Benji Shulman’s article was a textbook example of ideological projection masquerading as geopolitical analysis (“Iran is a malignant force in Africa”, June 25). His sweeping claims about Iran’s role in Africa are riddled with inaccuracies, deliberate omissions and unsubstantiated fearmongering — designed less to inform and more to smear.
Most importantly, reader s deserve to know that Shulman is the former director of public policy at the SA Zionist Federation — a position that renders any pretence of scholarly neutrality laughable. This is not an academic diagnosis; it’s political propaganda.
To paint Iran as the root cause of Africa’s instability is not only intellectually dishonest but grotesquely simplistic. For instance, the rise of Shia Islam in Nigeria is treated as if it were a foreign infection — erasing local dynamics and the spiritual autonomy of millions of African Muslims.
Shulman cynically weaponises African tragedies to argue for regime change in Tehran, but conspicuously omits that many of the same atrocities he describes have been fuelled — and at times facilitated — by Israeli arms and intelligence networks across the continent.
Israel’s documented support for apartheid SA, its covert military operations in Sudan and Ethiopia and its more recent arms exports to repressive regimes in Rwanda, Cameroon and Chad are absent from Shulman’s account.
Israel’s role in promoting surveillance states and militarised policing in Africa is well known, yet he offers no mention of these facts. Why? Because his role is not to illuminate Africa’s challenges — it is to shield Israeli policy from scrutiny while deflecting blame onto Iran.
Even his attack on MTN reeks of opportunism. The allegations, lifted straight from America’s regime-change playbook, repackage strategic rivalry as moral outrage. They are less about justice and more about punishing countries and companies unwilling to bow to Washington’s sanctions game.
Africa does not need lectures from partisan ideologues with an axe to grind and a foreign flag in their lapel.
Andile Songezo
Johannesburg
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