South Africa’s Clerics of Hamas
This was a cleric in South Africa openly saluting Hamas, the same Hamas that burned children alive, that raped women, that dragged grandmothers into tunnels on October 7.
Written By: Thabo Khumalo
On September 27 in Cape Town, a familiar theatre troupe assembled outside Parliament. The Muslim Judicial Council, the Al-Quds Foundation, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and a sprinkling of religious leaders mounted their soapboxes once more, calling for sanctions against Israel. With rehearsed piety, they invoked genocide, apartheid, and even God. What they revealed, however, was not moral courage but moral bankruptcy.
Let us start with the words of Maulana Abdul Khaliq Allie, President of the United Ulama Council of South Africa. With cameras rolling, he declared:
“We salute Hamas. We salute the jihad movement. The only language that the Zionists have ever understood is a jihad and resistance movement.”
Pause there. Read it again. This was not a slip of the tongue. This was a cleric in South Africa openly saluting Hamas, the same Hamas that burned children alive, that raped women, that dragged grandmothers into tunnels on October 7. The same Hamas that hides behind hospitals, schools, and mosques, then cries “genocide” when its human shields die. If ever there was proof that the anti-Israel lobby in South Africa has abandoned all pretence of human rights, it is here.
And yet this incitement was not rebuked by his fellow speakers. Not by Reverend Frank Chikane, who thundered about Zionism being a “racist system.” Not by convicted fraudster Alan Boesak, who turned his fire on South African voters, demanding they punish the DA for daring to question his hysteria. Not by the Hamas hosting Anglican church’s Archbishop Thabo Makgoba, whose representative recited lines about FIFA boycotts and flotillas, as though football leagues and publicity stunts were the moral frontlines of our time. No, every one of them stood shoulder to shoulder with a man praising a designated terrorist organisation.
This is the company they keep. This is the moral sewer they have chosen to wade in.
It gets worse. Among the organisers was the Al-Quds Foundation South Africa. They parade themselves as a registered NPO with a logo of the Dome of the Rock. Yet that is the very same logo and branding as the Al-Quds International Foundation, a so-called charity that has been sanctioned by the United States and multiple other governments for being a Hamas-controlled front. On October 4, 2012 the U.S. Treasury confirmed that Al-Quds International Foundation operates as a Hamas vehicle for terror finance, laundering money under the mask of humanitarianism. The South African branch, by name and by logo, sits within the same ecosystem, run by figures who overlap with the also-sanctioned Al-Aqsa Foundation.
So let us state it plainly: when South African clerics gather outside Parliament to denounce Israel, they do so under the banners of an organisation whose international parent is a Hamas conduit. This is not grassroots solidarity. It is Hamas franchising.
They parade under banners of “justice” and “human rights,” yet the mask slips with alarming ease. They can quote Nelson Mandela till their throats run dry, but they omit that Mandela, unlike them, recognised Israel’s right to exist and rejected terror. They wax lyrical about international law, but ignore Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket fire, its war crimes, its charter that calls for Jewish extermination. They invoke apartheid to evoke Pavlovian outrage, yet distort their own history. Chikane even dared to say South Africans “missed genocide by inches.” Such narcissism cheapens both apartheid’s victims and the very concept of genocide.
The “genocide” claim is their favourite bludgeon. They lean on the discredited June 2025 UN report, itself fed by NGOs now sanctioned by the United States for ties to terror groups. When America, Britain, and Europe recoil from these NGOs as Hamas mouthpieces, South Africa’s clerics rush forward to embrace them. They do not care that their evidence chain is compromised at the root. They care only for the headline: “Israel commits genocide.”
And so they gather, week after week, to chant and posture. They produce memoranda with all the gravitas of a student union resolution. They deliver them to low-ranking MPs for photo opportunities, pretending Parliament itself has taken note. They drag football clubs off pitches, as though rushing from Hanover Park to wave placards is proof of a people’s will.
But strip away the theatre, and you are left with something darker. You are left with the chilling sight of South African religious leaders saluting Hamas in public. You are left with bishops, pastors, and imams lending their pulpits to a terror cult. You are left with the grotesque spectacle of men who claim to speak for morality but have chosen to glorify barbarism.
The truth is plain: this was not a march for human rights. It was a march for Hamas. Every chant, every speech, every sanctimonious quotation was cover fire for a terror organisation that butchered innocents.
And that, in the end, is why they must be called out with brutal clarity. Because South Africans deserve to know that their clerics are not saints of justice but cheerleaders for jihad. Because invoking Mandela while saluting Hamas is not moral leadership but moral fraud. Because repeating “genocide” does not make it true, but it does reveal the depth of their dishonesty.
There is a line between solidarity and complicity. On September 27, outside Parliament, South Africa’s so-called moral leaders crossed it. They will never live it down.
To my dear friends of Eretz Yisrael, please be careful out there.
Thabo Khumalo is a concerned South African citizen and writer, focusing on analysing politics from a rational perspective.