Media Falls Over Itself To Defend South African President

Last week, President Donald Trump confronted South African leaders over the alleged genocide taking place against white South African farmers. Trump presented South African leaders — and the media — with video evidence of racially charged rhetoric advocating for the murder of white farmers. One such video showed political leader Julius Malema leading chants of “kill the Boer” and “Revolution demands at some point there must be killing.”

The propaganda press were quick to not only dismiss the genocidal chants, but to defend South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who didn’t seem eager to confront and condemn the chants. Outlets dropped all pretense of objectivity to paint Ramaphosa as a measured statesman blindsided by Trump.

NPR’s Kate Bartlett wrote “South Africa’s president is praised for staying calm during Trump’s Oval Office ambush.” Bartlett praised Ramaphosa for keeping “his cool” and heralded him as “one of the key mediators in the talks that ended apartheid in 1994.”

The talking point was quickly spread amongst the propagandists, with Reuters’ Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo and Alexander Winning writing: “Buffeted by Trump, South Africa’s Ramaphosa praised for keeping his cool.”

But perhaps it’s easy to “keep cool” when your government doesn’t appear to have any serious moral objection to openly genocidal rhetoric.

Despite their best attempt to cover for South African leaders, upon returning from the United States, South Africa’s president excused the genocidal chants as merely free speech.

Speaking to reporters, Ramaphosa said the chant is a “liberation chant.”

Liberation from what, exactly? White farmers? And how will that liberation occur if not through violence, as some South African political leaders are calling for?

“We take into account what the constitutional court also decided when it said that, you know, that slogan, ‘Kill the Boer, kill the farmer,’ is a liberation chant and slogan,” Ramaphosa said.

“It’s not meant to be a message that elicits or calls upon anyone to go and be killed. And that is what our court decided … We follow the dictates of our constitution because we are a constitutional state, and we are a country where freedom of expression is in the bedrock of our constitutional arrangement.”

In their frantic rush to shield Ramaphosa from scrutiny, the propaganda press not only dismissed the gravity of the evidence — but they’ve now aided in the normalization of racially charged rhetoric.

Notably, these are the same outlets that, as pointed out by Newsmax’s John Bachman, “freaked out about ‘Stand back, and stand by’” but “will accept [Ramaphosa’s comment defending genocidal chants] as fact.”

The propaganda press bent over backwards to portray Ramaphosa as a dignified moral authority — a statesman who gracefully endured Trump’s supposed ambush. He was framed as a calm, rational leader, a symbol of post-apartheid virtue. And then, mere days later, that very same moral icon stood before the press and earnestly defended chants calling for the murder of farmers.