinian statehood and, in fact, has grasped the opportunity to extend and expand Israel towards what it considers the historical Jewish state.

In such a conflict, the militarists and its attendant industry in the United States retain their hold over foreign policy and continue to demand the lion’s share of an ever-shrinking US budget.

In such a conflict, the existence, and sometimes projection, of Muslim extremist forces waging war and sowing mayhem over the Muslim world put the objectives of the Arab Spring on the back burner, and increases the currency of dictators, military or otherwise.

No monopoly on extremism

The convergence of these fundamentalisms shows us that Muslims do not have a monopoly on either fundamentalism or extremism. While the Muslim version thereof is non-state, informal and on the fringe of the global Muslim community, its counterpart in Judaism is in government, formal and mainstreamed, while in the US, the Tea Party and the rightwing Christian evangelical groups are, through the Republican Party, are in control of Congress and equally mainstreamed.

All three have the capacity for devastating violence. All three read texts literally, whether their scriptures or constitutions. All three feed on fear and ignorance and exploit an instinctive suspicion of those who are different. All three cultivate theologies and theologians espousing intolerance, cruelty and divine harshness.

Those who see the clear and present danger posed by these fundamentalisms have the obligation to be uncompromising in our opposition to them. We cannot pander to them nor be panicked by them into precipitous action. Our best response is to continue believing in the veracity of soft power and the counter-instinctive. But we must also undercut the subtle allure they have over people resulting from long memories of victimhood in the past or vivid imaginings of impending doom in the future.

But we must also be responsive to the growing discomfort many have about living in a world where faith, tradition and culture are not being reformed but denigrated and eroded, leaving people without anchors in life, and where a crucial part of their identities is lost in the great uniformity of a networked world. In such alienation do the siren songs of false certainty find an attentive audience.

Ebrahim Rasool is the former South African Ambassador in Washington, DC, and founder of the World for All Foundation.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

Originally published at www.aljazeera.com.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ebrahim Rasool

Ebrahim Rasool is the former South African Ambassador in Washington, DC, and founder of the World for All Foundation.

I observed the two terrible atrocities committed by the extremist movement, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), while in London. This may ordinarily be the stuff of headlines that impinge on your soul as all stories of untimely, random and horrific death and destruction should: They must interfere with the busy-ness of your own life.

But the actions of this particular extremist group and its antecedents have long ceased to impinge in the same way as other stories of death and destruction. This is because these atrocities and acts of barbarism are committed in my name, by people who pray like I do, eat how I eat, read the same texts and claim to follow the same God that I do. So in addition to the outrage every human being should feel, people like me — Muslims — also have to battle to ensure contradistinction with such barbarism and its perpetrators. We have to proclaim: not in our name!

This act of contradistinction says “I am different!” and “I am against!” It is an act of reclaiming the symbols, rituals and values of our faith and to deny extremists any legitimacy or even a minority share over our faith.

Contradistinction is not an act of obsequiousness, laced with apology and the reeking of guilt. The few, shared characteristics should not elicit, at minimum, suspicion of the innocent, or at worst, the equally barbarous idea of collective punishment.

Colonialism, genocide and slavery

It is for this reason that so much of the world continues to coexist with people of a particular colour, religion and origin despite their complicity in, or benefitting from, colonialism, genocide and slavery.

Also read: Without initiative, Paris attacks will change nothing

But contradistinction is necessary in a world where people are judged, not by the content of their character but by isolated characteristics. It is necessary through contradistinction to establish deeper levels of complexity and meaning in a world where people express themselves with limited characters and with a simple choice of like or not.

Contradistinction is necessary in a world where people are judged, not by the content of their character but by isolated characteristics.

Contradistinction is also crucial in an attempt to surprise victimised communities with empathy and solidarity so that their victimhood does not become testimony to the mistakes and atrocities committed by their governments or their ancestors or those with whom they share isolated characteristics.

Contradistinction is a battle with your own soul: a battle to quell your own ambiguity and ambivalence. Atrocities such as those in Paris are always stalked by the darkness of memory of historical and contemporary missteps. So when your instinct inclines towards “I told you so,” your better angels should let the light of human empathy and solidarity shine through.

Conferences are the places to unpack history, not funerals. Funerals are the places to celebrate the equal worth and value of all human beings and the sacredness of all life. Funerals are the places to reflect on the fragility of life and the pernicious must of death. Funerals are the places to mourn loss, not least the loss of our humanity.

Ambiguity and ambivalence

In the context of death and in the desire to restore the equal worth and value of all life, the headlines I have read in the course of a terrible week for humanity intensified my ambiguity and ambivalence and, therefore, the battle within my own soul: “Bibi’s Excellent Washington Adventure!” “All is forgiven, Mr Modi!” “Hezbollah bastion attacked!” and “Carnage in Paris!”

Indeed, extremism knows no religion, colour or shape. Extremism can often appear palatable because it stands at the head of a government or wears the garb of victimhood.

More often than not, extremism prefers to be free of responsibility so that its carnage is unfettered. Whatever its appearance, extremists are the alter ego of its fellow extremists, and often the best recruiters for each other.

Contradistinction requires that we must be different to, and against, all extremism. Habib Battah in a blog published in Al Jazeera, sharpens our ambivalence and ambiguity, and therefore the battle in our own souls, even further. He illustrates how the victims of the same barbarous, extremist group are not accorded equal value in the global public imagination.

ISIL attacked Beirut on November 12, killing over 40 people, and attacked Paris on November 13, killing 130 people. For Beirut, no monuments were lit up in the Lebanese colours and no major president interrupted his schedule to express outrage and condolence.

Every major global landmark was decked in French colours and, led by US President Barack Obama who decried the Paris bombings as an “attack on all humanity”, every major president rose in solidarity with France.

In contrast, the Beirut victims, living in a Hezbollah bastion, were not deemed worthy of such an outpouring of support and sympathy.

Beirut’s massacre

Some media, in their analysis of Beirut’s massacre, even suggested that it was a matter of time before such an attack would take place because of the predicament of the Shia community living in a Hezbollah stronghold. They hoped that this community would now come to question the Hezbollah mission in Lebanon.

Instead of the fulsome and justified outpouring of sympathy for the powerless victims, imagine an analysis of the Paris tragedy saying that it was a matter of time before France’s colonial and militaristic chickens came home to roost and that this was a predicament of a nation that bans the headscarf in pursuit of the strictest laicite.

This is unacceptable by any standard and should be condemned if it were ever to be used on the victims of New York, London, Madrid or Paris. But this is the tale today of two cities suffering under one barbarism.

If we are to fight extremism successfully, then we must fight all extremism, value all victims equally, condemn all perpetrators and decry all actions that reek of extremism.

Our greatest ally in the fight against extremism is moral consistency. Our greatest weakness in the fight against extremism is to favour some victims over others. The unsustainability in the fight against extremism is to nurture the cub and then to fear the tiger.

The greatest homage we can pay the victims of Beirut and Paris is to find the courage to be unwavering in our resolve to defeat ISIL and all extremism, and simultaneously to advise allies to close the factories of extremism by tempering the intolerance of their theologies and the attachment to their victimhood.

Ebrahim Rasool is the former South African ambassador to the US and founder of the World for All Foundation.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

Originally published at www.aljazeera.com.

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SPEECH BY THE AMBASSADOR OF SOUTH AFRICA TO THE USA, EBRAHIM RASOOL, ON THE OCCASION OF HIS WELCOME TO WASHINGTON DC (THE JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTRE, THURSDAY OCTOBER 7, 2010)

Members of Congress

Members of the Diplomatic Corps

Members of the Business Community both from South Africa and the USA

Distinguished Guests

Ladies and Gentleman

I want to record my thanks to the Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan, for speaking here this evening and bringing his entire delegation to this function. It means much to me, our Mission and the work we are tasked to do in the USA. I want to thank those who have sponsored this event: SAA for the initiative and the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and the IMC for their support. I want to thank also, and maybe especially, everyone here tonight at the Kennedy Centre for being here, and giving importance to our role as a Mission in the USA. Minister Gordhan has a quality that needs to be global in its application but is possessed by a few: the ability to know clearly what are the principles and objectives we strive toward, but to understand how we reach them strategically and pragmatically. I also want to express gratitude to President Zuma and South Africa – except for a few cold war warriors in the Cape – for the confidence they have shown in deploying me to probably one of the most challenging postings in the world. You would also understand if I thanked my life partner Rosieda, for making the enormous personal and professional sacrifice to accompany me on this 4 year adventure – she has faced many ups and downs with me, but has never before had to sacrifice her career and be isolated from the big support group in the form of family and friends in South Africa.

I’m indeed grateful to all my predecessors since 1994 who have had to represent South Africa in times which were more demanding than what I find myself in. They, together with all who represent South Africa in the USA today have made my task very easy, especially the Deputy Chief of Mission Johnny Moloto who have kept Team South Africa together and eased my path into Washington, with his unique combination of skills: to remain focussed, but unflustered. He was doing such a great job that I feared I would be irrelevant.

I’m certainly a most fortunate Ambassador. I have arrived here at a time of unprecedented warmth between President Obama and President Zuma, between Secretary Clinton and Minister Mashabane, and even between Ambassador Gips and myself. I must say, that prior to even becoming an Ambassador, I understood that all Ambassadors should model themselves on Donald Gips, because he doesn’t stand on ceremony, he knows the bottom-line of his job and he pursues it with passion. I am happy to call him a friend and a role model. These are not merely good relations at a personal level, but they emerge because we are operating in a time when the USA under President Obama is embracing multilateralism as the way to do business in the world today, when they are more responsive to the need to build enduring partnerships, when they engage more equally and reap the benefits increasingly of cooperation.

But I’m also fortunate because, probably for the first time, the American Nation has allowed themselves to be surprised by South Africa. The FIFA 2010 Soccer World Cup has swept away long standing Afro-pessimism as the world and Americans found in South Africa a peaceful people, a working infrastructure, fibre-optic connectivity, world class facilities, first class accommodation, spectacular natural scenery , a soulful connection with humanity, and the worlds best airline.

They found these despite the poverty, the economic inequality, the shortage of housing, the difficulties of delivering services, the preponderance of disease and inadequate schools.

It is within this contrast that our work is defined for the next four years but the conditions have never been more favourable for me to perform my simple task; to deepen and consolidate a cooperative partnership between South Africa and the United States of America. Already we share mutual priorities for good governance and democracy; for human rights and dignity; for peace and stability; for growth and development; for combating climate change and for creating a society free of pandemics like HIV and AIDS, afflictions like violence, and conditions like poverty. These will define the outcomes of my work and the work of Team South Africa in the USA over the next four years.

However, today we pursue our task from a completely different paradigm. While aid is necessary it is no longer the defining characteristic of the USA’s relationship with Africa and South Africa. More and more what we need is partnership in the search for new sources and approaches to energy. What we need is skills development that truly makes education the antidote to the legacies of colonialism and apartheid. What we need is more and more to drive down mortality from diseases like HIV and TB, but also investment in the research programs that continue to bring new tools in the fight against such diseases. What we need is to ensure that AGOA is not only maintained but strengthened, that we negotiate a viable and equal TIDCA and that we achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

These will be the tasks that will occupy the energy and resources of Team South Africa in the USA over the next four years and we will build on the firm foundations of initiatives like PEPFAR and the various cooperation agreements that already exist between South Africa and the USA.

But we pursue these objectives from a completely different starting point. It’s the starting point that says Africa and South Africa are at the table as partners in the quest for increased trade, investment and tourism with countries like the United States of America. We are reaching the point where countries like the USA begin to realise that the African economic giant is awakening.

The USA, too, have read the McKinsey Report that says that Africa’s growth rate exceeded 5% last year in the midst of a global recession, and is 2 to 3 times faster than that of the OECD countries. They too have noted that Ghana’s Stock Exchange – like its soccer team – is one of the highest performing in the world today. They too have been amazed at the fact that in 2008 Africa’s households spent a combined $860bn – more than what is spent in India or Russia – and that this is set to rise to $1.4 trillion by 2020. And they too realise that the SADC Free Trade Agreement has created a regional market of 170 million people with a net worth of $360bn.

These simple facts are instrumental in alerting a US business community suffering reverses at home but, so far, still too timid to cross the Atlantic Ocean, that indeed Africa is the frontier that they must now countenance.

All of this is a tribute to the political will of Africa’s leaders to intervene in conflicts, to embrace democracy, to build the institutions that support the Rule of Law, and increasingly to improve the ease and cost of doing business in South Africa and Africa. It is one of the great discoveries of spectators who travelled all the way to South Africa for World Cup 2010 that they found there the three ingredients that account for Africa’s success: The Rule of Law; an internationally justiciable legal system; and a 24/7 global banking system. These have changed the way the world looks at Africa and South Africa but more importantly the way Africa looks at itself.

I have come here in the year that at least sixteen African countries are celebrating 50 years of independence . 50 Years ago they responded to the call by Kwame Nkrumah for all liberation movements to rededicate themselves to the speedy liberation of their territories. There responded to the message of the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia where under the banner of the Non-Aligned movement they coordinated their support for the liberation of people in Asia, South America and in Africa. Today we can say that with South Africa’s liberation 16 years ago Kwame Nkrumah’s call has almost been fulfilled.

But 50 years later we are giving new meaning to the notion that was born then of a Third World. The notion of Africa being part of the Third World was born out of the Abbe Sieyes definition of the Third Estate that it “represents everything, but was nothing”. Today Africa represents the future and it is substantial. Today we are realising the dream of Nelson Mandela when he said “I dream of the unity of Africa, where its leaders combine in their efforts to solve the problems of this continent”.

In representing South Africa in Washington DC and standing at the head of Team South Africa in the USA we are re-engineering our work as Missions across the USA to catch the strong trade winds of this new context. Today we are working on the ratio 60:30:10. Simply put this means that economic diplomacy must consume 60% of our energy while our political and consular functions will fulfil the remainder. In a time of diminishing budgets we will reprioritise our objectives, retread our staff, and make Team South Africa capable of responding to the needs of the new era.

We will not hide behind anecdotes and generality but will set for ourselves measurable objectives and ambitious targets. We will cohere our operations and draw on the strength of everyone in Team South Africa. We will forge partnerships with all entities from Brand South Africa to SA Tourism to SAA and everyone else who share these objectives with us. We will invite Corporate South Africa to explore the opportunities of the USA with us, and we will facilitate as best we can the entry into the African market – through a soft landing in South Africa – business people from the United States who want to trade and invest and citizens who want to tour and explore.

From December 2010 for the next two years, our offices on Massachusetts Avenue will close for renovations and we will move temporarily to the Intelsat Building on Connecticut. This move is prescient because Intelsat is preparing to take South Africa into the space age and revolutionise communications on the continent of Africa with the launch of the satellite – New Dawn. What I want to conclude with is the hope that when we reopen our new purpose built offices on Massachusetts for a re-engineered Team South Africa in Washington DC, we do so with a memorial to Nelson Mandela towering over Winston Churchill and Kemal Ataturk, joining Mahatma Ghandi on the most international street in the world, and linking to the memorial of Martin Luther King Jr. in DC. I invite you to support us in this effort as a fitting tribute to the world’s oldest liberation movement, the African National Congress, who in 2012 will be celebrating its centenary. We will memorialise Nelson Mandela and celebrate the gift of a non-racial democracy by mobilising South Africans in the USA, the African Diaspora and American citizens who cherish the ideal of a non-racial, humane society. This purpose will shape an important part of the work of Team South Africa in the USA. Once again, thank you very much for being here, for listening, and for the partnerships we will forge over the next four years as we open the economic relations and recommit to the ideals of a democratic, non-racial, non-sexist, gentle and equal world.

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In a world filled with acronyms and post-modernist quests for self-identity, we have to ask ourselves: what exactly is Dar ul-Shahadah?

Shafiq morton_erDar ul-Shahadah – the safe abode of Islamic witness – is a term coined by contemporary thinkers such as Professor Tariq Ramadan and Ebrahim Rasool.

Ramadan, a grandson of the Islamic Brotherhood’s Hassan al-Banna, is the most recognised voice of Muslim Europe. Rasool, a son of the Cape Town soil and South African ambassador in the US, is a former provincial premier, parliamentarian and presidential advisor. A product of the anti-apartheid movement, he was in a group that broke away from the Muslim Youth Movement to form the Call of Islam, in the 1980s.

Directed by activists such as Farid Esack and Imam Hasan Solomon, Call of Islam believed that South African Muslims should join the anti-apartheid movement. They felt that Muslims should openly identify themselves with the objectives of the Freedom Charter. Not everybody agreed with Call of Islam’s integrationist principles at the time, and judging by recent events, when Rasool was accosted at Masjidul-Quds in Gatesville, there are, today, a confused few who still appear to have problems. But before we tackle that issue, Dar ul-Shahadah needs a little more definition.

Both Ramadan and Rasool say that as Muslim minorities in non-Muslim societies, we should have no conflict with our hyphenated existence of being Muslim-European, or Muslim-South African. Ramadan says that European Muslims have to develop a ‘European Islam’, and Rasool asserts that as South African Muslims with a 300-year legacy, we can already lay claim to a distinct community profile. Not only is Dar ul-Shahadah a safe abode of Islamic witness, it’s a space that signifies public identity and civic accountability. It’s a space where a new application of Sacred Law, the Fiqh of Minorities, shows up the exciting dynamism of Islam as it marches into the 21st century. It’s a space where if our Islam is not threatened, and if we have civic freedoms, our responsibility is to be an upright citizen. As John Donne writes, “no man is an island”.

But being an upright, participatory Muslim citizen doesn’t mean pseudo-patriotism, two-piece suits, or agreeing with the West or supporting Israel. Nor does it mean that we have to stifle critical political engagement, or that we have to apologise for our values. Far from it. It means that as franchised members of a society we’re an integral part of its diverse and challenging whole. We have to embrace it and become part of it. In Dar ul-Shahadah we live in a benign, as opposed to a threatening, space. Having travelled to the Muslim world and to Europe, I can say that in South Africa we have one of the most evolved models of Dar ul-Shahadah. Our access to government and civic freedoms are the envy of all I’ve met.

We’re one of the few Muslim minority communities who can actually have our destiny in our own hands.
I can remember interviewing Merve Kavakci, a Turkish MP. She was taken by the irony that she could wear her scarf in South Africa’s parliamentary assembly but not in her own. Then what about Switzerland, the so-called bastion of political neutrality? Are minarets banned in the suburbs of Cape Town like they are in Zurich? And the veil? Is it forbidden in South Africa? These are just some of the serious questions that those who tried to shout Rasool down during a Friday talk at Gatesville need to consider. The former premier, who was addressing the topic of Mandela Day, was accused of being responsible for legalising shebeens and gambling in the Western Cape. That the accusations were as spurious as Monty Python’s dead parrot merely being asleep, need no further comment. Nor does their disgraceful conduct in the masjid.

But what does need further comment is the hackneyed innuendo of state illegitimacy emanating from this group, many of whom were once associated with Pagad. Pagad was founded on the principle of reducing Cape Town’s pressing problem of gangsterism and drugs. But when the masses abandoned the organisation as its leadership imploded, Pagad became waylaid by a messianic obscurantism from which it has never recovered. With a reactionary leadership on the ground besieged by reactionaries from within, Pagad retreated into a ‘them’ and ‘us’ laager. We were either for or against Pagad. There were no grey areas in between. And it didn’t take too long before the association of unbelief, of being kaafir, was made on those public figures who disagreed with Pagad’s modus operandi – murder and chaos cloaked with religiosity. The calling of people kaafir enabled the inference that their blood was now ‘halaal’. Pagad’s extreme polarisation of principles (there’s only room for those Muslims who agree with them) reflects, by default, the ideas of the Egyptian polemicist, Sayyid Qutb. He wrote that there could only be a Dar ul-Islam or Dar ul-Harb, the House of Islam or the House of Hostility.

With Qutb we can immediately see the pitfalls. Where is there a genuine Dar ul-Islam today? The last Caliphate, the Ottoman one, collapsed in 1923. For most reasoned commentators Dar ul-Islam is more a hypothetical concept but in Qutb’s eyes it’s a revolutionary reality in which jihad and the overthrow of even secular Muslim leaders is compulsory for all Muslims. Military jihad may be relevant in Islam but it’s certainly not one of its pillars – something that Qutb and his ilk so strongly suggest. The greater jihad, as the Prophet (SAW) told his Companions on the way back from a battle, is the one of the human soul.
The obvious lack of a middle road here contradicts the Qur’anic ideal of ‘ummatan wasatan’ (the way of moderation) and the Prophet’s (SAW) well-known exhortations against extremism.

The grouping that attacked Rasool seems to have lost the plot of what it means to live in Dar ul-Shahadah. Do they want to impose their dictatorial, ill-formulated ‘Dar ul-Islam’ upon all of us, no questions asked? A ‘Dar ul-Islam’ where the blood of those who disagree with you becomes permissible? An ‘Islamic’ system where the ends can always be twisted to justify the means? When I think back on the infamy and terror of the Pagad era, the alternative becomes too horrifying to contemplate.

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Staff Writer

A HERD of 30 beautiful ornamental zebras galloped into Cape Town today to preach reconciliation, tolerance and peace ahead of the World Cup.
The creatures arrived in town for a project by former Western Cape premier Ebrahim Rasool and his new World for All Foundation, and are designed to catch the attention of
World Cup tourists in celebration of the “South African miracle”. The zebras will graze at sites around the city, each painted in unique rich colours by local artists and each
offering a famous quote by Nelson Mandela. Quotes such as “ Anger is a temporary feeling-you soon forget it, particularly if you are involved in positive activities and attitudes”
and “ I wanted South Africa to see that I loved even my enemies while I hated the system that turned us against one another” will be displayed. Rasool said: “ We thought that
the African zebra allows us to warn against a tendency to view everything in terms of simple binaries, in black and white. The zebra should be one of few beautiful things in black
and white, while almost everything else, especially human perspective, should learn to find beauty in complexity, in multicoloured dimension.”

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View article from Claremont Clarion Newsletter Issue 23 September/October 2010

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STATEMENT BY EBRAHIM RASOOL, FOUNDER OF THE WORLD FOR ALL FOUNDATION ON THE THREATS ISSUED BY AL QAEDA- MAGHREB

The World for All Foundation was started by former Western Cape Premier, Ebrahim Rasool, to continue a discourse he started while Premier under the rubric: ‘A Home for All”. Over the last year the World for All Foundation has carried its vision: ‘Towards a World for All – Beyond Extremisms” to many forums across the globe. It is headquartered in Cape Town.

Mr. Rasool said “The World for All Foundation is not surprised that extremists such as those in Al Qaeda would view the FIFA World Cup in South Africa as probably the most enticing platform from which to spread global fear and terror. The presence in South Africa of thousands of soccer fans, media crews and leaders from every sphere, and the fact that every match will be broadcast to every corner of the world, and that there will be unprecedented attention on South Africa, make the Soccer world Cup such an enticing prospect for extremists.

However, having participated in a Conference on Extremism a few months ago in Cape Town, especially in response to alarms being raised about security in the face of terror threats to the World Cup 2010, I am reassured that the intelligence And security agencies are very aware of potential threats, and assured us of their state of readiness to meet any such possibilities. It is unfortunate that we live in a world where we are forced to factor in precautions against extremists of any persuasion who have only threats, fear and terror to peddle.

This specific threat from Al Qaeda-Maghreb to make the world witness the bombing of the stadium in which the US plays the UK, and their delight in making the world witness thousands of people must be condemned unequivocally. There can be no ifs and buts, no justificatory case-building, no equivocation, no equivalence with injustices and wrongs perpetrated elsewhere. The threat by Al-Qaeda-Maghreb itself is an act of terror because it is meant to induce fear and divide people.

It is misguided from whichever standard one measures, especially from an Islamic standard from which they purport to speak and act. Nowhere in the teachings or history of Islam can we draw justification for wanting the kill thousands of innocent people, gathered to watch a sport, in a country that has given Muslims more rights and freedoms than Muslims arguably enjoy anywhere else in the world whether as minority or majority.

This is a moment when Muslim leaders in South Africa must take the lead in condemning the madness of the threat and the possibility of the carnage that would ensue if there was even the possibility of such terrorists carrying out the threat. More emphatically, Muslims must condemn them for even daring to don the garb of Islam to invoke the name of God, and to claim that they sow terror on behalf of all Muslims. We must also appeal to people of all faiths and cultures not to give these prophets of doom a victory by allowing fear and suspicion to emerge between us; we must unite to defeat them. Al Qaeda-Maghreb or any other terrorists must know that they will not be welcome in South Africa, especially not by the Muslims of South Africa.”

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