So I’m listening to NPR this week and it is celebrating a new documentary, Plot for Peace, about a mysterious French businessman who plays a big role in overthrowing apartheid in South Africa. And as soon as I heard it, I thought, I bet this “French businessman” is Jewish.
None of the major media on this film mention the businessman is Jewish. Here’s a snip of the synopsis on plotforpeace.com:
THE UNTOLD STORY BEHIND HISTORY, a well-kept secret behind the world-wide icon : Nelson Mandela’s release was a Plot for Peace. For the first time, heads of state, generals, diplomats, master spies and anti-apartheid fighters reveal how Africa’s front line states helped end apartheid. The improbable key to Mandela’s prison cell was a mysterious French businessman, dubbed “Monsieur Jacques” in classified correspondence. His trade secret was trust.
The film tells the story of Algerian-born French businessman Jean-Yves Ollivier’s involvement in Cold War-era African parallel diplomacy, the signing of the 1988 Brazzaville Protocol and discussions surrounding the eventual release of Nelson Mandela. Using archive footage[2] from apartheid-era South Africa alongside interviews from Winnie Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Denis Sassou-Nguesso and Mathews Phosa, Ollivier (previously unknown and referred to as ‘Monsieur Jacques’)[3] is revealed as a key architect of the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola and a 1987 prisoner-exchange programme involving six African nations.
The Guardian story does not mention that Monsier Jacques is Jewish.
Did Monsier Jacques play a big role in overthrowing apartheid because he was French or because he was a businessman or because he was Jewish?
The Jewish Chronicle in London wrote:
The film charts the steps this Algerian-French Jew took in persuading South Africa’s various neighbours to agree on a mutual peace as part of the process to end apartheid…
When he arrived in South Africa in 1981, he felt he was seeing a community that was “wrong” in its political approach “and, of course, racist. Many felt excluded and that they had no choice but to fight. I decided I could, and should, help them understand that they had a future.”
Did his Jewish values influence his later peace-making efforts? “Honestly? No. These are human values. I am not following overtly Jewish values.” Ollivier prefers to consider himself a believer “in man, in humankind. I believe that God will be there to help me.”
It was South African Jewish businessman Ivor Ichikowitz who “found” Ollivier. Ichikowitz has spent five years collecting South Africans’ stories, in a Steven Spielberg-like remembrance project called the African Oral History Archive, which documents the apartheid period. Ollivier, a previously little heralded figure, came up in a lot of testimonies. “Jean Yves was able to understand the individuals on a personal level and he could co-ordinate the various personal interests. For him, failure was not an option,” says Ichikowitz.
Ichikowitz believes that, as with Holocaust testimony, the details of who did what in the dismantling of apartheid is critical for the education of a new generation…Both men are certain that Israel can learn from the experience of Africa.
This matter of fact analogy between the Holocaust and apartheid is breathtaking. Apartheid had no genocide. How could anyone compare the two? Well, to those who want to remake white societies into weaker, multi-racial, multi-cultural societies, the Holocaust is the great weapon to show how evil the goyim are when they feel any sense of group solidarity.
For the average non-Jewish white person, the word “Europe” conjures up images of the place that built cathedrals, developed democracy, ended slavery and led civilization for the past 600 years. For left-wingers, however, Europe conjures up images of the Holocaust, pogroms, Crusades, persecution and bigotry. Europe was a bad place in this point of view and needed to be remade into something multi-racial and multi-cultural so that it would be less threatening to Jews and other minorities.
South Africa was similarly a bad place from this particular point of view because it was a land dominated by whites, who tend to evil when they feel solidarity with their fellow whites. So the country had to be destroyed and remade into something multi-racial and multi-cultural so that minorities could feel more safe there.
Don’t Jews fear blacks more than whites? No, because Jews don’t regard blacks as having the brains to be more than a nuisance.
I can’t think of any Jewish organization that supports the interests of whites. At best, Jewish groups are indifferent.
Are there Judeo-Christian values? Maybe, maybe not, depending on if the concept of “Judeo-Christian values” is good for the Jews. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. Or more precisely, sometimes the term is pleasing to some Jews and offensive to other Jews.
