Bob Unruh complained in a May 12 WorldNetDaily article:
The Episcopal Migration Ministries, which took in $53 million in tax funding to resettle 3,600 people in 2023 alone, is abandoning the next round of refugees, refusing to resettle them.
They are white.
The refugee branch of the church organization has worked for decades, on taxpayer funding, to settle refugees from various sources around the world.
But in a letter obtained by the Gateway Pundit, officials announced they are quitting.
Unruh continued to make the mistake of relying on the discredited Gateway Pundit to fill out his story:
The Gateway Pundit report said the decision to end a program helping refugees was “all because the Trump administration dared to classify white South African Afrikaners as refugees in need of protection.”
“The same Episcopal Church that prided itself on aiding persecuted people from war-torn regions is now walking away from its commitments simply because the next wave of refugees are white Christian farmers — victims of violent racial targeting in post-apartheid South Africa,” the report said.
Helping this group, the church announced, would violate its “moral line.”
Afrikaner families for years have faced deadly violence, arbitrary land seizures, a weaponized government and military, brutal attacks on them and their farms, and race-based discrimination.
The violence in South Africa is so bad, in fact, the crimes have prompted human rights organizations to raise an alarm.
Just one problem: that’s not true. We’ve debunked previous claims made by WND of a “white genocide” in South Africa, based in part on then-WND columnist Barbara Simpson misquoting a spokesman for Genocide Watch. Even white farmers in South Africa have disputed claims of a “genocide” there.
A May 14 article reprinted from the right-wing Daily Signal touted how “the White House condemned the Episcopal Church” over the withdrawal; writer Tyler O’Neil did not acknowledge the fact that claims of “white genocide” have been disputed. Unruh followed up the same day with an article hyping a threat against the white “refugees”:
A black woman who “styles herself an author” has posted a social media video of her shocking rant against whites from South Africa who have been targeted for death in their own country and have been declared refugees to the United States.
“I just want to make you aware that the black people who were students during apartheid, we’re grandmas and grandpas now… and we have the [air] of Gen Z, OK?” the woman states. “One more thing, I also want to let you know that our president, he has Secret Service – and you will not.”
In America, she said, “black people over here are empowered.”
And when they arrive they are to sit down, “don’t touch nothing” and to “have the day you deserve.”
The administration of President Donald Trump has fast-tracked the status of 59 Afrikaners, whites from South Africa, as refugees because their land was seized by their government without compensation.
Unruh offered no evidence that the white farmers’ land has actually been seized. In fact, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said that a recently approved land law “a constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution.”
Unruh went on to write: “The anti-white violence there is the result of a revolution against the minority white rule which had existed for generations.” Notice the missing word normally used to describe that system: apartheid. WND has long whitewashed the history and effects of apartheid, and for years it had has a columnist Ilana Mercer, a white South Africa native who misses apartheid and actually tried to make an intellectual case for it.
Meanwhile, Unruh made sure not to mention that one of the white “refugees” accepted for entry into the U.S. has a history of making anti-Semitic remarks (he later claimed he was taken out of context, perhaps because he was being resettled by a Jewish-affiliated group).