Anti-Israel activists have attempted to intimidate South Africa’s Jewish community, “trying to abuse South African history and the South African story for [its] own narrow purposes,” the national director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, told the Algemeiner in an interview published Wednesday. Wendy Kahn also accused anti-Israel activists of strategies that have “blatant antisemitic manifestations.”

She said recent incidents, such as a protest outside the South Africa-Israel Expo in March in which activists carried signs saying “Israel is the devil,” threw rocks and broke equipment, have proven that the movement calling for a boycott of Israeli products, culture and academia is “becoming intimidatory and threatening to South African Jews.” …

“There strategies have ended up in blatant antisemitic manifestations,” said Kahn, noting BDS campaigners’ recent hosting of Leila Khaled — a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine involved in two airplane hijakings — at the Durban University of Technology.

“The next morning there were calls to deregister Jews from the university,” she said, referring to a letter by the Progressive Youth Alliance asking the school to expel Jewish students. She said annual Israel Apartheid Week demonstrations, which were held this year from March 2 to 5, have compounded hostilities against Jewish students.

Kahn said that the effort to equate the anti-Israel boycott movement with the boycott that helped bring an end to apartheid in South Africa is based on a “superficial” understanding of the situations in each country.

Kahn’s comment about the anti-Israel boycott movement echoed those of South African parliamentarian Dr. Kenneth Meshoe, who was quoted by Beth Kissileff in Inside the Artistic Boycott Movement, which was published in the March 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine.

Many have written to debunk the factually inaccurate analogy between Israel today and South Africa, including Dr. Kenneth Meshoe, a member of the South African parliament, who wrote in the San Francisco Examiner that “Israel cannot be compared to apartheid in South Africa. Those who make the accusation expose their ignorance of what apartheid really is….The misapplication of the term apartheid makes a mockery of a grievous injustice and threatens to undermine the true meaning of the term.”

[Photo: WorldJewish Congress / YouTube ]