A couple days ago, we noted the interest from Newsmax columnists in the purported “white genocide” of white farmers in South Africa — completely ignoring the fact that blacks in Sough Africa are murdered at a much higher rate, making them the real “genocide.” Well, the usual WorldNetDaily writers have been on the case as well, having first obsessed about it last year.
Ilana Mercer — a South African native who still misses apartheid — launched into a tirade of Obama derangement, railing against the “modern day messiah” and the “estrogen-oozing amoebas of mainstream media” who liked him. She asserted that Obama, in a recent visit to South Africa where he allegedly “laud[ed] genial thug Cyril Ramaphosa,” was “silent about the systematic ethnic cleansing and extermination, in ways that beggar belief, of South African farmers in particular, and whites in general. Does the barefaced Barack care that white men, women and children are being butchered like animals, their bodies often displayed like trophies by their proud black assassins?” She also asserted that 3,000 white farmers have been “slaughtered” since 2011.
That’s a highly dubious number. Australia’s ABC found that less than 80 murders annually took place on farms since 2011 — and that number includes whites and blacks. Also, as we previously noted, Ramaphosa is a moderate who has tried to slow down the rush by extremists to forced land redistribution.
Mercer, needless to say, is silent about the thousands of blacks murdered every year in South Africa. Instead, she praises Russian leader Vladimir Putin for having “purportedly offered to give shelter to 15,000 white South African farmers, so far, recognizing them for the true refugees they are.” She added: “It should be news to no one that American refugee policies favor the Bantu peoples of Africa over its Boers. … Whichever way you slice it, on matters South Africa, Russia is the virtuous one.”
Jane Chastain, meanwhile, stayed away from the “genocide” claims and focused on the current attempt by the black-led South African government to take the land of white farmers without what they consider just compensation to spin an alternative history of apartheid:
South Africa’s early settlers were a racial mix. They included black tribes, primarily Xhosa and Zulus, who had migrated from the north; Europeans from Portugal, who arrived in the 1400s, and the Dutch and the English who arrived in the 1600s.
The blacks were organized by tribes and preferred the bush country where game was plentiful, while the white settlers took to farming and gradually created towns and cities. After some time, blacks began migrating to the cities and began to adapt to the advances that had taken place there.
In the 20th century, other black tribesmen began to travel and see the progress their relatives had made in the cities. This trickle of migration soon turned into a flood. Legislation then was enacted to control the flow of people into the cities. In 1948, the white-led government instituted a system of racial segregation known as apartheid to protect its minority.
By the time our country began to beat up on South Africa, this segregation practice – while still on the books – existed in name only and was mostly economic, as it has been in our country.
But as the Smithsonian points out, how strictly apartheid was practiced in the final years before its repeal doesn’t mean that the economic effects were not significant or went away at apartheid’s end: At apartheid’s end, whites made up of 10 percent of South Africa’s population but owned 90 percent of its land. As we noted, such inequity remains a key contention in the land redistribution: whites own or control as much as three-fourths of South Africa’s farmland, while blacks own just over 1 percent.
Chastain also argued that apartheid wasn’t so bad because “black citizens already had the vote in all but the national elections.” That was actually meaningless because blacks were not considered full citizens of South Africa but, rather, of “homelands,” supposedly autonomous nation-states inside the country. Even the Tricameral Parliament established in 1983 and lasting until apartheid’s demise excluded representation from the black majority, restricting that to whites, native indians and the multi-ethnic “coloured” population.
Simpson then complained that “We forced South Africa into holding premature ‘universal’ elections and now the rest is history – a history the liberal media is unwilling to tell.” If only Simpson was as eager to tell the full history of apartheid.