Bela Lugosi in White Zombie, 1931.

“The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.”

― Richard Burton

Why lie, when you know the lie will be exposed as soon as you tell it? Because the lie is the point. The more blatant the lie, the more likely it will be repeated every time it is refuted. Repeat it enough times and the libel, no matter how vile, will stick with the audience you want to appease.

This explains the spectacle that unfolded in the White House this week, when Trump ambushed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with a barrage of fake news stories and a manufactured video meant to advance the outrageous lie that black South African’s, with the connivance of the Republic of South Africa’s government, is engaged in a “white genocide” of Afrikaner farmers.

White genocide? There were 27,621 murders in South Africa in 2023, more than 80 percent of them young, black males, who were poor or unemployed. During that same year, there were a total of 49 people (both white and black) killed on farms. For context, Israeli forces have killed more than 50 Palestinians every DAY in Gaza for the last 19 months. The population of South Africa is 63.1 million. Population of Gaza (pre-October 2023): 2.1 million.

In his effort to humiliate South Africa’s president and portray himself as the champion of allegedly oppressed whites around the world, Trump went so far as to show photos of the burial site of black women who were raped and burned alive in the Congo and claimed it depicted the “burial site” of white farmers in South Africa.

Ramaphosa is not South Africa’s most dexterous politician, but he did keep his cool as he realized the Trump White House had set him up. He was affable, solicitous, deferential and professional, as he was treated with abuse by Trump. The message won’t be lost on other African leaders, who are already finding a more receptive audience with the government of China.

RAMAPHOSA: I am sorry I don’t have a plane to give you

TRUMP: I wish you did. I’d take it. If your country offered the US Air Force a plane, I would take it.

RAMAPHOSA: Okay.

REPORTER: What will it take for you to be convinced there is no white genocide in South Africa?

RAMAPHOSA: I can take that. It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans.

TRUMP *scowling*: We have thousands of stories talking about it…

RAMAPHOSA: I would say if there was Afrikaner farmer genocide, I can bet you these three gentlemen (including his white Secretary of Agriculture) would not be here..

TRUMP: We have thousands of stories talking about it. We have documentaries. We have news stories.

Imagine Trump ambushing Netanyahu with real videos of the mass killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces, the way he did South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa today with manufactured videos of Afrikaners, in one of the most despicable treatments of a foreign leader at the White House since, well, the tag-teaming of Zelensky.

South Africa’s richest man, the billionaire Johann Peter Rupert, told Donald Trump to his face in the Oval Office that there is no white genocide taking place in South Africa. Rupert told Trump, as he slumped in his gilded chair, that the issue is about crime, poverty, and unemployment, not “white genocide.” Rupert said even though he’s one of South Africa’s most hated men, he sleeps on his own farm with his doors unlocked.

When the meeting inevitably blew up in Trump’s face, he tried to pin the entire White Genocide scam on Musk, who was standing at the back of the room: “Elon is from South Africa. I don’t want to get Elon involved. That’s all I have to do—get him into another thing. This is what Elon wanted.”

The firebrand Julius Malema, member of the South African parliament and leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters party, had the most incisive response to Trump’s grotesque “white genocide” spectacle at the White House yesterday:

We’re not going to kill white people. Stop being sensitive. No one is going to kill you. You think we’re going to kill you just because you killed our people? The killing mentality is in your head. We don’t have a killing mentality. We have a mentality of justice and peace. The only thing we’re not prepared to do is to prioritize peace over justice. There must be justice first, before there is peace…We don’t owe white people an apology. Black people, stop apologizing to whites. They are the ones owing us an apology. You have done too much damage to black people. who are unemployed because of you, who are dying of diseases because of you, who are illiterate because of you, who are addicted to drugs because of you. You owe us a lot. You must show remorse and stop behaving like crybabies. South African democracy is going to be built by a robust debate, particularly when it comes to race relations. We must stop deceiving each other. The poor meant black. The rich meant white. For as long as that has not been resolved, there will be a permanent problem between the poor and the rich.

So why did Trump lay a trap for Ramaphosa? Yes, he was appeasing the white South African exiles (Mush and Thiel) who dumped millions into his campaign, but in the White House’s own words, the scorging of South Africa was also motivated by its brave stance against Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza:

In addition, South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.

The shooter who killed two employees of the Israeli embassy in DC this week claimed to be acting in the name of Palestinians, but the blowback from this senseless act of slaughter will do inestimable harm to the anti-genocide movement, at a moment when the political tide seemed to be turning decisively against Israel. Inevitably, the murders will be used as justifications for even more repressive crackdowns against Palestinians and their allies, even though they bear no culpability for the crimes.

But it must be noted that the Israeli government has never paid any kind of price for its military killing American citizens, including sailors (USS Liberty), students (Rachel Corrie and Aysenur Eygi), journalists (Shireen Abu-Akleh), octogenarians (Omar Asad) or children (Omar Rabea). Indeed the shooting of the Israeli embassy workers by a lone, unaffiliated gunman, who allegedly shouted “Free Palestine!” garnered far more attention than Israeli forces firing at diplomats from two dozen countries on the very same day, including representatives from China, Brazil, India, Russia, Japan, Canada, Mexico, France, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Jordan, the UK, and Egypt–an act of political intimidation the Israeli government later wrote off as a mere “inconvenience.”

According to the latest Data for Progress poll, 76% of US voters now support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

Yair Golan, head of the Israeli Democrats and former Deputy Chief of Staff of the IDF: “Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was, if we don’t return to acting like a sane country. And a sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not give itself the aim of expelling........

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