Mmusi Maimane’s trip to Israel has upset the ruling party, according to a report in this newspaper (13 Jan).
A DA spokesman said there was never an instruction by the President that Maimane should not visit Israel, which in the democracy that we live in makes sense – how can our government instruct anyone from visiting anther country - don’t we enjoy freedom of movement enshrined in our constitution?
But whilst our President has said on countless occasions that he together with his government support an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, how can this come about without constructive engagement and seeking of facts on the ground, something that Maimane seems to be doing. Or are our rulers and their supports afraid to discover the myth that they have been fed by the likes of those “progressive” bodies whose only agenda is Israel’s destruction.
Opposing official visits to Israel must fly in the face of our President and other government official’s numerous visits to Russia, who are occupying parts of Ukraine and who have been and are still conducting their murderous campaign of vicious bombing of schools and hospitals recently in Aleppo killing thousands of people including children, and still continue to bomb other parts of Syria where the death toll ably assisted by Russians jets has reached almost half a million people.
Opposing official visits to Israel must again fly in the face of those official visits to China who have occupied Tibet for over 50 years.
But these critics of Israel don’t seem to have any problem hobnobbing with the likes of Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, a wanted war criminal responsible for the death of almost a million of his countrymen.
Some of the world’s worst human rights violators are regular hosts to our ruling party officials in the likes of Cuba, Iran, China, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan but such visits don’t seem to bother those hypocritical critics of Israel.
Allan Wolman