Alex Newman — who likes to whitewash apartheid and the militancy of some white South Africans claiming to be victims — is at it again.
In an effective rehash of a February article he wrote for WorldNetDaily, Newman in an April 1 WND article again tosses around the word “genocide” to describe the plight of white farmers in South Africa, even invoking Genocide Watch’s Gregory Stanton to push the idea. But as our contact with Stanton made clear, while there are concerns about what is happening in the country, the situation for whites in South Africa is nowhere near genocide level, and the crime rate is much higher for South African blacks.
Newman’s point is further hammered home with the headline “Murder rate for these white farmers 20 times international average”; Newman cites Pieter Groenewald, leader of the Afrikaaner-linked Freedom Front Plus party, as framing the murder of white farmers as “a staggering 133 per 100,000” compared with the “international average murder rate” of 7 per 100,000. Neither Newman nor Groenewald offer any evidence that backs up that dubiously cherry-picked statistic.
While South Africa does have a crime problem, it affects blacks much more than whites, who are still far less likely to be murdered than a black person.
Newman goes on to complain about “systematic efforts to discriminate against and destroy the minority community” in South Africa — the “minority community” in question being whites. We suspect Newman is not terribly concerned about any non-white “minority communities” anywhere.