Another Trump Circus, Another Dangerous Deflection
It is now South Africa’s turn to be confronted by the madness of the Trump circus. This time, Trump dimmed the lights during his meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to showcase a series of videos supposedly supporting his claim of white genocide. The videos featured Julius Malema from the Economic Freedom Fighters, singing inflammatory songs about killing farmers.
This is typical manipulative behaviour from Trump, rooted in untruths. Malema does not govern South Africa and represents a fringe party that commands less than 10% support. Trump also claimed an image of white crosses were burial sites of white farmers when in fact they were erected as a protest. As well as showing some pictures of South African farm killings, he also showed photos from a report in the Democratic Republic of Congo, claiming they were from South Africa.
The claim of white genocide has been repeatedly debunked, including by prominent white South Africans who refuted the claim in the meeting with Trump. The Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU) estimates 50 people, across all races, are killed on farms and small holdings each year. This is deeply concerning but in a country with 26,000 criminal murders a year this is not extraordinary.
The key question, therefore, is: why is South Africa being subjected to baseless accusations of white genocide? The answer is simple. This is all about ongoing accusations of genocide in Gaza, and specifically South Africa’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) case against Israel.
We once again witnessed classic Trump resorting to smoke and mirrors. Trump showcases videos of speeches from a minor political party in South Africa claiming South Africa is implicated in genocide, while allowing Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to evade accountability for acts that have been labelled genocide by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others. While Malema’s rhetoric is abhorrent, Netanyahu has an arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court for directly authorising war crimes and genocide, not merely singing about it. Furthermore, the US gave Israel $17.9 billion in military aid between October 2023 to October 2024, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
Yet hypocritically Trump chooses to spend time admonishing President Ramaphosa for a fabricated claim of white genocide, attempting to tarnish his reputation by linking him to the incendiary words of Malema who is from a different political party altogether.
But this is more than deflection or hypocrisy, it is dangerous. It won’t be long before Netanyahu attempts to invoke double standards in the ICJ genocide case, despite the absurdity of such a comparison. Meanwhile, Palestinian civilians continue to be killed and the wholesale destruction of Gaza downplayed.
It is critical we resist the pull of the political theatrics and return to the core issue: Trump’s government, alongside much of the West, is supporting and allowing genocide to occur in Gaza.
