Isaac Mogotsi: Trump vs Malema, 'White genocide' myth and a diplomatic showdown
Key topics
Trump accused of "ambushing" Ramaphosa in explosive White House exchange
Mogotsi warns EFF’s struggle song risks geopolitical backlash
Elon Musk, Afrikaner billionaires credited with defusing Trump’s fury
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By Issac Mogotsi
Public Appeal to the 47th USA President Donald J. Trump and to the Founder & Leader of the Economic Freedom Front (EFF) Commander-in-Chief (CIC) Julius S. Malema following the globally televised USA & South Africa diplomatic meltdown at the White House on 21 May 2025.
“Cowardice asks the question – is it safe?
Expediency asks the question – is it politic?
Vanity asks the question – is it popular?
But conscience asks the question – is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular;
But one must take it because it is right.”
Rev. Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”
Holy Bible, Matthew, 5:9.
Dear Honourable President Donald J. Trump, Sir,
Kindly receive my sincere and warm greetings from Africa, specifically from South Africa, otherwise known as Azania.
It was actually not my intention to write this second letter to you, Sir, certainly not so soon after the first, but your riveting press conference at the White House with our State President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa on 21 May 2025 definitely necessitated it and forced my hand and pen. To paraphrase one of the famous Soviet poets, we live in a time when we do not look for the topic, the topic finds us. Such is your very pulsating, fast-paced, drama-filled, high octane, highly transformational, globally impactful (of course not always positively so, but impactful nevertheless), unprecedented, historic, loudest, widely controversial 47th USA presidency and most certainly an American presidency most watched and most followed by the world on various media platforms in all the history of the USA, if not of the world.
This alone, Mr. President, makes you a standalone commanding leadership figure in human history.
I must start by expressing my deep appreciation to you, President Trump, for hosting our Head of State and to our State President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa for the incredibly diplomatic, suave and sensible manner he conducted himself throughout your highly confrontational and combustible televised encounter at the White House.
President Ramaphosa certainly represented South Africa, the rest of our wonderful African continent, as well as the entire Global South with amazing aplomb and distinction during that unprecedented and volatile press conference.
He passed his greatest, and even South Africa’s greatest diplomatic test since 1994 with flying colours, in my view.
Now that he is back home, President Ramaphosa is again game in our domestic democratic quarrels, unlike when he met you at the White House, when we almost all of us rallied behind him and his team the way I used to see almost all Americans rally behind their military when it engages in wars and operations abroad. We are now at liberty to critique some aspects of how he handled the encounter with you, Mr. President, whilst living it to the great American people to do the same regarding yourself, Sir, to a large extent.
This is what democracy in our two friendly counties is all about after all.
President Trump, I believe that after meeting our President in person at the White House, you can now understand why the Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin (via a video link), Chinese President Xi Jinping, the United Nations Secretary General (UNSG) Antonio Guterres, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Brazilian President Lula da Silva heaped praises on our President for what the UN SG called “unmatched diplomatic skills,” when South Africa hosted the Johannesburg BRICS Summit in 2023, in whose BRICS Business Forum I fortunately participated.
Mr. President, your White House encounter with our Head of State reminded me of the powerful words of USA President J.F. Kennedy that “the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”
Sir, it became clear that the persistent, persuasive - to you - and unrealistic myth of a so-called “white genocide” in South Africa against white Afrikaners overshadowed your meeting with President Ramaphosa. It ignited the televised drama and pyrotechnics of the encounter you joyfully unleashed on our unsuspecting and clearly befuddled President as you embarked on your incredible “Dim the Lights” White House moment, as if you sought to edge out from fame the legendary American singer Teddy Pendergrass’ Turn Off the Lights ballad.
But unlike Teddy Pendergrass, you were in no romantic mood to whisper sweet nothings into our President’s ears.
Quite the opposite.
Mr. President, your “Dim the Lights” presidential command sounded more like a presidential war cry to launch a bilateral conflagration between your inordinately much more powerful country and our small country. You seemed super hyped for a vicious verbal assault against our highest South African State actor. Thus you confirmed the trepidation I expressed in my first open tough love letter to you, Sir, of 18 May 2025, ahead of your encounter with President Ramaphosa. Frankly, when you commanded for the lights to be dimmed, I momentarily thought that, contrary to your strong Conservative and Christian values, you were about to propose a homosexual relationship to our “handsome” President, and then I feared that you were seeking to physically assault and do an extreme wrestling tackle on our President for taking apartheid Israel to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on a genocide charge, because, psychology having been one of my university subjects, I had never before seen anything like your “Dim The Lights” moment at the White House, especially between two Heads of State.
Sir, President Ramaphosa was so visibly startled by your “Dim the Lights” command to your White House underlings that the only time I saw him in such a distressed and highly uncomfortable state was when he was confronted by Advocate Dali Mpofu at the Farlam Commission into the 2012 Marikana massacre, in which some implicated him as complicit, with an email he had written as a tiny minority shareholder of some 9% in London Minerals (Lonmin) requesting police action against striking mineworkers, whom he cruelly characterised as “dastardly criminal,” near the town of Rustenburg in the North West province of our country.
Yesterday Elon Musk, your head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the man you declared at the same White House press conference that “he wanted this”, posted on his X, under the nickname “Kekius Maximus”, a photomontage of several American TV networks all describing your unusual press conference with our President as an “ambush”. Elon sought to dismiss the near consensus of the USA liberal and globalist media that you “ambushed” our President as “the legacy media conspiracy”.
For many South Africans, your evidently rehearsed White House spectacle you passed on as a White House press conference was very painful to watch, seeing as we were that our President was subjected to such global humiliation and daylight roughing up by the leader of the world’s most powerful country on behalf of a myth and a false narrative about a so-called “white genocide” against our white Afrikaner compatriots.
President Trump, we collectively felt that you were abusing your home advantage as a host, something totally unsportsmanlike and diplomatically frowned upon, as you must know well.
I agree with Maggie Haberman of the New York Times when she stated in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on the White House kerfuffle, Mr. President, that you began to calm down from the moment the white Afrikaner South African billionaire friend of yours Johann Rupert began to address you. It was at that point, I also noticed, when you climbed off your White House high horse and stopped what Haberman called your “lecture” to our President about a nonsensical, non-existent so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa.
As I watched the intensity with which you listened first to Rupert and then to Ernie Else and Retief Goosen, two great international South African golfers in attendance, we South Africans released a collective sigh of relief as we felt that the three white Afrikaner patriots had successfully negotiated democratic South Africa out of the diplomatic equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis trap you had laid, Mr. President.
It was that close.
So I want to thank President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa and his team for the strategic genius of including the three white Afrikaner global celebrities as part of the presidential delegation to meet with you.
The world, especially America under your leadership, Mr. President, is what it is and not what we would like it to be in our minds.
Of course South Africa being a robust and noisy democracy there naturally is some unhappiness in certain political quarters here that the white Afrikaner male was overrepresented on our President’s side, just in terms of the demographics of our country.
However the majority of South Africans appreciated that because the persistent, persuasive and unrealistic myth about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa you have enthusiastically embraced, Sir, comes primarily from fringe alt right white Afrikaner quarters, backed by a powerful former South African billionaire player in the inner sanctum of your closest presidential advisors, namely Elon Musk, the inclusion of Rupert, Els and Goosen was a diplomatic masterstroke by President Ramaphosa.
You were clearly not going to be swayed by some Zulu, or Sotho, or Shangaan or Coloured or South African Indian from the persistent myth about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa.
I watched you via the streamed version of the press conference, Mr. President, as you intensely listened to the three white Afrikaner patriots debunking the persistent, persuasive and unrealistic myth of their fellow white Afrikaners from the lunatic alt right fringe. Given their very close knowledge of and association with you over many, many years, no other South African could have successfully saved the meeting for South Africa as well as they did.
It was clear by your warlike “Dim the Lights” command that not even the late former President Nelson Mandela nor Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the very best of our best, would have succeeded to calm you down and persuade you away from your determination to confront our State President on behalf of a persistent, persuasive, unrealistic and unfounded myth but for a white Afrikaner billionaire and two fabulously wealthy white Afrikaner golfers who accompanied President Ramaphosa.
In that sense they, President Ramaphosa and Zingiswa Losi, the President of the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) performed a rare patriotic duty and an almost unmatched diplomatic service at the highest and most fraught level since the dawn of our democracy.
I salute and thank them from the bottom of my heart for a diplomatic job exceedingly well done. The five of them richly deserve the highest accolades our country and its people can confer on outstanding South African patriots.
I shall explain below why I am not including Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen of the co-ruling Democratic Alliance (noticed that I did not say “our?” Agriculture Minister) in that five richly deserving of the highest of our national accolades.
ON CIC JULIUS SELLO MALEMA & THE ECONOMIC FREEDOM FIGHTERS.
However, Mr. President Donald Trump, there were very uncomfortable aspects regarding your encounter with our President that cannot be left unsaid and unchallenged, primarily with regard to the videos you played showcasing Malema singing the “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” song as well as regarding the conduct of the South African delegation.
Let me hasten to say that I am not a member nor supporter of the EFF, although in protest to the pervasive corruption and bad governance of the ANC of the last thirty years, I have always made a point, post the Nelson Mandela presidency, of voting ANC in my national ballot and EFF in my provincial ballot. In that sense you could call me a reluctant, secondary EFF voter.
If the ANC had shaped up well in government in the last three decades, I would have voted for them the way I did the first time I voted in my country in 1994. I would not have had to cast a protest vote for the EFF. I suspect that this protest vote against the corruption and bad governance of the ANC is what accounts for how the EFF has become such a strong electoral force since its founding, as you correctly observed at the press conference, President Trump, and why the ANC was booted out of power in the election of last year.
Given the sacrifices I made as a young man for the freedoms and democracy we enjoy today, I can never protest against the ANC by staying at home during elections and not cast my vote. But given the corrupt and failing ANC, giving it all my vote is also not possible.
Neither do I know Julius Malema personally, except through my writing over the years about him on the online Politicsweb site. I am not sure that he even recalls, but we fleetingly met at a distance at a posh Sandton, Johannesburg hotel at one of the lavish receptions hosted following the inauguration of former president Jacob Zuma in 2009. We did not even exchange words but looked at each other at a distance.
At that evening reception Malema was utterly isolated. No one seemed to be interested to touch him with a ten foot pole. I remember for much of the time at that reception he stood alone with a glass in his hand surveying the reception area, as if inviting anyone to come and chat to him. No one moved to join him. The next time I checked and looked at where he had stood, he had gone and left the reception.
I am reminded of the 15 November 2011 Pretoria News cartoon by the cartoonist Mgobhozi of Julius Malema near death in a hospital ICU, attended to by a doctor and a nurse and the nurse asking the doctor “how many lives does he still have?” and Malema, semicomatose and eyes closed, saying to the two medical professionals “ICU soon.” This was the time when Malema was beleaguered within the ANC and before he formed the EFF.
Incredibly, Malema did do the “ICU soon,” one of the most remarkable Second Coming, maybe on par with yours, Mr. President.
Fourteen years later, Mr. President Trump, you have made Malema perhaps the most powerful, most famous and most influential young leader on Earth via your bizarre “Dim the Lights” White House moment.
Back to my “relationship” with the CIC.
Over the years I have inconsistently and very irregularly kept in touch with him by Facebook and the then Twitter by way of me sharing with him articles I hoped would broaden his mind and political horizon. It was always a one-way street. He never shared anything with me.
I remember I also made two pointed requests over those social media platforms to him and had a 5O% success, if you are of the glass-half full disposition, or 5O% failure rate, if you are of the glass-half-empty disposition, Mr. President.
The first request I made to Julius Malema was in 2015 during his visit to London, I think it was over Facebook, can’t recall well now. What I do clearly recall was that I requested him to never gang up with the DA following the 2016 local election. His curt response was “why not?” I tried to explain myself to him but he never engaged me further in reply.
The second time I made a request to Malema was when he was already a Member of Parliament (MP) for the EFF. I can’t recall the year well, but it might have been in 2019 or 2020 or 2021. My Twitter request to him was to ask him to reign in some young EFF goons who were interfering with the authority of the headmen (traditional leaders) in my village and the villages around it (Hebron and Kgabalatsane.) Malema, who was busy in some parliamentary deliberations, instantly responded and asked me to elaborate as he could not call back as he was busy in parliament. After I tweeted to him the details of my request, he directed me to send my request to some EFF leadership platform. I did as he requested and soon thereafter I noticed that the harassment of the village traditional leaders by EFF goons around my village stopped immediately and that the EFF leader around our villages was deployed as an EFF member in the Rustenburg municipal council. The headmen have never experienced any problem from the EFF since.
I was eternally thankful to Malema for that gesture and for responding promptly, decisively and empathetically, not choosing to side with his own members but securing the authority of traditional leaders much older than he was.
I certainly do not have any relationship with the EFF nor have I ever benefited in any way, financially or otherwise, from it, other than as I just outlined. I have not visited any of their offices or attended any of their political events. Frankly their radical youth politics and their modes of outward political expression, especially their propensity, as much as yours, President Trump, to use crude words and even profanities to address those they disagree with, such as calling former president Jacob Zuma “domkop,” as in a dunderhead, do not appeal to me to the extent that I would want to join them or be a marginal part of the EFF. (Ditto, Mr. President, your shouting down an NBC journalist who asked you a question about a plane gift from Qatar and whom you dismissed as ‘fake news” during your “Dim the Light” presidential circus show at the White House.)
Neither do I really appreciate their singing of the struggle song “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” although I too sang it with passion as a political exile before 1990.
APPEAL TO CIC JULIUS MALEMA AND EFF.
If anything, I would like to appeal to EFF Commander in Chief (CIC) to deeply reflect, together with his EFF leadership core and their general membership, at the tremendous harm the singing of the song is now doing to our country as a weapon in the hands of deeply evil and malevolent forces, domestically and abroad, opposed to our democratic dispensation, constitutional order and the transformation imperative.
The singing of the song by them has become the weakest and most dangerous link in our collective national efforts to promote, protect and defend our posty-1994 political and constitutional achievement as well as our national sovereignty and territorial integrity.
I do not think Malema and the EFF will necessarily heed my call either, but if they were to, I would hope they do it before President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa and our democratic government host the G20 Summit later this year.
It is inconceivable that Julius Malema and the collective of the EFF think that the Revolution stands or falls on the basis of them singing the “kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” song, albeit that the Constitutional Court, our highest court, has deemed the singing of the song not to be in violation of any of our laws nor our Constitution.
But sometimes one refrains from doing certain things because one has outgrown a certain stage of growth and circumstances have changed dramatically, and not because the things one did before are necessarily illegal or wrong.
As a black father of three adult children myself, I appeal to CIC Julius Malema and the EFF to consider the real-time mortal danger that inimical forces, both domestically and internationally, may not hesitate to politically abuse their continual singing of the “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” song to visit the “Gaza Option” on the black youth in particular and on democratic South Africa in general, on account that post-apartheid and democratic South Africa hauled apartheid Israel before the International Criminal Court (ICC) on the charge of genocide.
This starkly is a real revenge possibility entertained by some profoundly demonic forces here on Earth.
Even if they fine-tune their offensive to target Malema and the EFF alone, it would be very devastating to the country as the EFF is the largest youth political formation in the country and houses arguably some of the best young black minds and politically most activist of our young black flowers who need and will continue to need unhindered access to western markets, capital, technology transfer and know-how to help them to address the past legacies which lead them to sing that song in the first place.
As good Marxists they proclaim themselves to be, CIC Malema and the EFF members would know what Vladimir Lenin, the founder of Soviet power, wrote about regarding the inordinate importance of correctly reading the political juncture at any point of one’s political, propaganda and ideological work in society and the huge dangers of dogmatism and subjectivism which are impervious to the real, objective world around them.
The bell is tolling.
For Whom the Bell Tolls? once asked one of the greatest American novelists of all time Ernest Hemingway.
I make bold to hazard that at this fraught political and diplomatic moment internationally, the bell is tolling for the EFF!
Wake up and smell coffee, EFF!
We do not want the “Gaza Option” to be hurled your and our way.
South Africa and Africa need a responsible and maturing EFF to continue to exist and to conceivably, after the 2029 election, become part of democratic South Africa’s first avowedly Left and anti-neoliberal government.
The continued singing by them of the “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” song is the biggest existential threat to Malema’s EFF, to a united Left and progressive political project which excludes the sellout ANC neoliberal faction of Ramaphosa in cahoots with the DA in the sellout Government of National Unity (GNU).
Such is the acute political challenge before the EFF at this current junction. Time unfortunately, is not on the EFF’s side on this one.
There must absolutely be no doubt in Julius Malema’s head and in the EFF as a whole that very, very dark clouds and ominous, evil and highly destructive forces are circling over them, ready to viciously pounce and hit very hard against them, if not against our country, anytime from now on account of their singing the “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” song.
They need to act fast before it’s too late.
South Africa and Africa do not deserve what apartheid Israel’s political and military leadership calls in reference to Gaza as “the mowing of the grass.” We as nation should stand together to defeat any possibility of the genocidal “Gaza Option” ever being visited on democratic South Africa.
The ANC itself was once forced by changed circumstances in the early 1990s to abandon the armed struggle and to call for the lifting of sanctions on white Afrikaners’ apartheid system before our 1994 election and even before we were really certain that former last colonial and apartheid President F.W. de Klerk’s reform agenda was irreversible.
But very painful decisions had to be made at the time by the outstanding and phenomenal ANC leadership core at the time, (incomparable to the very corrupt post-Nelson Mandela ANC), for the sake of our people and in order to advance and consolidate our democratic and constitutional project.
In January 2012 I wrote an article for the online Politicsweb site under the title “The nationalisation question in South Africa” where I gave three reasons why Julius Malema and the EFF would never succeed in their campaign for nationalisation of mines and for land grabs without compensation.
Those three reasons still hold true today.
They apply infinitely more so regarding the EFF’s ill-advised and now very dangerous insistence to continue to sing the revolutionary song “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer,” albeit constitutionally permitted to do so.
No purist in a Revolution survives if he does not move along with and adapt to fast-changing objective circumstances around him or her. Many a revolutionary and a revolutionary party have withered or perished for doing precisely that.
I hope and pray that the CIC and the mighty EFF will not join at the political and ideological graveyard those that did so.
The EFF’s enemies within the ANC Tripartite Alliance will not defeat the CIC and the EFF. MKP of former president Jacob Zuma will not defeat CIC and the EFF. Those former EFF leaders who have now joined MKP will not defeat the EFF. Johann Rupert, the Oppenheimers and big white capital will not defeat the EFF. Kallie Kriel, Ernst Roets, AfriForum and Solidariteit will never ever defeat CIC and the EFF. Donald J. Trump will not defeat the EFF. Western imperialism and neo-colonialism will not defeat CIC and the EFF. A hateful, unfounded but persistent myth about a so-called “white genocide” against white Afrikaners will not defeat CIC and the EFF. Nobody on Earth can defeat CIC and the EFF
But the continued singing of the revolutionary song “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” under current international conditions will not only defeat CIC and the EFF.
They might also bury them for good.
Be wise CIC and EFF!
Make the right choice now!
Choose well!
Time is of the essence.
I wish you Godspeed in that right choice you will hopefully make soonest.
Be blessed.
Dear President Donald J. Trump,
At an academic and intellectual level, I am of course hugely and abidingly interested in the EFF as a political formation, as I believe that I would rather have a highly radicalised South African black youth rather than a black youth wallowing in drugs, sex work and trafficking, in mindless criminality and in other such social ills, wallowing in religious pieties and dogmas, or a black youth completely detached and disinterested in the larger political issues of the day, other than narrowly to do with the advancement of their immediate personal and material interests, what the great German poet Bertolt Brecht rightly called “the political illiterate” who “doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions” and who “…is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics.”
That is the kind of youth political illiteracy I, like Bertolt Brecht, deeply detests, Mr. President Trump.
I would rather we have our black youth flocking to Julius Malema and his EFF than to have such a politically apathetic and disinterested black youth of political illiterates in South Africa chest-beating and shouting “we hate politics.”.
I hope the above digression on CIC Julius Malema and the EFF has set the table well for what follows, Mr. President.
Brace yourself!
Fasten your seatbelt.
You are about to hit turbulence, Sir.
Mr. President, I was therefore perplexed and disappointed that the South African delegation of Presient Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa which just met you did not include South Africa’s radical or unemployed youth to address you in person about their plight as the leader of the wealthiest country in the world.
I view this as a regrettable lost opportunity as you might have been made to appreciate that any country with the level of youth (mainly black) unemployment estimated at around 65%, with South Africa’s very high levels of youth poverty and functional illiteracy, with the majority of our black youth living in squalor in a country considered by many as the most unequal in the entire world, with catastrophic levels of criminality which have engulfed all – and I mean ALL – our communities - and not just the white Afrikaner farming community -, with the unmitigated and profound very high levels of black poverty and suffering, that those conditions would almost always lead to the emergence of radical youth politics, ideology and activism, whether on the left or right, anywhere in the world, and not just in South Africa.
So it was deeply disappointing that you, Mr. President, instead of committing the USA you lead to massively scale up its investment flows into our South African economy to assist us to address these challenges placed by our sad history of the last almost four hundred years of white western European and apartheid rule before our young, you chose to harangue our President “to arrest” Julius Malema.
“Why don’t you arrest this man?”, you tragically asked our astonished President regarding CIC Julius Malema.
Now I have been closely following USA politics as a very young man in my village through reading the legendary black journalist and editor Percy Qoboza’s The World newspaper, the predecessor to the Sowetan of today, since around 1974/1975, and I must say that for me it was the first time ever to hear an American president in a White House meeting with a foreign counterpart calling on the latter to arrest his or her citizen for this or that wrongdoing. The first time ever. At least from since President Jimmy Carter introduced the protection of human rights around the world as a core objective of US foreign policy. Typically American presidents before you in the recent past used their White House pulpit to call on their foreign counterparts to release this or that political dissident in their jails, not to arrest them.
Mr. President, this call of yours to our President “to arrest” the leader of a legal, democratic, parliamentary and vibrant EFF was very strange because about a week before your White House meeting with President Ramaphosa, you had met with the young new Syrian President Al Jolani, a former very brutal and highly murderous member and leader of America’s sworn enemies in the form of the terrorist organisations of Al Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which killed many American soldiers serving in the Middle East and thousands more innocent citizens of Iraq and Syria. Although previously the USA administrations had put a bounty of ten million dollars for the arrest of Al Jolani, whose new Syrian government just recently carried out a massacre in the predominantly Alawite north western coastal provinces of Syria, in your meeting with former Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorist Al Jolani in Saudi Arabia, you did not wheel in a big plasma TV to display gory pictures to remind the world of Al Jolani’s deeply vile former terrorist activities in the service of Al Qaeda and ISIS.
You did absolutely none of that, Mr. President.
Instead you beamed your white smile and cruelly, for Al Jolani’s thousands of victims, described the former terrorist Al-Jolaani’s past, to quote you ad verbatim, as “very strong”, whatever absolute nonsense you meant by that regarding Al-Jolani’s past which involved his terrorist, murderous and even genocidal rampages across Iraq and Syria.
You also, disgustingly, described former terrorist Al Jolani as “very strong and a handsome young man.”
[Please pass me the vomit bag, Mr. President!]
You cruelly failed to see or smell any traces of the tried blood of innocent victims on former terrorist Al Jolani’s hands you grabbed and chose to look past his abominable terrorist rampages across Iraq and Syria.
Mr. President, you in addition lifted American sanctions on Syria to give Al Jolani’s government a chance, as you eloquently but shamelessly put it, “a chance to succeed”.
Fine. As far as it goes.
My question to you, Mr. President is, why do you find Julius Malema’s singing of the song “Kill the Bower, Kill the Farmer” much more offensive than the past murderous, terrorist rampages of Al Jolani, including his killing and beheading of many westerners, and specifically American soldiers, as well as thousands of innocent Iraqis and Syrians as part of Al Qaeda and ISIS your government deems as terrorist outfits?
Neither CIC Julius Malema nor any EFF member have never killed any white Afrikaner farmer nor any American, European, Asian or Latin American, Shia, Sunni or any African because of their singing of the song “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer.”
Yet in a space of just about two weeks your presidential schedule showed a global split screen of you meeting and praising to high heavens a former Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorist leader in Saudi Arabia and, on the other side of the global split screen, you viciously berating Julius Malema before the whole global audience watching your bizarre “ambush” of our President in the White House at which you called for Malema to be arrested for just singing a song.
Mr. President Trump, how do you explain and justify such a glaring and even frightening inconsistency on your part?
Do mean to say you can do that just because America has the most powerful military in the world?
Is that it?
In its murderous, if not genocidal, terrorist rampages across Iraq and Syria, Al Jolani’s Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) declared itself a State, meaning it forcefully confiscated land without compensation which belonged to the Syrian and Iraqi authorities recognised by the international community.
Malema and the EFF merely sing about killing and merely promise to confiscate land from white Afrikaner farmers without compensation, but have done none of that in practice and actuality.
Yet, Mr. President, you direct your bitter ire against them, whilst at the same you warmly embrace and rehabilitate a former, unelected and most certainly undemocratic terrorist cum head of State of Syria into the international community of nations?
Come on, dear Sir.
How do you explain and justify such inconsistencies on your part, President Trump?
You humiliate the president of Ukraine Volodymir Zelensky, whom I consider a sock puppet of globalists, before the world as an “unelected leader,” but glorify a known global terrorist who was wanted by USA administration, dead or alive, and had a bounty on his head.
How do you explain such a disturbing inconsistency, Sir?
You also recently met with President Bukhele of El Salvador, a young leader of a country you once described as a “shithole”, but who today pleases you because he has built what is today the world’s most notorious and feared prison and locks up people there in a manner most foul but which you find most admirable and worthy of imitation in the USA in the form of a rehabilitated Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary (prison) on Alcatraz island in California.
In your recent meeting with Bukhele at the White House, where you were all smiles and fulsome in praises to your young and truly handsome guest, you were most amiable and never wheeled in a large plasma TV to show to the whole world the “shithole” side of El Salvador which necessitated its Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT) maximum security prison in the first place.
Instead you heaped lavish praises on the President Bukhele.
Why then do you choose to foreclose any avenue that CIC Julius Malema too may in the future mend his ways, emerge as a young, dynamic leader of South Africa, lock many of us up on Robben Island, the former notorious maximum prison which maybe inspired the construction of Alcatraz, where Nelson Mandela and other members of South Africa’s Greatest and Glorious Generation of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid political activists were imprisoned?
Recently, Mr. President, you took a very laudable decision to suspend the closing of the operation of the hugely popular around the world, including in the USA, Chinese TikTok video app in the USA because you realised, correctly, that it was very popular amongst America’s youth, who were the backbone of your 2024 November astonishing presidential election victory over “low IQ” (your phrase) Kamala Harris.
It was very admirable that you took this correct decision not because you would gain financially from it, but because you listened, are very attuned and responsive to the cries and concerns of America’s younger generation which is hooked on to TikTok, despite TikTok being accused by the American Congress as representing “a national security threat” to America through its massive data collection ability and which data it is alleged could be abused by the ruling Chinese Communist Party to harm America.
It didn’t matter much to you that TikTok was Chinese and accused of such nefarious activities in the USA. You let it be in the USA, at least temporarily.
You did not call for TikTok executives in the USA to be arrested. What was uppermost in your mind was what best served the American youth who voted for you in huge numbers.
I admire that sensitivity on your side to the concerns of America’s young.
I wish you could extend such a laudable concern for the young to the black youth of South Africa by considering to give Julius Malema and the EFF a second chance, instead of you publicly calling for the arrest of CIC Malema.
Mr. President, do you recall a heart-warming story you told in your book Think Big and Kiss Ass on pages 162 – 165 under the title “Everyone deserves a second chance,” where you narrated the story of a young Miss USA, Tara Conner who, according to you, “broke pageant rules by using drugs and alcohol in excess publicly in New York City”.
You gave her a second chance and did not call for her to be arrested.
The important lesson you drew from that incident involving Mss USA was that “do not jump down the throat of every employee who makes a mistake. If you punish every mistake severely, you set a standard that is hard to achieve. Many people will play it too safe in order not to make mistakes. Mistakes will decrease but so will productivity and ingenuity.”
Well said, Sir.
The same rule applies in politics, President Trump, especially youth politics, where non-observance of that rule leads directly to lack of political ingenuity, creativity and a fear for political experimentation with new and robust political ideas.
And it leads directly to the political illiteracy and apathy which the great German poet Bertolt Brecht strongly condemned.
I believe neither you want political illiteracy and apathy to engulf the youth of the world.
The famed American anthropologist Margaret Mead once said that the young must be allowed to lead as they work together with elders, because the young can pose questions which old people can never dare to ask and can go where the old may never dream to tread.
Mr. President, you must know that former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the same man you called “Governor Trudeau of the 51st State of America” (LOL), engaged in the offensive black face masking as a young man.
But look where he ended up in life!
Didn’t the young Prince Harry of Britain once appear at a 2005 costume party in Britain dressed in a Nazi soldier uniform, but today is a married to a ravishingly beautiful Canadian woman of colour, something Nazis would abhor?
Mr. President, didn’t you yourself once fraternise with Jeffrey Epstein in the earlier, highly permissive and seemingly prurient stage of your life? Yet today Jeffrey Epstein’s name is a byword for child sex trafficking? (See The Guardian, UK article titled “Jeffrey Epstein details close relationship with Trump in newly released tapes” of 01 November 2024.)
And now that you are the 47th USA President, are you going to release the #EpsteinFiles un-embargoed, Mr. Trump?
Why the delay in releasing those files?
And maybe the most extraordinary of them all, Sir:
Didn’t the younger JD Vance, your current Vice President, several years back call you “America’s Hitler”?
Yet here we are today and you have found goodness and strength in you to forgive JD Vance and gave him a vice presidential chance.
You did not call for the young JD Vance to be arrested.
Do you know how many people Adolf Hitler killed, Sir, and how many countries he destroyed?
And you find CIC Malema and the EFF singing the song “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” far worse than you being called “America’s Hitler,” a through and through genocidal fascist?
Are you all together upstairs, Mr. Trump?
True, the young often can do terrible things they later regret.
I know that as a father myself.
It’s why you were correct, Mr. President, in saying that we shouldn’t be too harsh on those making mistakes, as mistakes are part of growing up and maturing when you are young (and indeed even when you are older or aging, like you.)
This is how we should understand CIC Julius Malema and his youthful EFF members, Sir, and not call them “these animals”, as your former National Security Advisor General Flynn did on X on 21 March 2025 and not refer to them as “genocidal”, as an X account under the nickname “The Vigilant Fox” did on X immediately following your “Dim the Lights” White House circus mauling of President Ramaphosa.
Neither did I agree with Glenn Beck posting on X on the same day in reference to your humiliation of our State President and you showcasing CIC Malema singing the “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” song that you had played a 4D chess at that shambolic and now very infamous White House encounter.
As a chess player of note myself taught by the Russian chess masters how to play the game in the 1980s, yours was more like ancient Rome’s brutal venatio of trained bestiari in the Circus Maximus of the Colosseum arena, Mr. President, and not 4D chess.
Only that our President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa looked more like a lamb to the slaughter than a trained bestiari, whilst you took the role of the most vicious of beasts of ancient Rome’s venatio.
Sir, as you know well and as a very good family man and father yourself are aware, when a child is a problem child, parents must be the first to be blamed and must have enough patience to mould such a child, and not to expel a political problem child from the mother political organisation, as President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa did to Malema from the ANC and the ANC youth league.
However at your “Dim the Lights” White House circus beamed to the whole world, you did not hold President Ramaphosa responsible for producing the problem child you berated as he chaired the ANC National Disciplinary Appeal Commission (ANC NDAC) which recommended the expulsion of CIC Malema.
In other words, you absolved President Ramaphosa of any parental responsibility towards Malema and focused solely on the problem child.
A problematic child is often a reflection of his or her parent, in Malema’s political case, it is the ANC, which expelled him from its ranks for criticising the neighbouring country of the Republic of Botswana.
This means, Mr. President, that were you a member of the ANC today, the ANC would have expelled you from its ranks for your utterances on Canada, Mexico, Panama, Greenland, the Gulf of…uh…Mexico, and on Gaza in Palestine.
Let that sink in.
President Trump, the irony is that many of us here in Africa actually view you as the white Julius Malema of the angry and poor white American working class and the very greedy white American oligarchs you are part of.
The similarities between you and CIC Malema are astonishing.
You are both transformational figures, no doubt. You are both rude, loud, strong, very influential, capable of amassing huge sycophantic mass following, have no time for stupid media questions, bear grudges, impervious to advice from those you look down upon, you are politically reckless both of you, you are very self-assured and confident, you push political boundaries to the extreme limit, you like to “fight, fight, fight,” as you put it, you deeply detest the status quo, you are brash, you are well-off both and you do not like to apologise for your errors. You both seem to defy normal political gravitational forces which hobble normal, usual politicians. You both have been counted politically done in, dead and finished but you both did remarkable Second Coming and “ICU soon” miracles.
And, most crucially, you are both shaking the world to its foundation, more so yourself, Mr. President.
Perhaps, Mr President, you hate CIC Malema so much because you see yourself in him.
President Trump,
In our case the black youth under a democratic and constitutional dispensation will never tire to ask why black people own only 4% of productive farmland in South Africa when black people are 93% of the population and white South Africans are merely 7% (using the 2022 estimates) of the population? The same 7% of the population own close to 50% of prime privately held urban and residentially developed coastline land of South Africa.
They will never tire to ask why individual black shareholders own less than 10% of direct shareholding and 13% of indirect shareholding on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), if one uses the wildly exaggerated and most optimistic available figures provided by the Alternative Prosperity research outfit in 2015, given the aforementioned demographic breakdown per race.
Neither will they tire to ask why since South Africa’s Employment Equity Commission was established in 1999, its yearly reports ritually show that the white 7% of the South African population occupy anything from 65% to 72% of the tippy top executive positions in top blue-chip companies on JSE, not to mention the same or even worse picture which emerges in big to medium white companies unlisted on JSE.
They will not tire and they must not tire to raise these questions as young black people, including why, according to the 2012 figures, white South Africans making up 7% of the population make up incredible 76% of the full professor positions in our universities.
The young and questioning black minds will also ask why the five biggest of anything of value in our economy is white-owned, whether the five biggest banks, the five biggest law firms, the five biggest engineering companies, the five biggest media houses, the five biggest construction companies, the five biggest millers, the five biggest road construction companies, the five biggest brewers, the five biggest wine makers, the five biggest hospitality companies, the five biggest travel companies, the five biggest private printing companies, the five biggest book retailers, the five biggest private hospital chains, the five biggest manufacturing companies, the five biggest industrial conglomerates, the five biggest medical aid companies, the five biggest insurance companies, the five biggest mining companies, the five biggest IT companies, the five biggest shipping companies, the five biggest agricultural companies, the five biggest importers, the five biggest importers, the five biggest of anything of value in our economy, are white, given the aforementioned demographic figures in our country?
Even in death the statistics follow like death follows birth in real life, as the five biggest life and funeral cover companies as well as the five biggest gravestone construction companies in South Africa are white-owned, in a country where the black majority constitute 93% of the population, three decades after the corrupt ANC came to power?
Mr. President, how do you expect these horrendous figures limning our horrendous racial inequalities not to animate young black minds towards political radical politics and occasionally even towards political extremism?
Our leaders in business and politics are prone to spew out these figures at the slightest provocation but do absolutely nothing to fundamentally change the picture to address the legacy of the past other than to enrich themselves beyond their wildest dream through proximity to political power.
Compare that woeful performance by the ANC in power in the last three decades to the astonishing economic progress Malaysia achieved within a similar time span after it launched its own version of empowering the majority native Malay population.
It’s a difference between day and night.
Of course the standard explanation usually trotted out is that the legacy of apartheid is obdurate, enduring, multi-layered and highly complex.
Many in South Africa’s white community would want us to believe that their wealth and privileges are the result of discipline, grit, hard work, dedication, ingenuity and persistence rewarded and that apartheid and colonialism in our country per se had little to nothing to do with these outcomes.
It’s a laughable self-serving posture of course!
It is why Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen used his two minute global fame President Ramaphosa accorded to him in front of you to give, according to the erudite South African journalist with a waspish pen Richard Poplak of Daily Maverick, “a campaign speech” at your “Dim the Lights” White House ambush, choosing to lash out at CIC Malema, instead of telling you, Sir, how he suggests his political party will address the legacy of apartheid and colonialism.
Mr. President, your fellow conservative black American professor Walter Williams was quoted by the legendary The Sunday Times white English South African editor Ken Owen (RIP) in his book These Times: A Decade of South African Politics (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 1992) as writing in his (Walter Williams’s) book South Africa’s War Against Capitalism that “…the whole ugly history of apartheid has been an attack on free markets and the rights of the individuals and the glorification of centralised government powers.” (Ken Owen, ibid, page 224)
So, Mr. President, apartheid and its bitter privileges and economic benefits for a minority white community in our country are not just an antithesis of what the democratic and constitutional ideals of the black majority in South Africa are about, but are also a clear, direct and irresoluble contradiction to the core economic tenets and principles of what American economic conservatism you believe in so fervently is all about.
From all you said over many years, Sir, you believe in free markets. Apartheid was anything but a free market as it forcibly confiscated without any compensation whatsoever huge tracts of land from black South Africans in both urban and rural areas. You believed and continue to believe that at the core of free markets system such as exist in the USA are free and empowered individuals with rights which enable them to act in their rational self-interest. Apartheid was anything but that for the 93% of the South African population for over four decades since 1948. In the case of west European colonialism in our country, it was close to 400 years excluding the black majority from free markets.
Mr President, on innumerable occasions you have stated your desire to devolve power from the Federal Government of the USA to the States. You oppose suffocating regulations from centralised government centre, or from the Federal Government in the case of the USA. Apartheid was the most centralised system in the world outside Nazi Germany and the Eastern Communist bloc before the three of them collapsed, thanks God.
Mr. President, you are also known around the world as a self-made billionaire in the real estate market and you empower the free enterprise of entrepreneurs, their creativity, innovation and ingenuity. Apartheid, which in your White House meeting with President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa you described, correctly, as “terrible,” was the opposite of all that for 93% of the South African population. Besides being terrible, apartheid was a crime against humanity, as so declared by the United Nations (UN), and the most abominable racist system since Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Its legacy and injustices against the majority black population cannot be left unattended to if national prosperity, peace and long-term stability are to prevail in democratic South Africa.
The point I am making, Mr. President, is that be wary of attempts by those who most benefited and continue to benefit from the apartheid system which was a vile and despicable “attack on free markets and the rights of individuals”, as the American black conservative Walter Williams put it, to trap you, Sir, in their corner and use you as their most powerful shield against the just and necessary attempts by the democratic government of South Africa, under tremendous pressure from the black youth, at redress of the glaring and unconscionable legacy of apartheid, a government power centralising and anti-free market and anti-capitalist system par excellence.
Mr. President, the American Thinker, which produced the article from which your advisor(s) lifted off a picture of a massacre by Rwanda-backed rebels in Goma, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for you to, I believe, unknowingly whip out and use as a blistering, libellous and slanderous accusation against democratic South Africa during your “Dim the Lights” White House meeting with President Ramaphosa as some irrefutable proof that democratic South Africa is committing a so-called “white genocide” against white Afrikaners, maliciously spreads the false and deeply offensive lie that the ANC and black people in South Africa seek to build a “socialist” government in South Africa by way of redress of past injustices of white Afrikaners’ apartheid system.
Nothing could be further from the truth, Honourable President.
The ANC does seek to build a thriving mixed market economy in our democratic country but unfortunately has gone about doing so in the most corrupt way of self-enrichment of its leaders than the poor black communities across our country who largely vote for it, and not because it seeks to build a socialist economy in our country.
The ANC’s biggest weakness in the last thirty years, Sir, has been precisely its monumental failure to build a thriving, autonomous, powerful, ingenious, resourceful, innovative, adaptable, adept and globally competitive black bourgeoisie (top capitalist class) in South Africa comparable to the native bourgeois classes of say Japan, South Korea, the rest of East Asian Tigers and of China or even of the Gulf countries you just visited or even of the Islamic Republic of Iran or of India, because the ANC leaders preferred and still prefer to suckle from the tits of white oligarchs who amassed their wealth under the anti-capitalist apartheid system which conservative black American professor Walter Williams so powerfully critiqued in his book.
The building of such a powerful mass and truly patriotic black bourgeois class in post-apartheid and democratic South Africa, and not a creation of a small sliver of overnight and rapacious wealthy Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) oligarchs like President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa and his brother-in-law and your billionaire friend Patrice Motsepe, amongst a very few others, is no substitute for the creation of a very large pool of an indigenous, native black, especially black African, bourgeois class in South Africa capable of powering our national economy, if not our sub-region, ahead and which is not dependent on the white billionaire oligarchs like your friend white Afrikaner billionaire Johann Rupert, Brian Joffe of Bidvest, the Oppenheimers, the Minell family and neither on what the journalist and author Pieter du Toit terms the Stellenbosch Mafia, with the town Stellenbosch being “the cradle of Afrikanerdom”, as an Amazon blurb about the book puts it. (See Pieter du Toit’s book The Stellenbosch Mafia: Inside the Billionaire Club, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2019).
Democratic South Africa needs urgently a thriving and mass native black bourgeoisie to supplant the apartheid- and colonialism-era white bourgeoisie created with the huge and undeserved entitlements, assets transfers and unfree markets of the apartheid and colonial era in our country, Mr. President.
Mr. President, like many others in the world, I regard your second, non-consecutive term presidency as akin to a massive global political earthquake or a global tsunami that has hit the world and is shaking everything. You are undoubtedly a hugely transformational figure, as I said before. You are on occasions even an original and deep thinker, albeit intuitively so, contrary to what apartheid Israel’s Alon Pincus, former Consul General to New York, said about you, which I quoted in my first letter to you, Sir.
I for one even consider you, in a non-Marxist and purely narrow, utilitarian power politics sense as the world’s first true anti-Lenin Leninist in the way you understand the mechanics of State power in what Lenin called The State and Revolution, although in your case I would call it The America First State and Global Counter-Revolution.
It is this The America First State and Global Counter-Revolution of yours which has made you so ready, eager and open not only to embrace but also to be the chief global propagandist and purveyor of the persistent, persuasive, unrealistic and hurtfully false myth about a so-called “white genocide” against white Afrikaners in democratic South Africa.
But I must deflate your bragging rights hellium balloon, Sir, when it comes to how you have handled the persistent, persuasive, unrealistic and false myth about democratic South Africa.
On this score, you have been profoundly unoriginal, deeply conservative and unimaginably narrow minded. And, as Alon Pincus would put it, “lacking in depth.”
Unfortunately it seems that the proponents of the myth of a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa have duped you to believe that you are a prophet of a new course never before advocated so robustly and publicly by an American administration.
Not so, Honourable Mr. President Donald J. Trump.
As a good man of God and a good Christian, I do believe that you have heard about our late Anglican Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu (RIP). I am not sure if you have had a chance to read The Authorised Biography of Desmond Tutu: Rabble-Rouser for Peace by John Allen (The Free Press, 2006).
In it, Sir, John Allen wrote about the first term administration of President Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Chester Crocker (appointed in 1981) as suggesting, regarding apartheid South Africa in 1984, “that America’s empathy for the suffering of black people should be balanced by empathy for what he sympathetically described as ‘the awesome political dilemma in which Afrikaners and other whites find themselves.’ As the conflict intensified in the early 1980s, this approach alienated the administration from broad swaths of black South African opinion. Crocker’s phrase ‘constructive engagement’ became a dirty word. Second, as the administration lost touch with black people’s thinking, it lost its capacity to interpret what was actually happening in South Africa.” (Page 244)
Mr. President, whatever vocal support you choose to lend to the propagandists in democratic South Africa of a stubborn myth about a so-called “white genocide” against white Afrikaners, avoid getting yourself and your administration trapped in policies which the 93% black majority in South Africa will regard as embodying dirty words and which again will deprive your American administration of its capacity to correctly interpret what is actually taking place in democratic South Africa of today.
The blatant lies about a white cross protest memorial being a “burial site” and your offensive and totally shameful use of a massacre picture from the Eastern DRC as proof of a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa shows that what the late Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu feared is already afoot regarding your administration, Mr. President.
This is very dangerous.
You have now gone down the annals of history as having done a Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) UN vial display just to defend a false myth on a global stage from the venerable Oval Office at the White House.
For what precisely, Mr. President?
To give credence to a persistent, persuasive, unrealistic and totally false myth?
Just to please Elon Musk, a generous donor to your presidential campaign?
Come on, Mr. President!
Honourable President Donald J. Trump,
The myth about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa is nothing but a latter-day resuscitation of Chester Crocker’s 1984 “…awesome political dilemma in which Afrikaners and other whites find themselves”, apparently this time around under a democratic and constitutional dispensation in our country.
Mr. President Trump, there is even a much more compelling reason to be very wary of embracing this myth, a reason which is offered by events which tragically led to the USA administration of President George W. Bush to, open-eyed, saunter arrogantly into the catastrophe that was its illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq.
As you and we all know now, Mr. President, at the very heart of that huge geopolitical and geostrategic miscalculation by the administration of George W. Bush in illegally invading Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a myth fuelled by false intelligence claims provided by Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, nicknamed “Curveball” by the USA Defence Intelligence Agency, an Iraqi political dissident and bitter political enemy of the then Iraqi ruler and President Saddam Hussein, just as Elon Musk is proving to be a very bitter political opponent of democratic South Africa.
The Guardian (UK) article of 15 February 2011 called Al-Janabi “an Iraqi fantasist.”
President Trump, beware of the strong temptation to become a fantasist on democratic South Africa regarding a so-called “white genocide” myth. At your “Dim the Lights” White House circus on 21 May 2025, you did sound and appear like an American fantasist.
Elon Musk’s Grok app states the following about this Iraqi individual:
“The anti-Saddam Hussein dissident who provided compromised intelligence to the George W. Bush administration which was used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, also known by the codename ‘Curveball.’ Al-Janabi, an Iraqi chemical engineer who defected to Germany in 1999, claimed that Iraq has mobile biological weapons laboratories. His claims were a key part of the U.S case for war, particularly emphasised in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s 2003 UN speech. Despite doubts about his credibility within the intelligence community, his information was heavily relied upon. Al-Janabi later admitted to fabricating these claims, hoping to destabilise Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
This is what Elon Musk’s Grok says, Mr. President, not me.
President Trump, be careful of the motives of dubious bearers of financial gifts for your presidential campaigns!
All I can share with you, Mr. President, is that former President Thabo Mbeki, former Foreign Minister Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and former Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad instructed me as the then Director in South Africa’s Middle East section of the Department of Foreign Affairs at the time, (today the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, DIRCO), to lead a humanitarian flight to USA-occupied Iraqi capital of Baghdad in June 2003, soon after the illegal USA invasion of Iraq, to deliver humanitarian aid to the Iraqis, in conjunction with Dr. Imtiaz Suleiman’s Gift of the Givers humanitarian organisation, the first country in the whole world to do so soon after the illegal American invasion of Iraq .
The trip was successfully undertaken with the assistance of the UN and the governments of the Arab Republic Egypt, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the State of Kuwait and the Russian Federation, with the latter providing the hired Illuyshin cargo plane for the trip.
The black-led democratic government of former President Thabo Mbeki in South Africa did this despite having bitterly opposed, like you President Trump, the plans of the administration of President George W. Bush to invade Iraq, because former President Thabo Mbeki deeply cared about the USA-SA bilateral relationship, as has been the case really with all our post-1994 Presidents, as well as about South Africa –Iraq bilateral relationship.
Our delegation, which included members of all the races of South Africa but not any elements of the white Afrikaner alt right-wing lunatic fringe today spreading the “white genocide” myth, spent two weeks in Baghdad distributing the humanitarian aid, meeting with the UN office in Baghdad to assess what the UN’s reading of the humanitarian needs of Iraqis was and freely intermingled with very friendly to us USA soldiers and UK humanitarian officials at the sprawling former presidential palace of Saddam Hussein, which had become the military and civilian Head Quarters of the American occupation.
However L. Paul Bremer, the then head of the USA Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA0, the civilian overseer of the post-war American occupation of Iraqi, flatly and repeatedly refused to meet with our delegation to discuss how further the South African government could assist to ensure that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s supporters from the minority Sunni population, who had been governing Iraq for four preceding decades and were feeling increasingly sidelined by the CPA, did not resort to insurrection to destabilise Iraq.
The other grouping which flatly and repeatedly refused to meet with our delegation was made up by the leaders of the majority Shia community in occupied Baghdad, still smarting from and angered by what they perceived as democratic South Africa’s past closeness to the overthrown government of Saddam Hussein, which had supported our anti-apartheid struggle.
So what Elon Musk’s Grok app says today about Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi is not news to some of us.
What is news is that you, President Trump, seem to be eager to follow in the footsteps of President George W. Bush and to be misled too by false claims and false intelligence reports about a so-called “white genocide” against white Afrikaners taking place in democratic South Africa.
This is sad. Very sad.
Bob Woodward in his book The Plan to Attack (SIMON & SCHUSTER, 2004) wrote the following about debates which raged within George W. Bush’s administration about possible Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD):
“Well-placed officials in the administration were skeptical about the WMD intelligence on Iraq – among them Armitage, some senior military officers and even the CIA spokesman, Bill Harlow, who repeatedly warned reporters that the intelligence agencies were convinced Saddam had WMD but that they lacked ‘a smoking gun.’ This skepticism apparently did not make it in any convincing form to the president.” (Page 295).
[President Trump, on two occasions in his book Woodward sings high praises to the example South Africa set of voluntarily dismantling its nuclear weapons and placing its nuclear energy capability under very intrusive international supervision, an example Woodward believes the George W. Bush administration should have followed with regard to claims about Iraq possessing WMD and which example, I believe is, applicable to the ongoing standoff between your administration, Mr. President, and the Islamic Republic of Iran over Iran’s nuclear capabilities and is another important point underlining the harm and futility being caused by your ongoing intense hostility towards democratic South Africa on account of a false myth. This example Woodward refers to is also something you should consider and engage President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa about in relation to your current standoff with Iran during your upcoming visit to South Africa to attend the G20 Summit later this year, instead of you being churlish, infantile and petulant and threating to boycott the G20 Summit later this year to be held in democratic South Africa on account of a false myth about a fantasy “white genocide.”]
Mr. President Trump, beware of the Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabis of today within and in close proximity to your administration and who sell you false claims about a phantom and non-existent so-called “white genocide” against white Afrikaners in democratic South Africa and make a fool out of you, the leader of the most powerful country in the world, by convincing you, Sir, to point to white protest crosses to victims of farm murders, which white crosses were lined up along one of our urban thoroughfares, as evidence of mass graves of white Afrikaner victims of a so-called “white genocide” and make you to hugely embarrass yourself and the great American people before a global audience you invited into the White House by presenting you with a picture of a massacre which took place in Goma, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as evidence of mass burial site of victims of a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa.
The world saw this contrived movie before in the lead up to America’s catastrophic and illegal invasion of Iraq under a false WMD pretext in 2003.
Mr. President, do not fall for such tricks.
Do not allow yourself, Sir, to be used as a shield to protect the bitter fruits of a poisonous vine, to use a biblical metaphor, and the ill-gotten gains and injustices of the past in our country.
It is truly shocking today that the American administration you lead has so very viciously and globally turned against democratic South Africa and even embraces and spreads the slanderous myth that a so-called “white genocide” is taking place in South Africa, when our black-led government under former President Thabo Mbeki expressed solidarity with America and the great American people following America’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq by sending a humanitarian flight to Iraq few months after the illegal invasion.
No bilateral friends should treat each other like this in diplomacy, dear Honourable Mr. President Donald J. Trump.
President Donald Trump, in your great and memorable Address at the Opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson on 09 December 2017 you stated, amongst other things, that:
“These buildings embody the hope that has lived in the hearts of every American for generations – the hope in a future that is more just and more free.
“The Civil Rights Movement records the oppression, cruelty and injustice inflicted on the African-American community, the fight to end slavery, to break down Jim Crow, to end segregation, to gain the right to vote, and to achieve the sacred birthright of equality here.
“”…Here we memorialize the brave men and women who struggled to sacrifice, and sacrificed so much that others might live in freedom.”
You continued, Mr. President:
“Among those we honor are the Christian pastors who started the Civil Rights movement in their own churches preaching, like Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. – a man that we have studied and watched, and admired for my entire life – that we are all made in the image of our Lord.”
And then you uttered these words which should as well be the one-stanza anthem for the whole entire world, including for the suffering people of Gaza currently undergoing a genocide being committed by apartheid Israel with savage weapons supplied by your and Genocide Joe Biden’s American administrations:
“We want our country to be a place where every child, from every background, can grow up free from fear, innocent of hatred, and surrounded by love, opportunity, and hope.” (www.trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov)
Mr. President Trump, your 09 December 2017 Jackson, Mississippi speech located you closest to where the great United States of America becomes greatest and noblest – when it is closest to its revolutionary roots, when it is fair, when it is just and when it is at its most edifying.
That bold and beautiful speech of yours, Sir, places you closest to the legacies of American presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John F.K. Kennedy and to former South African President Nelson Mandela and to Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
It places you closest to Mother Theresa and the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
It places you closest to Mahatma Gandhi and Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.
It places you closest the great and immortal “Ripple of Hope” Address of American Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy to the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, which blasted the white Afrikaners’ apartheid regime in 1966.
It places you closest to our Lord Jesus Christ.
It places you closest to what is best, noblest, most sacred, most uplifting and most empowering about politics and political power.
And it places you closest to the ancient yearnings and long-held dreams of African Americans, of Africans in general, of black South Africa in particular as well as closest to the entire caring humanity across the world.
It places you closest to leadership as a mighty human force that unshackles that which chains human freedoms and human rights.
It is your speech, Mr. President Trump.
Own it in whole again as you meet world leaders at the White House like our President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa during the course of your non-consecutive second term.
I too, like you do, Sir, believe that the Almighty God spared your life from two failed assassination attempts to grant you a chance to do good to the world, and not to just shake it, and, I believe, to give real meaning to that uplifting Jackson, Mississippi speech of yours of 2017.
Re-embracing that Jackson, Mississippi Speech owill make it impossible for you to embrace the repugnant, malodorous, persistent, persuasive, unrealistic, misleading, poisonous and false myth about a so-called “white genocide” against white Afrikaners in democratic South Africa, Mr. President.
And it will make you never to prevaricate about whether or not to attend the next G20 Summit in South Africa later this year.
It will secure your immortality as the fifth most transformational and most impactful American President after George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John F.K. Kennedy.
It will make you be treasured and loved by the world not for the power you wield and not for the the billions in your bank accounts, but because you are just and fair.
Honourable Mr. President Donald J. Trump and Hourable MP & CIC Julius S. Malema, I thank you both for your kind attention to this Public Appeal to you both.
Praise be to the Almighty Lord!
Amen!
*Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Author of the Award-winning novel The Alexandra Tales and the author of the self-published book Whispering Against the Wind: Democratic South Africa’s Search for National Identity, 2011 -2022 (CEDIA Publications, 2024).
isaacmogotsi@centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.com
info@centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.com
https://centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.com
“Dynamic Thought, Positive Action.”