Trump’s contentious meeting with South Africa’s president

 By Ryan Denison PhD - Posted at Denison Forum:

Are white farmers facing genocide in South Africa?

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s meeting with President Trump yesterday began well enough. Ramaphosa brought two South African golfers, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, to help break the ice before the conversation moved to a bit of foreign policy. However, things took a turn when a reporter asked what it would take for Trump to recognize that there was no “white genocide” in South Africa.

Ramaphosa answered for the president and said, “It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans.”

Trump then responded by playing a five-minute video compilation of South African leaders calling for violence against the Boer, which means farmer in Dutch and Afrikaans, including a clip of white crosses lining a road that he claimed were part of a mass burial site for murdered white farmers.

After the video ended, Ramaphosa acknowledged that crime is a problem in his country—South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates in the world—but pushed back on the idea that it was worse for white people than black. The degree to which that is true depends, at least to some extent, on the kind of violence in focus, and we’ll take a closer look at the reality of the situation in a moment. However, it’s important to note that the video was not as representative of that reality as Trump claimed.

The white crosses, for example, were part of a protest staged by activists to draw attention to the farm murders of which the president spoke, rather than the actual graves of those farmers. Moreover, much of the inflammatory and racist rhetoric in the video dated back nearly a decade or more and came from groups that the South African government has since denounced.

That said, the video’s errors and misrepresentations do not mean that white South Africans have nothing to worry about. The violence is real, and many have good reason to be afraid. But if we’re to understand what is really going on in that region, then it’s important to get the details correct, and the video shown by the White House was, at the very least, misleading.

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the situation in South Africa, as well as how it got to the place where the leader of the free world is tossing around accusations of genocide.

Continue here...