Luke Ford

MP3

Google suggested these stories on South African white farmers:

* New York Times:

Trump Cites False Claims of Widespread Attacks on White Farmers in South Africa

Mr. Trump’s comment came after the Fox News host Tucker Carlson presented a late-night program on South Africa, including land seizures and homicides, and described President Cyril Ramaphosa as “a racist.”

The tweet gives prominence to a false narrative pushed by some right-wing groups in South Africa that there have been numerous seizures of white-owned land and widespread killings of white farmers. Some of those groups have brought their claims to the United States on lobbying trips…

The number of killings of farmers, including farm workers, is at a 20-year low, 47 in the fiscal year 2017-18, according to research published in July by AgriSA, a farmers’ organization in South Africa. That is down from 66 during the fiscal year before. The figures were consistent with a steady decline of violence since a peak in 1998, when 153 were killed.

South Africa recorded 19,016 murder cases from April 2016 to March 2017, according to the South Africa Police Service. The national murder rate last year was 34.1 per 100,000 people, but the number of people living on farms is not fully known, which makes comparisons difficult.

Most official statistics do not break down homicides by race.

“There is no official crime category called ‘farm attack’ or ‘farm murder,’ ” according to Africa Check, a local fact-checking organization.

* VOX: Trump’s tweet echoing white nationalist propaganda about South African farmers, explained
There’s no evidence of a genocidal campaign against white farmers.

* The Guardian: White farmers: how a far-right idea was planted in Donald Trump’s mind:

The conspiracy theory of “white genocide” has been a staple of the racist far right for decades. It has taken many forms, but all of them imagine that there is a plot to either replace, remove or simply liquidate white populations.

South Africa and Zimbabwe in particular have exerted a fascination on the racist far right because in the mind of white nationalists, they show what happens to a white minority after they lose control of countries they once ruled.

The Charleston shooter Dylann Roof was obsessed, like many other white supremacists, with “Rhodesia”, as Zimbabwe was known under white minority rule. As the Christian Science Monitor reported in the wake of his massacre, the fates of the two countries are “held up as proof of the racial inferiority of blacks; and the diminished stature of whites is presented as an ongoing genocide that must be fought”.

* Theater Thursday: Straw Dogs (1971) Wikipedia

* Is Jeff Sessions pushing back against Trump?

* Intelligence and health

* Steve Sailer: Is Transgenderism the New Anorexia?

* The Forward: Black Jews Are Being Chased Out Of the Jewish Community By Racism. Here Are Their Stories.