From the New York Times news section:
‘Kill the Boer’ Song Fuels Backlash in South Africa and U.S.
Right-wing commenters claim that an old anti-apartheid chant is a call to anti-white violence, but historians and the left-wing politician who embraces it say it should not be taken literally.
By John Eligon
John Eligon attended the rally in Johannesburg where a political leader made the controversial chant
John Eligon is a veteran New York Times reporter covering and stoking racist anti-white hate.
Aug. 2, 2023
The political rally was winding down when the brash leader of a leftist South African party grabbed the microphone and began to stomp and chant. Thousands of supporters joined in, and when he reached the climax, they pointed their fingers in the air like guns.
“Kill the Boer!” Julius Malema chanted, referring to white farmers. The crowd in a stadium in Johannesburg on Saturday roared back in approval.
A video clip of that moment shot across the internet and was seized upon by some Americans on the far right, who said that it was a call to violence.
Unlike Julius Malema who is definitely not on the far left in South Africa.
That notion really took off when Elon Musk, the South African-born billionaire who left the country as a teenager, chimed in.
“They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa,” Mr. Musk, who is white, wrote on Monday on Twitter, the platform he now controls.
In recent years, people on the right in South Africa and the United States, including former President Donald J. Trump, have seized on attacks on white farmers to make the false claim that there have been mass killings.
There has been stochastic terrorism against white farmers as described in Disgrace, the Nobel-winning novel by J.M. Coetzee about black violence against South African farmers. When the African National Congress protested, Coetzee, a long- time Leftist, fled into exile in Australia.
Mr. Malema leads the Economic Freedom Fighters, a party that advocates taking white-owned land to give to Black South Africans. That has made his embrace of the chant all the more disturbing to some whites.
It would seem reasonable to describe EFF as the Far Left of South African politics, with 11% of the seats in the National Assembly. But then former ANC prime minister Jacob Zuma frequently sang “Kill the Boer” too.
Despite the words, the song should not be taken as a literal call to violence, according to Mr. Malema and veterans and historians of the anti-apartheid struggle. It has been around for decades, one of many battle cries of the anti-apartheid movement that remain a defining feature of the country’s political culture.
The chant was born at a time when Black South Africans were fighting a violent, racist regime, and was made popular in the early 1990s by Peter Mokaba, a former youth leader in the African National Congress. But the A.N.C., the liberation party that has governed South Africa since the beginning of multiracial democracy nearly 30 years ago, distanced itself from the song in 2012—the same year it expelled Mr. Malema for his incendiary statements.
The term “stochastic terrorism” makes sense for explaining the frequent murders of whites.
Similarly, he said, the phrase “kill the Boer”—the word means farmer in Dutch and Afrikaans—is not meant to promote violence against individual farmers. “It was a call to mobilize against an oppressive system,” Mr. Ngqulunga said.
Nomalanga Mkhize, a historian at Nelson Mandela University, said of the chant: “Young people feel that it rouses them up when they sing it today. I don’t think that they intend it to mean any harm.”
But John Steenhuisen, the white leader of the Democratic Alliance, South Africa’s main opposition party, filed charges this week against Mr. Malema at the United Nations Human Rights Council, and claimed, without providing evidence, that “brutal farm murders continue to escalate in the wake of Malema’s demagoguery.”
Analysts say that Mr. Steenhuisen is eager to placate white South Africans, who might be attracted to parties to his right, ahead of elections next year.
Mr. Malema, who thrives on provocation, projected a blasé attitude toward the criticism. “Bring it on small boy,” he wrote in a Tweet to Mr. Steenhuisen.
Asked during a news conference on Wednesday about Mr. Musk’s comment, Mr. Malema responded: “Why must I educate Elon Musk? He looks like an illiterate. The only thing that protects him is his white skin.”
Of course, the previous ANC prime minister Jacob Zuma had sung “Kill the Boer.”
In other news, while “Kill the Boer” is not to be taken literally, the New York Times takes Jason Aldeans’ ”Try That in a Small Town” very much on the nose:
Protest Scene Removed From Jason Aldean ‘Try That in a Small Town’ Video
A news clip of a Black Lives Matter protest in Atlanta was edited out of the music video after criticism that the song and video were offensive.
By Remy Tumin
July 26, 2023The music video for the song “Try That in a Small Town” by the country music star Jason Aldean appears to have been edited to remove violent images of Black Lives Matter protests after criticism that the song and the accompanying video were offensive.
The updated video, six seconds shorter than the original, no longer includes video clips from Fox News in Atlanta showing police violence against protesters during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. However, the video is still set at a Tennessee courthouse that was the site of a lynching, and it includes other clips of criminal activity and clashes between protesters and the police.
Portions of the Fox News clip appeared twice in the original music video, first projected against the exterior of the courthouse as Aldean sings about actions that he claims would not be tolerated in a small town: “carjack an old lady,” “cuss out a cop,” “stomp on the flag.”
The removed clip was filmed in Atlanta during the nationwide protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. The demonstrations grew so tense in Atlanta that the city’s mayor urged protesters to go home, and the governor of Georgia declared a state of emergency.
Country Music Television stopped airing the video last week, but did not confirm that it had done so in response to backlash against the song. The network and Mr. Aldean’s record label, BBR Music Group, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. In a statement to The Washington Post, which reported the changes to the video, BBR said that “the video footage was edited due to third-party copyright clearance issues.” …
State Representative Justin Jones of Tennessee, a Democrat, condemned the song on Twitter, describing it as a “heinous song calling for racist violence” that promoted “a shameful vision of gun extremism and vigilantism.
The general impression that blacks are too incompetent to mass kill the white geese that lay the golden eggs no matter how vicious are their views is widely shared. My guess is that it’s mostly true that black on white murders will largely be the work of the disproportionate number of black psychos. But will it always be true?
What would the ADL say about a sizable party whose theme song is “Kill the Jew”?
