Ebrahim Rasool.
In an article published on BizNews on 18 March, RW Johnson excoriated Ebrahim Rasool for writing for Al-Qalam, a newspaper he described as “antisemitic”. Johnson wrote: “It is quite normal to find articles in Al-Qalam referring to ‘the filthy Jews’ and asserting that the Jews are ‘a filthy nation’.”
I have been the editor of Al-Qalam since 2005 and can attest that Al-Qalam has never published an article using this kind of obscene language. Anyone who searches for these terms on the paper’s website will find that they simply do not exist in the paper’s digital archive. Anyone with the time to go through the paper’s hardcopy archive will find the same.
There are only two credible explanations for Johnson’s wholly false and defamatory statement. He is either deliberately lying or he is expressing an assumption, a deeply prejudicial and Islamophobic assumption, that he has not bothered to measure against reality. Either way, Johnson’s attack on the paper is as outrageous as it is untrue.
There are two problems here. The first is Johnson’s well-documented habit of making statements for which he can provide no evidence, statements that are often plainly untrue. In a 2014 piece in Africa is a Country, Benjamin Fogel provided a useful explanation of Johnson’s modus operandi.
As Fogel noted, Johnson’s lack of regard for the basic rules of evidence is well known. The Guardian described Johnson’s 2009 book, South Africa’s Brave New World, as “a record of pretty well every piece of unsubstantiated gossip to have circulated South Africa’s rumour mills”.
In his review, the late and great novelist André Brink wrote that Johnson “often quotes himself, or hides behind cop-out phrases such as ‘It was generally assumed …’, ‘There was suspicion…’, ‘Causing some to believe…’ or, scattered throughout the notes, unsubstantiated references to private information or private sources”.
Johnson’s wild and wholly unevidenced allegations in the book included the claim that the ANC murdered Chris Hani, along with this bizarre statement: “Not only was Mugabe one of the few people given a forewarning of the events of 9/11, but he had actually allowed al-Qaeda militants to fly into Zimbabwe in the week following 9/11 to get fitted out with false Zimbabwean passports.”
The source for this extraordinary claim by Johnson is, of course, a footnote citing Johnson.
In another important piece in Africa is a Country, published in 2022, Ronnie Kasrils provided a detailed destruction of Johnson’s vicious and typically unevidenced character assassination of Joe Modise, which Kasrils accurately described as “speculative, fanciful, and libelous storytelling”. Johnson went so far as to assert, without evidence, that Modise and Thabo Mbeki are the prime suspects for Hani’s murder.
Johnson’s slander of Modise was often taken as credible by journalists and academics despite his lack of evidence for his claims. It was a highly effective piece of character assassination. The damage done to Modise’s reputation, and to our understanding of our history, by Johnson is only now being reversed by Kasrils’ excellent new book on Modise, a book written to set the record straight in the wake of Johnson’s calumny.
Johnson’s fabrications have not just been called out by the left. In a 2022 piece on PoliticsWeb, Helen Zille, writing in response to Johnson, made it clear that his critique of her also had a very casual relationship with facts and evidence. She wrote: “I refuse to be accused of doing things I have never done, or of believing things that have never entered my head, or of devising strategies that are figments of a critic’s imagination. This is a game that I won’t facilitate.”
The second problem that we need to address is BizNews’s lack of concern for facts and evidence, and its habit of publishing conspiracy theories and giving a platform to people like Johnson, whose record of making public statements that are either plainly untrue or for which they can provide no evidence is well known.
As much as decent people find the far-right politics of BizNews odious, it does have a constitutional right to, for instance, run a fawning interview with Gary Player in which Player describes his close friendship with and admiration for Donald Trump. However, BizNews does not have a right to, as it does, regularly publish conspiracy theories while claiming to be a serious publication.
GroundUp has done an excellent job in tracking BizNews’s repeated publication of right-wing Covid conspiracy theories. It also regularly gives space to other kinds of conspiracy theories, such as climate denialism, and the hallucinations of AfriForum, among others.
Johnson is not the only well-known conspiracy theorist fawned over by BizNews. Tim Noakes gets the same treatment. Anyone who has the stomach to look at Noakes’ timeline on X will see a constant flow of far-right conspiracy theory. Noakes seems to like BizNews as much as it likes him. In a 2021 article titled “Tim Noakes and BizNews are spreading dangerous falsehoods”, GroundUp showed in detail that a BizNews article tweeted by Noakes was “a shoddy and unsophisticated piece of conspiracy theory peddling”.
Johnson’s casual defamation of Al-Qalam in BizNews is not a random falsehood resulting from a general lack of regard for facts and evidence. It is a very specific allegation that is plainly Islamophobic. The idea that all Muslims and all Islamic thought is antisemitic is a standard trope of contemporary Islamophobia. It is also, of course, routinely used to slander critics of Israel, including principled people of all religions as well as secular people.
Antisemitism is a real problem in our society, and it doesn’t just lurk at the margins of society. For instance, on 24 March, Noakes shared an antisemitic tweet from the notorious antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke. Anyone who is genuinely appalled by antisemitism would have been outraged by this, but we are unlikely to see an attack on Noakes by Johnson in BizNews.
Al-Qalam is a progressive publication that was banned for a short while in the 1980s for its support of the anti- apartheid struggle. Editors before me, among others, have included Na’eem Jeenah, Professor Simphiwe Sesanti, Dr Nisaar Dawood and Fuad Hendricks, all of whom have made a significant contribution to South Africa’s public life. Ambassador Rasool has a relationship with Al-Qalam that spans decades.
It is not an accident that Al-Qalam was founded in Durban in 1973, the year of the Durban strikes. The paper came out of the same creative milieu in Durban, often referred to as the “Durban moment”, associated with great figures like Steve Biko and Rick Turner. The Durban moment generated the Black Consciousness Movement and the nascent black trade union movement. It was a moment of left political innovation committed to democratic values.
The Durban moment also reinvigorated the Christian tradition, producing clerics such as Barney Pityana and the late Rubin Phillip, who would go on to play significant roles in the anti-apartheid movement. Phillip, an under-recognised but great figure, would remain committed to supporting grassroots political organisations well into his retirement.
Al-Qalam also emerged from this political ferment as an anti-apartheid and left project within Islam, a democratic project that remains committed to the values of the left — values that, as is the case around the world, include a simultaneous rejection of antisemitism and principled opposition to the oppression of the people of Palestine.
When black journalists and black-edited publications make statements that are untrue, they are excoriated. It is striking, though, that BizNews can publish outright conspiracy theories and fawn over figures such as Johnson and Noakes without being subject to the same excoriation. Facts and evidence matter, and we must all be held to the same standards.
We need to acknowledge that Johnson and Alec Hogg, his editor at BizNews, are not credible people.
Dr Imraan Buccus is senior research associate at Auwal Socio-economic Research Institute, a research fellow at University of the Free State and editor of Al Qalam.
