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Johannesburg - The SA Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) said it had laid criminal charges of hate speech against ex-University of Witwatersrand Students Representative Council president, Mcebo Dlamini, for calling Jews "devils".
"Dlamini’s comments are the latest in a series of offensive public statements that he made about South African Jews over the past nine months," SAJBD communications head, Charisse Zeifert, said on Monday.
It considers the comments he made on radio station, Power 98.7, during a discussion facilitated by Shaka Sisulu on June 23, racist and defamatory and laid the charges at the Norwood police station last Friday.
The new complaint will be added to an existing one with the SA Human Rights Commission, which was based on him proclaiming his admiration for Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler on Facebook earlier this year.
In the Facebook post he wrote, "I love Adolf Hitler... There is an element of Hitler in every white person".
In the latest incident, Sisulu had Dlamini on the line to comment on his belief that there were irregularities with the way his case was handled before being kicked out as SRC president by the university.
He had faced a complaint over another matter in February and University of Witwatersrand Vice Chancellor Adam Habib had him removed over the Hitler comment.
Challenging academics on Hitler
Dlamini explained that when he "broke the issue of Adolf Hitler", he wanted to challenge academics to think beyond what was being written in newspapers.
"It is an issue of transformation itself. We are not ignorant of the human atrocities that Adolf Hitler committed over there."
He said that after apartheid, black people, and especially black youths, were not free.
"As black people we reconciled alone, the white community didn't reconcile. I brought Adolf Hitler to prove that. What happened?
"Adolf Hitler died 80 years ago, they have not forgiven him even after they were paid - the Holocaust, the Jewish Holocaust - they were paid repatration [sic], but the black people who were killed by Adolf Hitler were not paid."
Black people forgave "before they even apologised".
"When students in Cape Town said Rhodes must fall because he stood for no good, white students and white professors there, including the house negro, the colonised intellectual posing as a vice chancellor in University of Free State said that we must preserve history. 'Let us not wipe away history in as much as this man was bad, but there were elements of him that were good'. Why are they not doing the same thing with Hitler?" asked Dlamini.
'Freaks of nature'
He wanted to know why there was no statue of Hitler in Poland, Germany or Austria, but statues of Jan van Riebeeck, Rhodes and "all these freaks of nature who are the same as Adolf Hitler".
He continued: "By the way, they are worse than Adolf Hitler because Adolf Hitler only killed bodies."
He said initially the post itself was comparing Nazi Germany and "apartheid" Israel.
"And there were a lot of comments there. My love of Adolf Hitler was in the middle of about 20 comments, when a black student said, 'but white people hate Adolf Hitler when they are doing exactly what he is doing to them'. I said 'I love AH'.
"Then the Jewish community just took just that, posted it all over South Africa here. Now I said to myself 'thank you very much for exposing your hypocrisy, and I am going to tell you exactly who you are'. That's what I am doing right now.
"They are devils... [inaudible] for nothing. They are hypocritic [sic], like Chancellor Adam Habib, they are uncircumcised in heart."
Dlamini said he was not aware of the criminal charges the SAJBD had laid against him, but his lawyer would establish whether anything he said qualified as hate speech.
"I will respond to them in court," he said when asked if he stood by his statement, or would withdraw it.
He is still waiting to hear the outcome of his appeal over his axing.
He said that the university admired people like mining entrepreneurs Barney Barnato and Harry Oppenheimer, or political activist David Webster, but not Robert Sobukwe who was a lecturer there, or Nelson Mandela.
His campaign was about true transformation for black children and students, he said.
