“It is not easy to be Jewish in South Africa,” Howard Feldman wrote for the Jerusalem Post. “Not with an African National Congress (anc) government that has institutionalized anti-Semitism. Not when the anc openly embraces the Hamas terrorist organization, which has vowed in its charter to hunt down every Jew (while hiding behind rocks) and kill them.”

Feldman is a South African Jew. He wrote that over five years ago.

In 2024, it’s even harder to be Jewish in South Africa—and everywhere else.

Last week, South Africa’s government filed a lawsuit against Israel with the International Court of Justice. That hearing starts today. The 84-page suit calls Israel’s war against terrorist butchers and rapists an exercise in “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”

Several South Africans were among the hundreds raped, tortured, killed and kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel responded to that holocaust with war. If South Africa wins its suit, Israel would have to immediately abandon its war effort, allowing Hamas to regroup and plan another October 7.

South Africa has the 12th-highest population of Jews in the world. They were attacked 182 times last year, 63 percent of which came after October 7.

On October 11, a small crowd gathered around the Jewish and Holocaust museums in Cape Town, South Africa, yelling racial epithets and chanting, “One Zionist, one bullet!” Two days later, an even larger crowd marched to Parliament, wearing Hamas T-shirts, waving Hamas flags, and demanding all diplomatic ties with Israel be severed. The government was happy to agree.

South Africa does not consider Hamas a terrorist organization. Hamas is rumored to have an office in Cape Town. It has since emerged that South Africa’s Foreign Affairs minister called Hamas officials shortly after the October 7 attacks, offering support and financial aid.

Opposing schools displayed swastikas to visiting Jewish students; the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Center was inundated with messages calling the Holocaust “a lie to kill innocent German people” and “innocent white babies.” The South African Jewish Board of Deputies received anonymous letters calling Jews inauthentic, genocidal, sexually perverted and corrupt.

“Israel is a state built on dishonesty, theft, murder, Nazism, ethnic cleansing,” one bizarre letter stated. “You are truly the most evil nation this world has ever seen.”

These would seem like ridiculous fringe sentiments if they weren’t the same ones inspiring anti-Israel, pro-Hamas marches around the world. They are the same ideas that fueled the horrific October 7 attack. Within South Africa, they inspired the government to take Israel to the International Court of Justice. Jordan, Malaysia, Turkey and the Islamic Organization of Cooperation all back the filing. The pressure is on for the rest of the world to support it too.

According to Turkey, “Israel’s murder of 22,000 Palestinian civilians, the majority being women and children, should not go unpunished in any way.”

The court of public opinion agrees, not only that Israel should be punished, but that Israel has been targeting civilians and not Hamas radicals and sympathizers. It doesn’t seem to matter that South Africa’s lawsuit is almost entirely based on misrepresented quotes and lies.

That isn’t surprising. Jews are “the one minority society loves to hate.” As such, the anti-Israel world is celebrating South Africa’s lawsuit.

But why does South Africa in particular hate Israel so much? No other nation is taking Israel to court, not even its staunchest critics. Even those who hate Israel know the allegations of genocide are false. The Palestinian population would not have tripled over the last few decades if they were true.

Why is South Africa willing to dismiss reality in order to promote hatred? It has everything to do with the anc, South Africa’s ruling party.

The African National Congress, which came to power in 1994 after decades of white minority rule, has close ties with the rabidly anti-Israel Palestine Liberation Organization (plo) and other pro-Palestinian groups. The anc’s anti-Israel rhetoric dates back to its founder, Nelson Mandela, who famously called for an end to apartheid by any means necessary, including armed struggle against Israel. Mandela also visited Palestine several times and met with Yasser Arafat, the leader of Fatah, one of the plo’s main factions. Mandela’s successor, Jacob Zuma, also expressed sympathy for Hamas.

The anc has used anti-Israel rhetoric to gain support from and manipulate South Africa’s black and Muslim populations. The message is clear: Whites are bad, and the West is evil.

This distracts from the fact that South Africa is on the verge of collapse. Half of its electrical power output is offline. Its once powerful economy is failing. Its violence and corruption are getting worse.

Despite all these problems, South Africa still finds time for hate. Instead of bettering itself, it pours resources into a false claim against the most oppressed and abused people in history. It condemns Israel while supporting Russia’s war on Ukraine and the authoritarian regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, all while failing to address—and even causing—a myriad of problems at home.

This is because South Africa is a nation transformed by communism. The anc received weapons and training from Communist Russia and Cuba. When Nelson Mandela, a proud Communist sympathizer, became president in 1994, South Africa’s precipitous decline began.

Now it is on its deathbed, engaged in a battle to distract from its impending demise.

Communism transforms successful republics into failed states. It deflects from its own failure by attacking all forces that oppose its existence. The Trumpet warned about this in 1997:

Disaster looms huge on the horizon of South Africa, as godless communism has its day bringing an anc-dominated government to power with the apparent full endorsement of Western society!

Communism is a cancer that destroys from within. The rampant poverty, crime and violence in South Africa are proof. But it does more than that. It transforms and corrupts the minds of its adherents.

It leads people to believe and fight for lies, even as the source of these lies slowly kills them. America is on this same path.

“[We] are witnessing the fall of South Africa as a prelude to the accelerating descent of the United States and of the once great British company of nations,” our e-book South Africa in Prophecy states. “South Africa is the first major domino to fall in what will become a free fall into slavery of those once mightiest nations on Earth!”

As thousands march against Israel in support of terrorists on American soil, it is clear that communism infects America. Crime, violence and corruption are increasing. If they go unchecked as in South Africa, America will become a nation on the verge of collapse.