Topic: WorldNetDaily
Shortly after we wrote about how WorldNetDaily columnists were once again fretting about the "white genocide" of farmers in South Africa (which isn't actually happening), President Trump tweeted about it. (Coincidence? You decide.) And WND's writers -- particularly Ilana Mercer -- loved the spotlight Trump put on the issue.
Mercer -- a South African native who still pines for the days of apartheid -- spent her Aug. 23 column ranting about the proposal by the black-majority government in South Africa to seize land from whites and give it to blacks (an admittedly controversial issue). She praised Fox News' Tucker Carlson (who actually did inspire Trump's tweet) as a "superhero" for highlighting the story, adding: "If anyone can make the thuggish African National Congress and its leader, Ramaphosa, reconsider their plot to simply steal privately owned land from whites and gift it to the clamoring black citizens of South Africa – it’s President Donald Trump."
Mercer also cited "Dr. Philip du Toit, a farmer (with a doctorate in labor law) and author of 'The Great South African Land Scandal,'" as having "traversed the 'beloved country' from the Limpopo to the Cape, from Natal to the North West to document the transfer and consequent trashing of the country’s commercial farms." Mercer doesn't mention that du Toit is a white nationalist and a bit of a fraud.
The Mail & Guardian newspaper in South Africa reports that du Toit's doctorate is from Pacific Western University, an unaccredited school that was considered to be a diploma mill. Du Toit has also spoken to the American white nationalist group American Renaissance, and one of the researchers he used in writing "The Great South African Land Scandal" is a known far-right activist.
In her Aug. 30 column, Mercer serves up some whataboutism regarding apartheid, arguing that "apartheid South Africa sustained far more critical scrutiny for its non-violent (if unjust) resettlement policies than did the U.S. for its equally unjust but actively violent mass resettlement agenda, say, in South Vietnam." After invoking the Wounded Knee massacre and the Japanese-American internment during World War II, she added: "Nothing in Afrikaner rule, even at its least enlightened, can match such episodes in American history."
She also blamed the British for starting black oppression in South Africa, insisting that "the Afrikaners fought Africa’s first anti-colonial struggles, are native to the land and not colonists in any normal sense,' and that "while the honing of apartheid by the Afrikaner National Party started in 1948, after Daniel Malan assumed the prime minister’s post, elements of the program were part of the policy first established in 1923 by the British-controlled government."
That reads more like excuse-making than anything else.
Hanne Nabintu Herland then took a shot at it in her Aug. 29 WND column, doing her own for of whataboutism by suggesting that what happened in the Belgian Congo is likely to happen in South Africa:
Before independence, primary education was provided for all in Congo, including uniforms, school books, etc. There were functioning roads, airports, hospitals built, universities begun by the Belgians. This, of course, is not mentioned in most books today; rather we are notoriously and chronically presented only one side of the Congolese reality, namely the atrocities by the Belgians.
It is true that there were atrocities committed by the Belgians. Yet, has there not been atrocities done to black Africans by their own black leaders post-independence?
[...]
Remarkably little critique is put forward toward black African leaders – a consequence of the 1960s neo-Marxist thought: If you criticize a black man, you are automatically “a racist.” Thus, if anything goes wrong in an African country, it has to be the white man’s fault. The complaint that several Western companies exploit Africa is absolutely true – but is it not African leaders that allow them to do so? It is the African population who are suffering from it.
Now, much the same process is happening in South Africa, horrifying atrocities are being committed and apartheid is being reinforced. And the Western elites, including the United States, say nothing.
Herland also cheered that "Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson recently addressed one of the minority issues that are not so popular to speak about: racism against whites in South Africa."
We last wrote about Herland fretting that abortion was killing too many white, Christian fetuses.
