‘Kill the Boer’
July 31, 2023
ANNEKE Claassen (73) and Hennie Claassen (77) were tortured and burned alive last month in a surprise attack on a farm in Limpopo, South Africa. Another couple was killed on a farm the very same weekend. More than 20,000 people are murdered every year in South Africa so this violence is no surprise. What separates these murders from many others is their brutality and the innocence of the victims. Last year, 89-year-old Elizabeth Lee from the farm Breeland was bludgeoned to death with a chair by a 15-year-old. Thousands of similar farm attacks have occurred in the last 30 years, with hundreds of white farmers killed by black assailants. (Statistics here.)
This past weekend Julius Malema, head of the opposition party Economic Freedom Fighters, nevertheless sang the song “Kill the Boer” at the party’s tenth anniversary gathering. ‘Boer’ is the Afrikaans word for farmer, and for the white Afrikaans population in general. (Translation of lyrics can be found here.)
An estimated 100,000 party members packed a stadium and cheered Malema.
The Equality Court in Johannesburg ruled in August last year that the song was not hate speech or incitement, after AfriForum took the matter to court.
The court held that the song was freedom of speech and had to be left in the political arena.
The court said the lyrics of the song – “Shoot to kill, kill the Boer, kill the farmer” – were not to be taken literally. (Source)
The BBC offered a somewhat positive piece on Malema in response to the gathering and there was no international outrage by any major government, agency or the U.N. No U.S. news outlet reported the story of Malema’s song at the event.
Mr. Malema’s speech at the convention is worth listening to in full — his rhetoric is familiar justification for Communist-style, racial revenge. Malema speaks glowingly of Vladimir Putin. The Soviet star and fist festoon a large banner and his supporters in Soviet-red T-shirts pump their fists. By the way, who funded all those T-shirts? Was it Nathan Kirsh, the “George Soros of South Africa’?”
In a rare 2020 news article on the murder of farmers, The New York Times suggests murders like those of last weekend were justified:
Tension is particularly high in rural farming areas where white people still own a vast majority of the farms and Black people still serve as their often impoverished laborers.
Groups representing white farmers accuse the South African government of deliberately failing to protect them. Some white activist groups say that what they call “farm murders” represent the beginning of a “white genocide” aimed at driving whites out of South Africa.
Critics see this as a deeply distorted narrative promoted by the white beneficiaries of apartheid to drum up international sympathy. They point out that violent crime is common in South Africa. The vast majority of the victims are Black.
The Times fails to mention the black beneficiaries of apartheid, the relatively high standard of living in South Africa, the infrastructure farmers have subsidized — roads, sanitation facilities, communications — and the food the farmers have grown, a level of agriculture unknown in most of Africa. Is this thinly-veiled incitement any better than Malema’s song?
In this video made four years ago, three victims of farm attacks, including Willem Stafleu, whose wife, Vanessa, was killed six years ago in front of their young children, tell their stories.
