US President Ronald Reagan is attributed as once wisely noting that: "Politics is simple yet hard to do." Even more so in the international arena, as South Africa's contortions in the United States on the bilateral relationship revealed. Last week, International Relations Minister Naledi Pandor was in the news for two apparently related reasons. Domestically, she [...]
Last Friday evening, I attended a dinner in Cape Town addressed by the writer and associate editor of the conservative magazine, The Spectator, Douglas K Murray, and author of the best-seller "The Madness of Crowds". In an interview there with Gareth Cliff, Murray suggested that South Africa's case against Israel on genocide charges before the [...]
The death last week of pioneering sociologist Professor Edward Webster occasioned distant memories of my 20-year-old self as a student in his industrial sociology class at Wits University. Eddie as he was universally called, was a Marxist academic, as were many in the faculty - but you did not need to drink his ideological Kool-Aid [...]
Recently in Parliament, in answer to a question by DA MP GR Krumbock, Naledi Pandor, minister of international relations and co-operation, stated that "South Africa does not consider Hamas" - perpetrator of the mass slaughter of civilians in Israel on 7 October, "as a terrorist organisation". In her answer, Pandor claimed that SA’s stance is [...]
