Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ilana Mercer is not taking kindly to her white-supremacist leanings being outed.
Mercer devotes her entire Sept. 2 WorldNetDaily column to attacking me, weirdly focusing on a couple of ConWebBlog posts instead of the much more comprehensive article I wrote on Mercer's views.
One of her complaints about said blog posts: that I "omitted quotation marks" in excerpting from her column. Actually, it's clear that the indented text is the part being directly quoted, though it's partially obscured in one post by the placement of a picture of Mercer. Still, the direct quote is preceded by a paragraph ending in a colon, which is also a common indicator that I'm directly quoting someone.
Mercer then decides to defend the indefensible in portraying militant South African white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche as an "innocent":
Krepel began his litany by accusing me, on June 12, 2011, of lionizing Eugene Terre'Blanche, the murdered leader of South Africa's Afrikaner Resistance Movement. This daughter of an anti-apartheid activist (me) also stands in the dock for "pining for the days of apartheid," and helping to hide Terre'Blanche's "group's history of violence and white supremacism."
In the "War on White South Africa," I had reported on the manner in which the controversial 69-year-old Mr. Terre'Blanche was bludgeoned to a pulp with pangas and pipes by two black farmhands. The old Afrikaner had not threatened anyone
But Terry Krepel bays for the blood of Terre'Blanche, who "reaped what he sowed." Or so writes Krepel of Terre'Blanche's "violent life" and "violent death."
What, then, of the many farming families who've met a similar fate?
As my book "Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa" documents, South Africa's farmland is a vast burial ground for thousands of farmers. How does Krepel dismiss their deaths? And why does Krepel conceal that the Terre'Blanche killing bore the telltale signs of a farm murder?
Do these victims deserve the fate that befell Terre'Blanche?
(See, Ilana? The above section is indented. That means I'm directly quoting you.)
Of course, I did not celebrate Terreblanche's death; I merely pointed out that Terreblanche lived a violent life -- he once beat a man into a coma, and he led an invasion of a South African black homeland that resulted in the deaths of 37 people -- and it's unsurprising that his death was violent as well.
Mercer, while calling herself the "daughter of an anti-apartheid activist," couldn't quite serve up a blanket condemnation of South Africa's apartheid regime:
People fuss about apartheid having denied the majority its democratic rights (the vote). Denying people political privileges does not necessarily amount to depriving them of natural justice.
As explained in the book, apartheid "did more than disenfranchise the majority; it denied the majority's economic freedoms. Citizenship rights, after all, are not natural rights. It is natural rights that the law ought to always and everywhere respect and uphold.
"In its police state methods – indefinite detention without trial, declarations of a state of emergency – apartheid destroyed the individual defenses of equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus and various other very basic freedoms. That the apartheid regime contravened natural justice by depriving Africans of rights to property and due process is indisputable as it is despicable." (Page 231)
Disputes about democracy notwithstanding, there can be no disagreement over Krepel's crappy journalism.
(Again, indented text means direct quote.)
Any criticism she has of apartheid, however, is contradicted by her behavior, whether it be defending Terreblanche, her repeated suggestions that blacks are too stupid to run a country, and and her association with the website VDARE, which its editor describes as "white nationalist."
I've been engaging Mercer and others in the comment thread at thebottom of her article. As of this writing, she has yet to acknowledge that Terreblanche was a violent white supremacist, nor has she explained her other "white nationalist" associations.
