South Africa’s former Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor is one of the towering moral figures on the international scene today, who led her government’s filing of the lawsuit against Israel’s campaign of genocide in Gaza at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Now chair of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Pandor continues energetically organizing governments and citizens to defend the basic human rights of all people. Last Friday, July 18, on Nelson Mandela Day, Pandor inspired diplomats at the United Nations to become “good troublemakers” against the injustices of the world, as Mandela had been. Eight days earlier, she addressed the opening panel of the July 12-13 Schiller Institute conference in Berlin, and urged participants to ensure a “massive growth” of the International Peace Coalition, which the Schiller Institute had initiated; the IPC, she argued, must be “an important contributor to the development of a new global partnership and a fresh approach to multilateralism.”
On July 20, one Renaldo Gouws, a two-bit South African publicity-seeking, rage-ball “influencer,” whose term as MP for the pro-British Democratic Alliance was cut short in 2024, when exposure of his white racism made him too great a liability for even that party, posted a crude smear job against Pandor on his YouTube channel. Gouws charges that Pandor is a pro-terrorist “Israel-hater” and Iran-supporter, who is “using the Nelson Mandela Foundation to fight Christianity/Judaism.” He threatens that the foundation will lose all international credibility, should Pandor remain there.
Gouws’s evidence of Pandor’s “anti-Judaism” is her opposition to Israel’s genocide; and of her purportedly fighting against Christianity, the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s initiatives to free “Christian Zionists” from their racist ideology. One such initiative of the foundation was to co-sponsor a “Critical Dialogue” with the deeply-Christian Rev. Munther Isaac, the Lutheran pastor from Bethlehem, Palestine, known for his intensely moving 2023 ["Christ in the Rubble"](https://redletterchristians.org./2023/12/23/christ-in-the-rubble-a-liturgy-of-lament/ Christmas sermon foundation.
Gouws is just a frontman; scratch the surface, and the Anglo-American war party emerges as the driver of the anti-Pandor campaign. On March 7, 2025, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy (FDD)—the neoconservative bastion of Dick Cheney associates dedicated to organizing for war against Russia, China, Iran, etc.—issued a Policy Brief targeting South Africa, its ruling ANC party, and Pandor, in particular. Titled “Embracing Iran, South Africa’s ANC Claims ‘We Can’t Hide Our Friends’,” it retails the absurd charge that Iran bribed South Africa to file its genocide case at the ICJ, and that Pandor was the conduit for the bribe. “The Trump administration should investigate the Iran bribery allegation related to the ICJ investigation and consider imposing sanctions on ANC officials who provide support to Iran,” the warmongers demand.
The FDD sources this lie to the campaign launched in May 2024 by the Israeli Zionist “lawfare” NGO, Shurat HaDin, which demanded that U.S. officials invoke the Magnitsky Act and investigate ANC leaders for “significant corruption involving bribery,” over the Iran fabrication.
