Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News, 2014-08-19

Tony Ehrenreich, the provincial secretary for COSATU in the Western Cape will lay charges against the Jewish Board of Deputies and its Directors and Office Bearers at the Cape Town Police station at 11am on Tuesday 19th of August 2014.

The charges include:

• SAJBD are funding and providing moral justification to the Israeli army genocide in Gaza.

• SAJBD are encouraging and recruiting young men from South Africa, to break the law and go and fight in the Israeli army.

• SAJBD acts against the stated policy of SA to promote peaceful dialogue as the mechanism to end conflict by refusing to condemn the killing of women and children in Gaza.

According to Ehrenreich the victimisation and death threats he is receiving via telephone, e-mail, Facebook and in tweets, are linked to his challenging the Jewish Board of Deputies.

“The craziest death threat via cell phone was from 0829008973 and went as follows: ‘Tony you are an anti-Semitic C*** and I am going to kill you, you piece of s**t’”.

“Whilst these threats are taken with a pinch of salt, the Jewish Board of Deputies is the ones who are portraying me as being anti-Semitic, and so they must be held complicit in these threats. Those making the threats must realise that this is not Palestine where people are not able to respond with an equal reaction to aggression,” said Ehrenreich.

Speaking to Radio Islam, Ehrenreich said he stood by the controversial Facebook posting, in which he called for “eye for an eye” retaliation against Israel for its action in Gaza and would not have phrased it differently.

“What I think is the Jewish Board of Deputies will decry and stifle any criticism. This is what they do in their propaganda and defence of the Israeli army.”

“So it doesn’t matter what was said, they would have found some angle to lay a charge against that. So that for me the wording or the specific issues are merely secondary,” said Ehrenreich.

He has denied that the post was an incitement to cause harm, or that it was meant to encourage violence against Jews.

“So what I meant was an “eye for an eye” is that there has to be action taken in South Africa that’s commensurate with the atrocities… So if my statement makes the SAJBD uncomfortable then so be it, because it’s much less to make them uncomfortable than have the killings of families in Gaza go ahead without any constraint,” said Ehrenreich.

The Jewish community responded with calls for an immediate apology.

The SAJBD is in the process of instituting both criminal and civil charges Ehrenreich, according to its national director, Wendy Kahn.

(Twitter: @Faizie143)