WorldNetDaily columnist and South African native Ilana Mercer still pines for apartheid, so of course she would run to the defense of apartheid-era South Africa after it was revealed that Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof wore a South African flag from that era, as well as a flag of colonial-era Rhodesia, on his jacket.
Mercer complains in a June 18 blog post:
Roof is as ignorant as the MM (malfunctioning media) and its accomplices (Southern Poverty Center), who are attempting to further marginalize the South African and Rhodesian white minorities (most of the latter have been purged by black “freedom fighters”) by associating the alleged killer with the once internationally flown flags of these defunct countries.
Of course, it’s not the media making that association — it’s the alleged killer himself.
Mercer added in an update: “US ‘news’ media have been depicting the Old South African and Rhodesian flags as the equivalent of Nazi insignia. Sean Hannity has just mentioned the display of these flags as a predictor of a disturbed mind, on the verge of an eruption. This is such rubbish. These anchors would think nothing of flying the ANC’s old flag.”
On June 21, Mercer followed up by quoting a “corrective comment” by “Dr. Dan Roodt, director of PRAAG, for Afrikaner activism,” who said:
The Christian and humane principles on which both the old South Africa and Rhodesia were founded, prohibited any form of ethnic massacre. In fact, during Afrikaner history we were mostly the victims of such massacres by either foreigners of other ethnic groups, so we understand the pain and suffering associated with such mass killings.
[…]We have a proud military tradition, associated with our flag. We have always abided by the Geneva Conventions. Unlike our enemies who practiced terror against us and who still attack our own civilians on farms and in our homes, we would never think of attacking civilians, let alone in a church while praying to God.”
In neither post does Mercer (or Roodt, for that matter) address the issue of apartheid, the thing Roof was presumably endorsing by wearing the flag in question.
As we’ve noted, Roodt travels in the same circles as American “white nationalists” like Jared Taylor. Roodt was also a fellow traveler of Eugene Terreblanche, a white supremacist who headed the violent and militant Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) until he was killed by two black farmhands.
It’s unclear who the “we” is in Roodt’s statement that “We have always abided by the Geneva Conventions,” but it’s dishonest and meaningless either way. PRAAG is not a government and thus not subject to the Geneva conventions; and the conventions apply to the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners of war, and apartheid was never a declared war against another country but, rather, an internal action of a government against its own people.
All in all, both Mercer and Roodt sound like right-wingers who are trying to defend the Confederate flag — for instance, a June 21 NewsBusters post by the MRC’s Brad Wilmouth complaining that a CNN reporter cited a tweet “comparing the Confederate flag to the flag of Nazi Germany.” But Wilmouth never explained why that is an inappropriate or unfair comparison.