Undercover Muslim exposed

WITH Yemen in the news for arguably the all the wrong reasons, Theo Padnos' book, Undercover Muslim, a Journey into Yemen, takes on a whole new significance.

Published in 2011, just about the time US-Yemeni extremist Anwar Awlaki was vaporised by a drone, Padnos (formerly Peter Theo Curtis) takes us on a richly layered and personal tour into the heart of the real Yemen and its face of Salafism.

Almost no-one has succeeded in a first-hand English narrative account of the Salafi universe in the Arab world, one tempered by the austere, reductionist and extreme credo of the discredited Saudi scholar, Ibn Abd ul-Wahhab.

The story begins when Padnos, tutoring the inmates of a Vermont prison in poetry, shows them a YouTube video of John (Suleiman) Walker Lindh, the American Talib. This kindles in him the idea of seeking out the John Walker Lindh’s of the Muslim world.

He travels to Sana’a and as an English teacher, is able to get a job at a local government funded newspaper, the Yemen Times. His plan: instead of “wandering around in amidst religious feelings I could not understand” to learn Arabic and to study Islam.

Almost in the style of Richard Burton and others, who buried themselves in Muslim characters to avoid detection on their 19th century travels, Padnos “embraces Islam” and takers on the name, Thabit. He enters a madrasah where he encounters a community of youths seeking out their Islamic utopia.

There he meets “brothers” from Nigeria, France and England, and in the intimate living space of the madrasah, is quickly exposed to their idiosyncracies – and weaknesses.

An expedition with his friends in the upmarket sector of Sana’a looking for halal chicken (in a halal-friendly 99% Muslim country) becomes an understated, if not tragically side-splitting commentary on the kind of extremism that can so bedevil the Muslim world.

In another instance, his friend Said – inflamed with the Salafi notion that all images are forbidden – tears up an election poster of President Abdullah Saleh. In a matter of seconds both find themselves arrested and flung into jail.

On his release from prison, Padnos discovers that he’s passed some kind of credibility test. With his Thabit persona and the tribal acclamation of “Bani Mattari” (a kind of qat he used to occasionally chew) he could now travel to a madrasah in the town of Dammaj to the north. Dammaj had become a Salafi hub in the Zaidi-Shi’ah Houthi region.

With the Salafis regarding the Shi’ah as unbelievers, and the Houthis perceiving the Salafis as an ideological pestilence, their mutual antagonism was easy to understand. Funded by the petro-crat Saudis the Dammaj community was luring thousands of people from all over the world.

Padnos meets Jawad from Islington, a 14-year old banished to the Yemeni desert by his Yemeni refugee mother in England. Jawad had been dispatched to the “homeland” to quell his delinquent fires, but his adventurism and urban survival instincts are very much in evidence. 

Whilst Undercover Muslim is a personal journey, the author doesn’t intrude. Padnos allows his surroundings and his characters to tell the tale. Five years after Padnos’ departure from Dammaj, the Houthis would chase the Salafis out of town. And in another turn of irony, Padnos would be captured by Jabhat an-Nusra in Syria and held for six-months before being released.  

Although written in 2006, Undercover Muslim, a Journey into Yemen, is still very much a recommended read for those trying to understand why things in Islam are sometimes the way they are.

Undercover Muslim, a Journey into Yemen is published by Random House, London.

Forget Gaza now, please remember Yarmouk

The iconic image of Yarmouk's inhabitants queuing for food.
Courtesy: UNWRA

MY headline is meant to be provocative. If you get p***** off, good. It’s because I’m equally p***** by what is currently called “Palestinian solidarity”.  For so many years “Palestinian solidarity” has remained one-dimensional and fixated on the West Bank and Gaza – as important as they may be.

But there is a bigger Palestinian picture – and my contention is that it has been ignored.  The Palestinian question is not just about Gaza and the West Bank.

According to the UN there are twelve official refugee camps (there are more) in Lebanon (where about 800,000 Palestinians still live in stateless limbo). In Egypt 50,000 Palestinians cannot register as refugees, or be granted permanent residency. There are ten official camps in Jordan. Until occupation and ISIS there were over 30,000 refugees in Iraq and nine camps in Syria.

Today there are Palestinians in almost every corner of the world. In my own wanderings I have encountered Palestinians in Europe, the US, Libya, the Far East, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Africa. The real Nakba, the real Palestinian catastrophe, is that with seven million refugees we have the biggest poltical exile of modern times.

It is for good reason that the late Edward Said insisted that the Palestinian lot be called a “shattat”, or a “scattering”, as opposed to a “diaspora”. Palestinians were not dispatched stateless and dispossessed into the world because of a divine decree like the Jews, but because of a Zionist colonial project supported by Europe that forcibly displaced two-thirds of its population.

Therefore, I insist that there needs to be a more committed activist focus on the shattat. Those ignored outside the current Palestinian-Israeli paradigm need to be included, or else the whole delineation of being Palestinian will be framed by a notion that Palestinians don’t really exist outside of the occupied territories.

When I toured Lebanese refugee camps in the 1990’s researching my book, Surfing behind the Wall, I encountered open anger from people who told me they’d been forgotten the minute Yasser ‘Arafat and the PLO had left Beirut. However, I was deeply enriched by what I heard. Lebanon was a gripping chapter of Palestinian history I would not have got in Gaza or the West Bank.

And my reporting on the Zionist massacre of Tantura in 1948 would not have been possible to corroborate via independent Palestinian sources without the work of Mustafa al-Wali in the Syrian refugee camps. The same goes for what I learnt in Jordan about the Battle of Karameh.

But the most distressing instance of what I call “geographical amnesia” about Palestinians outside of Palestine is the tragic, bloody and brutal tale of Yarmouk, once home to 150,000 registered refugees and an equal amount of poorer Syrians who also lived there.

Yarmouk was recognised as a refugee camp in 1957 after the 1948 Nakba and evolved into a suburb of Damascus. Before the Syrian disaster, Yarmouk was a thriving commercial hub with shady streets, apartments, shops, restaurants, coffee houses, mosques, schools and factories.

All this was utterly devastated by the Syrian conflict, which overflowed lethally into Palestinian life.  Politically, as refugees, the Palestinians were neutrals – non-combatants who should have been subjected to internationally protective conventions.

Pleas at the time for Yarmouk to be declared a safe zone were blithely ignored as both the FSA and Assad’s forces fought battles in and around its streets. Attempts by those in Yarmouk to guard it from the conflict backfired when the FSA took control. In 2012 Assad besieged Yarmouk, denying the passage of aid and cutting off its water, electricity and food supplies.

Yarmouk, as The Guardian put it, became the “worst place in Syria”.  Entrapped by a circle of steel, those who essentially had nothing to do with the conflict, became its worst victims as they starved to death in the rubble.

Some analysts say that Assad’s brutality was prompted by fears that Yarmouk was less than ten kilometres from his Damascus headquarters. Others that he’d been angered by Hamas leader Khalid Mesha’al – who’d lived in Yarmouk – endorsing the Syrian revolution after he’d left for the Gulf.

The upshot was that Yarmouk would be subjected to unimaginable terror as the barrel bombs rained down. When the UN finally managed to get aid through in February 2014, so bad was the situation that officials had to go for trauma counselling. 

As one UN officer described it: “it (Yarmouk) was beyond inhumane.”

What was once one of Damascus’ thriving suburbs was now an eerily hushed Armageddon-like landscape. The 18,000 remaining Yarmouk survivors queued like ghosts in a spectacle as iconic as those of the Nazi camps – an exhausted, haggard and hungry mass of humanity crowding a broken street for food.

But sadly, the image – which featured prominently on the wires – would prove to be just another chapter in the tragic, but forgotten saga of Yarmouk. That picture alone should have sent Palestine solidarity movements marching in the streets of the world’s capitals in their thousands, yet it didn’t. There was a ripple of indignation, and then nothing.

Early this year Yarmouk was visited by the forces of ISIS now aligned with Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat an-Nusra, keen to use Yarmouk as a foothold to get into Damascus. Once again, those of Yarmouk were caught in the crossfire.

For those trapped inside, it was a question of changing tormentors from Assad to ISIS and the An-Nusra front, with a 16 year-old Amjad Yaquub telling an AFP reporter that ISIS goons had played “football” with a human head – at least Assad’s bullies hadn’t done that.

Historically, Yarmouk is one of our modern tragedies – a supreme irony given that in 636 CE Muslim forces, led by Khalid ibn Walid, defeated the mighty Byzantine army at the Battle of Yarmouk. It’s a case of going from one of the highest moments to one of the lowest.

And this time there are no Zionists to blame; only Arabs, only Muslims and only us. 

Over 100, 000 Palestinians have disappeared, almost without trace, into the black hole that is now the Syrian refugee crisis. Our silence has been deafening and I would suggest that our complicity is complete.

Festival Voice of the Cape 91.3 FM, 2015

THE Voice of the Cape Radio Station annual festival has been running in Cape Town for nearly 20 years. Inaugurated as a fund-raiser, it has grown into an event of some proportion with stalls, exhibitions, tea gardens, stage events and live broadcasts attracting some 100,000 attendees each year. Pictured here is the opening night.
www.vocfm.co.za

© Shafiq Morton, 2015

Yemen: the enemy of my enemy

WHAT country in its right mind would bomb another from the air with no boots on the ground? What country would attack a people who are its enemy’s enemy to get at its other enemy?

The answer is Saudi Arabia. The invaded people are the Houthis of north Yemen. The “other enemy” is Iran. In the convoluted politics of the Middle East where the enemy of my enemy can equally be my friend, it is often difficult to understand what is really going on.

The five million-strong Houthis – who consist of some 400 tribes and who are about 40% of Yemen’s population – are the arch-enemies of Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP). AQAP are the sworn foes of the Saudi monarchy. But today, for reasons which we will explain, the Houthis are now the enemy of the House of Saud.

For the AQAP Wahhabis, the Houthis are deemed unbelievers worthy of death because they belong to a Shi’ah sect, the Zaidis. For the Wahhabis, all Shi’ah are kafir, notwithstanding that the theologically moderate Zaidi’s are deemed to be close to the Sunni Shafi’i legal school of thought.

As Saudi Arabia’s southern neighbour, Yemen has been no stranger to conflict in the modern age. Unease marked the post-Ottoman era, the British maintaining a presence at Aden in the south from 1839 to 1967. Up north in 1962 the Houthi Mutawakkilite Kingdom, the first independent Arab entity of modern times, was overthrown and the Yemen Arab Republic established.

But not after great unrest, during which Saudi Arabia and Jordan supported the royalists, and Egypt and the USSR the republicans. Egypt’s president Gamal Nasser committed over 60,000 of his troops to what became a quixotic conflict, it ultimately costing him the 1967 Six-Day War against Israel. 

At the heart of the Yemeni discord is the fact that the country was divided north-south during the Cold War with the south enjoying communist rule. The need to co-operate on oil and economic matters saw moves towards unity during the 1980’s. Yemeni unification took place on May 22, 1990, when the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen) was united with the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen), forming the Republic of Yemen.

At the helm of the new government was a strong-man from the north, Abdullah Saleh. He would stay in office until the Arab Spring. Angry Yemenis would unseat him due to corruption, human rights abuses and his alliance with the US to fight Al-Qaeda, whom he – a Houthi – secretly fostered to keep the US aid pot going.

Yemen – which is the Arab world’s historically oldest, but least developed country – is situated strategically on the south-east straits of the Red Sea. Yemen abuts the Rub al-Khali, the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert, with fertile coastal highlands to the west. The country has oil reserves, but due to political instability, they have been inadequately exploited.

With many of its young men working in the Gulf States, Yemen’s economy was bolstered by their monthly remittances. However, after the 1990 Gulf War, Saudi Arabia expelled 800,000 Yemeni workers in retaliation for President Abdullah Saleh’s refusal to support the US-led coalition.

This devastated the already fragile Yemeni economy where nearly 50% of the population hovers under the bread line. The economy would take another hit in 1994, making Yemen largely reliant on aid to survive. With its laudably humane – but financially unsustainable – policy of offering open refuge to those affected by tumult in Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Syria, Yemen hosts 250,000 foreign refugees in addition to its internally displaced 400, 000.

But whilst there are religious agendas at play, the real struggle in Yemen is a political one. What has been happening has been about power: north-south power; Houthi political power and Sunni political power; this all balanced against Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies feeling uneasy after President Obama’s rapprochement with Tehran.

Apart from perceiving Iran as a mortal enemy in terms of regional affairs, Saudi perspectives are weighed heavily by the Wahhabi creed of regarding all Shi’ah as an undesirable influence. With US capacity for intervention in the Middle East waning, Saudi Arabia perceives an urgency to become the region’s number one broker.

So when a “Shi’ah crescent” sweeps from the north into the capital Sana’a and to Aden, alarm bells will ring in the marble palaces of Riyadh. Despite Houthi leadership having adamantly denied any direct Iranian influence, the Saudi-led coalition has seen it that way.

This has prompted the Saudi-Gulf coalition bombing and support for the government of President Mansur al-Hadi.  The point here, as we’ve already mentioned, is that Yemen has no tradition of Shi’ite-Sunni sectarianism. However, outside powers have disturbingly taken sides along those lines.

This, of course, doesn’t address the delicate issue of the balance of power in Yemen, a harsh and rugged country that was historically ruled by the Houthis for centuries before the colonialists arrived. The tragedy is that prior to the Houthi uprising – fuelled by notions of being marginalised – Yemen was wobbling towards a political equilibrium of sorts, despite AQAP insurrections.

Unfortunately,  the Saudi coalition – expressing a desire that the bombing would persuade the Houthis to come to the political table again – has in the short term achieved the opposite. Instead, by hobbling the Houthis the Saudi coalition has empowered AQAP, and even the Islamic State, to rush into a vacuum once policed by the Houthis.

This does not bode well for Yemen, a starving country short of water and infrastructure that can ill afford any more calamities than it has already suffered.

Sandton moods....

SANDTON CITY, first constructed in 1973, is said to be Africa's biggest retail space, hosting nearly 300 retail outlets. Over the years it has attracted major corporate businesses, consulates and five-star hotels. The name "Sandton" is a mix of the two suburbs "Sandown" and "Bryanstown". From being a sleepy semi-rural outpost 50 years ago, Sandton has grown to become the business and financial hub of South Africa with the highest office rentals in the country.

Mandela's imposing statue in Mandela Square, a re-invented
Johannesburg away from the original CBD, first
constructed by the gold barons of the 19th century.

South African Highveld sunsets are stunning, even in suburbia.

Late autumn evening brings out blue. 

Easter egg politics in the mall. Opposition leaders
Helen Zille (right) and Julius Malema
flank President Zuma in a parody of chocolate.

Looking out over Sandton towards the west of Johannesburg.

A stunning end to the day.

The ISIS report card, an already failed state

ISIS, or to use its real moniker – DA’ISH – claims to have established an “Islamic State” in parts of war-torn Iraq and Syria to await the final days. However, genuine Islamic sovereignty can only be established if the state ascribes to the true spirit of the Shari’ah, which is governed by mercy.

For ISIS, it seems Sacred Law has meant the misappropriation of hudud, or legal chastisement, to enforce martial rule signified by brutal application.

We should realise that mass killings justified by declaring unbelief on those opposing you, and the YouTube performances of Jihadi John, are not the true face of Islam. An authentic reading of history will reveal that Islam has traditionally been hallmarked by diversity and tolerance.

From the plains of Mongolia to the skyscrapers of New York, and from the Sahara to Anatolia, Islam has never been a homogenous whole marching to one drummer. The classical scholars of Islam have never called for mass migrations to the Middle East as the neo-Wahhabi ISIS has done.

Ironically, it was Ibn Taimiyya – an iconic figure of ISIS – who ruled in his famous 12th century Mardin fatwa that Muslims could live peacefully under non-Muslim rulers who were not hostile to them.  

Diversity has been the footprint of the Muslim community for over 1,400 years.  Sustained by differing interpretations of Shari’ah by four imams of legal thought, Islam has been driven by ijtihād – the inductive reasoning – of qualified men and women who’ve applied their minds to questions of the day.

Shari’ah, the human interpretation of Qur’an and Sunnah, has been subjected to rigorous research. Fiqh, the juridicial application of Shari’ah, has been evolving for centuries. Had it not, Islam would have been fixed in a time warp of mud houses, palm fibre beds and sandals.

To understand Shari’ah we have to look at its definition. “Shari’ah”, we learn, is the pathway to a watering hole. The pathway is the following of God. The water is the Sacred Law’s intellectual nourishment and its life-giving qualities.

Shari’ah is governed by principles or goals, which are called maqasid.  The first scholar to identify the maqasid as a separate discipline was Imam al-Juwaini, who wrote about it in the fourth century after the Prophet’s (SAW) demise. Some of the prominent scholars who built on his writings, and further codified the maqasid, were Al-Shatibi, Al-Razi, Imam Ghazali and Al-Qarafi.

According to the final consensus, Shari’ah had to be grounded in six principles: the protection of Religion, Life, Mind, Family, Wealth and Character. Some jurists felt that Life took priority over Religion, but essentially, all agreed to the categories.

Basically, the above six classifications (Hifdh ul-Deen, Nafs, ‘Aql, Nasab, Mal and Ird in Arabic) are the yardstick to measure the Shari’ah-centric direction of a society – where, ironically, non- Muslim countries such as New Zealand score higher than so-called “Islamic” ones.

So, the big ask: how does ISIS – the Islamic state of all Islamic states according to its massive propaganda machine – measure up to the above?

Protection of Religion: ISIS has killed anyone not taking an oath of allegiance to its leader, Al-Baghdadi and persistently insults Judaism and Christianity. Shi’ah and Sufis (who are Muslim) enjoy no protection from ISIS, let alone Yazidis, Christians or ‘Alawites, who have all been killed for their views. ISIS scores zero in this category, as the Qur’an classifies Jews, Christians and Sabians as “people of the book”.

Protection of Life: Dabiq, ISIS’s magazine says: “Every Muslim should get out of his house, find a crusader (a Christian or Jew), and kill him. It is important that the killing becomes attributed to patrons of the Islamic State who have obeyed its leadership...” Given ISIS’s roadside executions, YouTube shenanigans and massacres, this proves that ISIS does not preserve or protect life.

Protection of the Mind: this classification has been interpreted as academic endeavour and civic freedom. ISIS’s misinterpretations of Islam and its highly selective use of a few errant scholars, is not reassuring. It readiness to declare takfir (unbelief and death) on anyone disagreeing with it, gives ISIS a zero here. It’s the Caliph’s word, or off with your head.

Protection of Family: ISIS’s mediaeval worldview with regards to slavery and the capturing of non-Muslim women (after having killed their husbands) for sexual exploitation thoroughly degrades family life. ISIS gets a zero for protecting family life for its murderous chauvinism and for the marginalisation of the mother.

Protection of Wealth: ISIS has plundered Iraq’s banks. ISIS has destroyed the homes of civilians, a violation of this principle tied to the respect of property. ISIS has smashed religious shrines, priceless archaeological artefacts and ancient churches. ISIS has extinguished the cultural, social and fiscal wealth of Syria and Iraq. A fat zero here.

Protection of Character: the character or honour of any person not seen to be embracing the ISIS brand has been besmirched, being called an unbeliever, a hypocrite, a Crusader or a polytheist. Al-Baghdadi’s concept of ird is reflected in his statement (in Dabiq) that anyone insulting a Muslim should have his arm chopped off. Another profound zero.

Of course, many of us will recognise that the above maqasid – designed for the benefit of humanity in the mercy of the Shari’ah – have as equally been violated by other leaders and major powers of the day, who professing an undying sympathy for human rights, have killed millions in wars on abstract nouns.

However, the point here is that ISIS claims to aspire to something nobler than the hegemonic powers it says it is fighting in the name of Allah. It begs the question – the ancient cliché naturally– of whether the means can ever justify the ends, or whether two wrongs ever will coalesce into being a right.

This is because the maqasid are all about the means, first and foremost. In this case, if there are no positive means there can be no fruitful end. This is something that ISIS has spectacularly failed to understand, and because of this, the so-called “Islamic Caliphate” in Iraq and Syria is already a failed state.

Xenophobia: our official-unofficial policy?

Xenophobia includes racism.
Photo Copyright Shafiq Morton

THE letter “x’’ doesn’t feature prominently in the English dictionary as the opening letter for a word. Mostly, the “x” precedes borrowed expressions, mainly from Greek. In this case the word “xenos” means “strange” or “foreign”. “Phobia”, as we all know, denotes fear.

Xenophobia is a “deep-rooted, irrational hatred towards foreigners” intones the Oxford Dictionary, whose definition I prefer over a wordier Webster. This is because my encounters with xenophobia tend to agree with the Oxford version, whose definition I would expand to embracing racism and Orientalism.

What the dictionaries can’t define, though, are the horrific outcomes – violent mob behaviour directed against those who have become figures of national resentment. Xenophobia, which targets migrant African minorities, is our great shame.

The picture of Mozambican national, Ernesto Nhamuave, clinging to life after being set alight by a mob in the Ramaphosa informal settlement during Gauteng’s xenophobic riots in 2008, is a harrowing image that has come to characterise the disturbing savagery of South African xenophobia.

Please note that I deliberately haven’t used the term “post-apartheid” to frame the discussion here; our historical human rights shortcomings did not become new ones after Madiba. Three centuries of colonialism and 46 years of apartheid are not the kind of things that disappear overnight because of a different rule book.

Culturally, we are the heirs of an entrenched, violent racial irrationality that has constantly hallmarked our turbulent history. For instance, how many of us know that the first recorded xenophobes were the early Cape settlers who used to hunt the San, or that the Adderley Street Slave Lodge was used as a whorehouse by the Dutch?

Gabiba Baderoon in her book Regarding Muslims explains that the obsession with the p-word on the Cape Flats is a direct result of black women being debased. The term “Maasbekers”, once referring to Mozambicans in our community, is as loaded as “makwerekwere”, the derogatory term for foreigners today.

Even in the stormy 1980’s, when thousands of Congolese and Mozambicans sought shelter in South Africa from regional conflict, some of our Bantustans – to which they were confined by the government – deigned not to accept them. So should it be a complete surprise that in the 1990’s foreigners would unfairly bear the brunt of socio-economic frustration?  

Due to our mining industry we have always been an economically migrant society. In the pecking order that governs being a newcomer, our recent migrants fleeing war, famine and poverty have always been the most vulnerable in the most insecure and most impoverished sectors of our society – a place where competition for scarce jobs and resources is at its most intense.

Let me provide an anecdotal example of why I would say the above. A few years ago I was teaching a journalism course at a local tertiary institution. When the topic of xenophobia came up in a discussion forum, things got very heated.           

Some students were adamant that the foreign migrants should go home. Foreign migrants took their jobs, sold drugs and unfairly occupied RDP houses. Other students argued that foreign migrants were hard-working, law-abiding and that the RDP houses had been sold to them by the very same locals who wanted them out.

As I sat watching these talented young minds let loose on each other, I began to observe a pattern emerging. It was a small class and I knew my students well.

Those who were the most “xenophobic” in debate usually came from township environments, whilst those who were more tolerant generally hailed more from the middle-class ones. It wasn’t scientific, but there was an observable trend.

It reminded me that apartheid’s group areas had been designed to confine people of colour to the outskirts of cities. The poorer you were, the more you were pushed to the edges. With populations forcibly moved, they were suppressed by a psychology of state violence that, I feel, still festers angrily within our DNA.

I tried the same discussion on xenophobia with another class, and exactly the same thing happened. I tried it the following year, and again, exactly the same thing happened. Those from disadvantaged backgrounds always expressed the most antagonism towards foreign migrants.

Fascinated, I turned to a 2004 study on xenophobia by the SA Migratory Project that told me 21% of its respondents had felt that foreign migrants should be repatriated; 64% had felt there should be restrictions. It tied up with my findings number-wise, but I didn’t encounter too much about setting – for instance, foreign migrants are not traditionally targeted in economically stable areas.

Given apartheid’s stark geography, this lack of attention to socio-political ecology surprised me. I’m no expert, but wouldn’t the institutional memory of our privilege-divided landscape be the key to addressing the challenges of xenophobia?

When you’ve been down in the dumps for so long, and your hopes have been extinguished by decades of municipal neglect, unemployment and corruption, perceiving a newcomer to be ahead of you in the queue is going to fuel resentment – justified or not.

However, what struck me further was another statistic. It showed that 87% of law enforcement officials believed 10 years ago – without any proof – that foreign migrants were involved in crime. This explained the bureaucratic disdain that is the bane of every migrant’s life in South Africa. Xenophobia – I’m afraid to say – is our official, if not unofficial, policy.

Comparisons are unmistakably odious, but it does remind me of a mentality during apartheid that a black man walking through a white area was always regarded as a potential burglar.  Even the dogs were xenophobic, and picking up their master’s vibes, would snap and snarl at any person of colour.

Of course, in trying to understand xenophobia we are certainly not condoning the rank lawlessness and ugly victimisation occurring across the country. But surely the time is ripe for our leaders, who appear to pay little more than lip service to the rights of foreign migrants, to rid themselves of the subliminal xenophobe that still lingers within us?