A PRESS STATEMENT

 

The Jamiatul Ulama South Africa (JUSA) is alarmed at the recent turn of events where Islamophobic tendencies and anti-migrant sentiments are coalescing into a new form of hate, now calling for the de-legitimisation of Palestinian solidarity.

 

Reports of the emergence of spiteful anti-Muslim graffiti in a North Beach neighbourhood, and viral social media clips attempting to undermine and debase South Africa’s Palestinian solidarity, have come to light to indicate and define a growing campaign of hate. JUSA rejects all such vicious notions.

 

The struggles of humanity are not competing footnotes in separate books. They are chapters in the same story. It is a story of hegemony over the dispossessed, of land stolen, of people displaced, of dignity denied. It is a system that creates a hierarchy of humanity.

 

The African migrant that crosses the Limpopo River and the family that is shunted from one refugee camp to another, whether in Rafah or around Goma are caught in a supremacist complex that treats certain parts of humanity as an expendable subclass.

 

In all the struggles of the Global South, to stand with one is not to negate the other. Rather, it is to affirm the principle that protects all of the marginalised masses, in their shared quest towards real emancipation.

 

One need not choose between caring for South Africa’s poor and standing with Palestine. It is not a political position. This is a logical trap, camouflaged in the language of concern for the vulnerable, designed to manufacture communal discord and silence dissent.

 

Solidarity is driven by a noble urge and a deep sense of moral clarity that a heart that breaks for a child in Gaza, does not break any less for a child in Khayelitsha. Solidarity is never a finite resource, reserved only for a selection of concerns. A voice raised against a brutal occupation recognises it as part of broader struggles such as unemployment, landlessness, or inequality at home.

 

Madiba recognised and declared that South Africa would not be free unless Palestine was free. His was the understanding that the struggle for liberation of the Palestinian people mirrors South Africa’s own fight for freedom and equality, both against the same forces of global domination and subjugation, always reproducing themselves to push back and reclaim what they reluctantly yield to anti-colonial campaigns.

 

Weaponising local grievances in order to suppress international solidarity does not translate into the championing of the cause of South Africa’s poor. What is does is to take away our energies from challenging the structural conditions such as global riba-based financial systems, and exploitative economic practices that impoverish communities, both here and abroad.

 

The South African Constitution which clocked 30 years, few days ago, was born from the very solidarity the world once showed us, enshrining human dignity as universal; not conditional; not geographic, and not selective. To honour that legacy is to refuse all hierarchy of suffering.

 

Released by:

The Executive Committee
Jamiatul Ulama South Africa

 

25 Duh al Qa’dah 1447 / 13 May 2026