President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa was in the White House today, meeting with President Trump. Trump took the opportunity to talk about the attacks on white farmers in South Africa, and even played a video. The New York Times pretends to be shocked:
In an astonishing ambush, President Trump dimmed the lights in the Oval Office on Wednesday during a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and showed what he said was video evidence of racial persecution of white South Africans.
Did Trump really “ambush” Ramaphosa? It wouldn’t seem so, since several days ago President Ramaphosa announced that he would challenge President Trump on this very issue during their Oval Office meeting. The Times should be aware of this fact, since it reported on it earlier this week. The Times headline: “South Africa’s President to Challenge Trump on Afrikaner Refugees.”
Mr. Ramaphosa plans to counter Mr. Trump’s Afrikaner genocide accusations by pointing to America’s support of Israel. His spokesman said that Mr. Ramaphosa will argue it is “laughable that you can use the genocide word on South Africa, while on the other hand you’re looking the other way where the actual genocide is being committed.”
So, not an ambush.
The Times rattles off left-wing talking points about South Africa:
The clash in the Oval Office centered on Mr. Trump’s insistence on false claims of land seizures and mass killings of white Afrikaners, members of a white ethnic minority group who ruled during the country’s apartheid era.
“False claims.” Of course, the Times doesn’t deny that farmers have been killed and land has been seized. The paper even admits that at least one South African party uses “Kill the Boer” as a chant during its rallies:
At least one of the scenes on the screen appeared to be the rallying cry of “Kill the Boer,” which U.S. officials and Afrikaner activists have cited as evidence that white South Africans are being persecuted. Boer means farmer in Dutch and Afrikaans. The governing party of South Africa, however, the African National Congress, distanced itself from the chant, which was popularized by the leader of another political party, years ago.
Really? Persecution of the white farmers has been going on for a number of years. In an article titled “South Africa’s White Farmers Under Siege,” the Human Security Centre wrote about it in 2013. And the African National Congress was promoting “Kill the Boer”:
Whilst the ANC is supposed to be a party to unite a non-racial South Africa, in January 2012 their leader Jacob Zuma was filmed singing a ‘struggle song’ called Kill the Boer. Boer is the Afrikaans word for farmer and used to refer to white Afrikaners in the country.
The Times takes issue with the claim that killings of white farmers amount to a “genocide.” (“Mr. Trump has made debunked claims that white farmers in South Africa are being killed in a genocide.”) I wouldn’t call the killings a genocide either, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happening. They are. And the Times doesn’t dispute that under current South African law, the property of white farmers can be seized without compensation. So they are being driven off their land and deprived of their livelihoods.
The real source of this debate, of course, is the fact that the Trump administration has admitted a tiny number of white South African farmers–I believe 59–as refugees. It doesn’t take genocide to qualify as a refugee. The fact that these South Africans are threatened with violence and driven off their land is plenty of reason to admit them–legally, so they are identified and potentially vetted.
If this group of refugees were black, no one would question their refugee status. Marco Rubio put his finger on the real issue when he told Senator Tim Kaine in yesterday’s Foreign Relations Committee hearing, “You don’t like that they’re white.” As so often happens, the underlying reality is the racism of the Democratic Party.
