EDITOR – I am neither Jewish nor a supporter of the current Israeli government, but I found the headline in a daily newspaper on 11 February regarding the call by the student representative council of the Durban University of Technology to deregister Jewish students nothing less than blood-chilling.
The words that immediately sprung to mind when I read it were 'ignorance', 'racism', 'anti-Semitism', 'race hatred' and 'fascism'.
It is deeply shocking that this sort of sentiment is expressed by a student body in this country, and it is probably the first time that there has been a public call of this nature, anywhere in the world, since 1938 when Nazis began the process of eradicating Jews from any form of public life in Germany, as a precursor to murdering them.
If the authorities at the DUT do not take an immediate, hard-hitting public stand against this madness, and charge those responsible with inciting racial hatred, reporting them to the Human Rights Commission and suspending them pending disciplinary inquiries, then the DUT will be complicit in this outrage.
Richard Lyster
Human rights lawyer and former commissioner on the SA Truth and Reconciliation Commission
