On Tuesday, Adriaan Basson, editor in chief of News 24, expressed “renewed gratitude that in South Africa the ‘rights of journalists, authors and artists to write, say and sing what they like’ is an established right in ‘our maturing democracy’.”
Basson is correct, too, that we should “never ever take our open democratic spaces and debates for granted”.
One of the most important tracts on the constitutional right to free speech in the United States, where a century of litigation tested its first amendment to the limit, is aptly entitled “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A biography of the First Amendment”, by Anthony Lewis.
The First Amendment famously prohibits Congress from creating legislation that limits free speech or freedom of the media. Though over decades its meaning and restrictions have evolved. But the general idea was well expressed in one famous case where the courts allowed supporters of the US Nazi Party (National Socialist Party of America) to march through a town in Illinois, Skokie, in 1977, even though a significant percentage of its residents were Jewish survivors or family of victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
Before South Africa embraced the constitutional protection of freedom of expression (as defined in Section 16 of our Constitution), free speech had a torrid time, largely due to the authoritarian diktats of the apartheid state.
Easily chilled
In 1987, I was lecturing constitutional law at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Since we then had no democratic, rights-based Constitution of our own, we offered our students a glimpse of future freedoms by quoting the history of the fight for free speech in the US, among other places.
One of the most important warnings even back then was that “freedom of speech is very easily chilled”.
At the time, free speech was very much in South Africa’s deep freeze. Yet universities and the key newspapers pushed the limits to allow a diversity of views to be expressed. However, as the adage says, ‘hard cases make bad law’.
1987 was also the year of a white general election; the University of Witwatersrand “de-platformed” (as we would call the withdrawal of an invitation to an invited speaker today) the most famous liberal politician who opposed apartheid from within the confines of the white parliament, Helen Suzman.
As a member of the faculty, I protested this decision with the university authorities. I was both offended by the decision in principle and also had a partisan interest. Suzman and I were both public representatives of the same movement, the Progressive Federal Party (PFP). It was unavailing. The official view was that since Suzman was a candidate in an election which denied the vote to the majority, no one should be entitled to speak on campus during a campaign.
In 1993, in her memoirs, In No Uncertain Terms, Suzman wrote of the incident:
Thirty years on, as Basson reflected in his opinion article, we have enshrined the concept of freedom of speech subject only to limitations which include not extending this right to those who advocate “hatred based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm”.
This has not, though, encouraged some universities to offer platforms or confer honours today to those who champion unpopular causes. Israel, par excellence, is the country and cause that provided the litmus test here.
So, for example, two senior academics at the University of Cape Town, Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings, wrote in Daily Maverick recently how a recently retired law professor, Anton Fagan, was denied emeritus status because of his outspoken criticism of calls for an academic boycott of Israel and due to a provocative exam question he set. They note that this refusal of emeritus status, usually and automatically conferred on retirement, is the first such example in more than a century, notwithstanding his impressive academic record.
Helen Suzman was a staunch champion of human rights. She also was a secular Jewess who like most, but not all, of her community, was a strong Zionist, a believer in the idea of a Jewish homeland situated in today’s Israel.
After Suzman retired from public life, a foundation named in her honour was established to promote her values and causes.
The Helen Suzman Foundation (HSF) hosts an annual lecture in her name which, according to its website, seeks to “honour not only Helen’s extraordinary contribution to public life in Parliament [but] to uphold the values she brought to public life outside Parliament”.
Controversy around Imitiaz Sooliman
Controversy now engulfs the person chosen to deliver the Helen Suzman lecture on 11 November, Dr Imitiaz Sooliman, founder of the NGO, Gift of the Givers.
Dr Sooliman and Gift of the Givers’ prodigious works of charity and upliftment were commendably cited by the HSF for their “positive impact impact… to alleviate the plight of the most poor and vulnerable in South Africa”. This is incontestably correct and is four square in the spirit of the late Helen Suzman’s life and work (she died in 2009).
The HSF felt obliged to reference this matter by way of a statement on 27 October, though the public works of both Sooliman and his NGO occasioned no push back. Nor any controversy.
The HSF statement, though, then went on to defend its choice of speaker due to what it termed “serious allegations” levelled at Gift of the Givers and Dr Sooliman linking him to the Muslim Brotherhood’s Al Aqsa Foundation and accusing him of funding terrorist organisations.
The HSF chairperson Kalim Rajab and its executive director Naseema Fakir then advise: “He has assured us and stated publicly that the allegations are untrue and without substance.”
On this issue the statement and its signatories are both explicit and provide some detail.
Curiously and coyly, the statement then refers vaguely to “certain of Dr Sooliman’s recent public statements” without any elaboration nor any rebuttal on his part. Though hinting at disquiet on this topic, the foundation advises: “We would like to make it clear that the HSF has an unequivocal stance against antisemitism. We are also committed to the principle of free speech.”
Why, the casual reader might enquire, do freedom of speech and antisemitism and the HSF’s determination to proceed with the lecture all appear in the same statement?
This is not to be obtained from this document but from outside it.
Nearly a month ago, Dr Sooliman was recorded saying: “Every time we protested; the Zionists were too clever. They were acting with impunity, they put fear into you. They put fear into corporate corporations [sic], into universities, into communities, into political parties…They run the world with fear. They control the world with money. And every time they say something, they terrify you with ant-semitic. But I’ve got a message for them: find a new narrative, this one is dull, boring.”
This ancient stereotyping by Sooliman is itself clearly antisemitic. As one of Suzman’s relatives pointed out to me: “In his remarks, he tries to defend his anti-Zionism from antisemitism but falls into one of the most well-worn antisemitic tropes.” It probably also falls outside the protection offered to free speech in our Constitution.
David Baddiel in his important short work “Jews Don’t Count” elaborates on this trope, from a left-wing perspective at least:
It is clear into which circle Sooliman, on his own references, places the Jews. It is also on the record that Helen Suzman did not believe in deplatforming controversial speakers. She might though have found the choice of the speaker selected this year to honour her legacy a curious one.
However, to quote the title of her own biography, she would have called out the casual or intended bigotry of Dr Sooliman “in no uncertain terms”.
