Like other faith-based schools, King David’s identity is based on the religious, cultural and historical life of the community it serves, she says. Roedean’s refusal to honour a sporting fixture based on the players’ Jewish identity, therefore, “constitutes an antisemitic act and is discrimination based on religion”.
That violates South Africa’s constitution.
Section 9 of the constitution, as Kahn notes, provides that “no person may be unfairly discriminated against, directly or indirectly, on the grounds of religion, belief or culture”.
Roedean’s leaders should have known that.
Its tennis-match debacle does not exist in religious, political isolation.
In 2023, Roedean invited the Ummah Al-Rahma madrasah to provide its religious, spiritual programming – Ummah Heart – on campus for Muslim pupils. It tried spinning the initiative as a gesture of inclusivity, a way to signal alignment with fashionable political currents.
Instead, it signalled something darker: a willingness to outsource moral judgment to the loudest ideological faction in the room.
The madrasah’s public record and associations had drawn significant criticism and concern. It was accused of expressing sympathy and support for Hamas, including sharing or endorsing material aligned with Hamas and other jihadist causes.
That represented, as attorney and essayist Richard Wilkinson argued, “school capture”.
Roedean was not just accommodating Muslim pupils within a pluralist, school-controlled framework. It was outsourcing part of its religious curriculum to a “fundamentalist Islamic provider”.
Critics warned of the perils of combining “woke”, diversity rhetoric with a hard-line madrassah, allowing reactionary, radical religious politics to shelter under the language of “true inclusivity and belonging”, while narrowing the space for dissenting or minority views – particularly Zionist or even just openly Jewish ones.
Appeasing a particular worldview, including one openly sympathetic to a terrorist organisation, is not a smart move. Bringing a Hamas-aligned group onto any campus normalises rather than challenges a climate in which Jewish pupils are already vulnerable – and in which ANC-style, anti-Israel agitation quickly, easily slides into open antisemitism.
It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to work out where that leads. It’s where ringing calls to “globalise the intifada” have brought us.
To its credit, Roedean allowed the partnership to peter out.
It has undone that good work by failing to honour a simple tennis fixture with Jewish schoolgirls. Its credibility and moral scruples are again under a microscope.
Roedean’s statements, prepared and distributed by its PR company, Flow Communications, are a study in obfuscation, euphemism and sophistry, starting with the opening line in its February 10 offering:
“We will place the best interests of young people first.”
Roedean has not placed the interests of its own “young people” first. It has trampled over the interests of King David’s young people.
The only interests it put first are those of the minority of staff, parent body and student body who don’t want to play sport against Jews.
Roedean says it has “engaged an independent party to review allegations”. It may regret adding that it has also engaged “an independent facilitator to work with our students to resolve their concerns fairly and respectfully”.