The Right2Know Campaign strongly condemns the desecration of Muslim graves in Cape Town!
PIC: @RantsSouth
The Right2Know Campaign strongly condemns the desecration of a Muslim burial site in Cape Town on Wednesday, 30 October 2019. Gravestones were removed from approximately 80 gravesites and rearranged in the shape of an inverted cross. In a country in which for the vast majority of the population their spiritual identity is an integral part of their personhood, the desecration of the last resting places of family and loved ones is especially disturbing and an affront to the human dignity of those affected and their faith community.
The incidence of religious intolerance appears to be on the rise, as levels of intolerance generally appear to be rising too. These acts are often directed at faith communities with numerically smaller numbers – the Jewish community and the Muslim community being two of those. In 2017, a pig’s snout and blood were left on the steps and walls of a mosque in Simons Town. In December 2018, 39 Jewish graves were vandalised in Wellington in the Western Cape and in June 2019, Jewish graves in the Strand were also vandalised.
These acts all constitute a crime – malicious damage to property – and the tampering with or destruction of a grave is also a breach of the City of Cape Town’s bylaws. Where, like in the present case, the element of hatred directed at a specified (religious) group is present, it would make this act a hate crime, if the Act defining hate crimes had already been passed. That Bill has been under discussion since it was introduced in 2016.
Our Constitution allows for freedom of expression but expressly prohibits “the advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm.”
The Bill identifies more grounds for the classification of hate crimes including hatred based on ethnic or social origin, nationality, migrant or refugee status (e.g. xenophobia), political affiliation or conviction, culture, sexual orientation (e.g. corrective rape of lesbians), gender (femicide), language and (threatening to kill someone who has) albinism.
In its current form, the Bill will ensure that crimes (like assault, harassment or malicious damage to property) will attract additional and harsher sanction when motivated by hate. The Bill also provides for preventative measures to be taken to root out the thinking and attitudes that foster hatred toward each other. Our society is increasingly fractured with lots of jagged edges. Those edges hurt, maim and kill. Almost weekly the definition of hate speech is being sharpened; every week there are multiple reports of crimes made all the more heinous because of the hatred towards the victims with which they were done.
We call on the government to revive the engagement around the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill and to move swiftly for the adoption of the definition of “a hate crime”.
We call on the government to implement the range of preventative and responsive measures contained in the National Action Plan against Racism and to use that as a template to deal with discrimination also beyond racism.
We call on all South Africans to practice more tolerance both in their words and in their actions.
For further comment, please contact:
Ghalib Galant, R2K Deputy National Coordinator: 084 959 1912
Lazola Kati, R2K National Campaign Organiser (Freedom of Expression): 072 956 7753
