Pretoria - The South African Students Congress (Sasco) has accused Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng of abusing his position to support the violation of human rights by Israel.
“As students of South Africa, we cannot be silent when the head of one of our arms of State abuses his position to support the violation of human rights in another country,” said Sasco president Bamanye Matiwane.
“As a progressive student movement that values deeply the principle of progressive international solidarity, Sasco calls on all students and progressive forces in civil society to support the call for the chief justice to retract his statement of support for apartheid Israel.”
Furthermore, the students' organisation demanded that Chief Justice Mogoeng should recuse himself from the case pitting trade union federation Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) against the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), which Sasco said is before him at the Constitutional Court “as he is clearly compromised and cannot provide an unbiased judgment in this case”.
Chief Justice Mogoeng was this week in a line-up of The Jerusalem Post’s “exclusive webinar”, which also featured South African Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein and was moderated by the Jerusalem Post’s editor-in-chief, Yaakov Katz.
Among other remarks, Chief Justice Mogoeng, a staunch Christian, said during the Jerusalem Post virtual conference: “The first verse I give is in Psalms 122 verse 6, which says: ‘Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, they shall prosper that love thee.' Also Genesis 12 verses 1 to 3 says to me as a Christian, if I curse Abraham and Israel, the Almighty God will curse me, too. So, I am under an obligation as a Christian to love Israel, to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, which actually means the peace of Israel. I cannot, as a Christian, do anything other than love and pray for Israel because I know hatred for Israel by me and my nation can only attract unprecedented curses upon our nation.”
"I think as a citizen of this country, we are denying ourselves a wonderful opportunity of being game-changers in the Israeli–Palestinian situation. We know what it means to be at loggerheads, to be a nation at war with itself,” Chief Justice Mogoeng said.