Straw men and dead farmers: SA's rural crisis meets global denial - Leigh-Ann Hallak

Key topics:Trump confronted Ramaphosa with evidence of farm murders in SA.Media focused on semantics, downplaying violent anti-Boer rhetoric.Attacks on farmers framed as "ordinary crime" to deflect racial motives..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Leigh-Ann Hallak.When President Donald Trump met with Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office, he didn’t mince words. In a blunt and uncomfortable exchange, Trump presented Ramaphosa with hard evidence: footage of South African politicians inciting violence, crowds chanting “Kill the Boer,” and a video of white crosses placed in remembrance of murdered farmers. Ramaphosa sat in silence. The room was quiet. For a brief moment, the reality of South Africa’s rural bloodshed was brought into the heart of the world’s most powerful office. But within minutes, the establishment media had already chosen their headlines. They didn’t lead with the murders. They didn’t question the politicians dancing on stage chanting about killing minorities, or the usual demagogues reciting violent revolution like it’s performance art. Instead, they went into full damage control.Farmers in South Africa are being ambushed, tortured, and executed, often in the most gruesome ways imaginable. Yet the media scrambles to debunk, spin, and distract, fussing with the curtains while the house is on fire. Families are bound, raped, shot, and mutilated. Homes are turned into scenes of horror. And while rural communities mourn, the media obsesses over whether a line of white crosses in a protest video was described accurately enough for their liking.The media had a choice. They could address the substance: the mounting evidence of targeted racial rhetoric, government complicity, and the unrelenting violence targeting farming families. Instead, they reached for their favourite weapon: the straw man.Almost instantly, headlines appeared from news outlets around the world. “Trump’s false claims,” “Crosses not burial sites.” None of these rebut what was actually shown on screen. None engage with the facts. They nitpicked over a word, fixating on Trump referring to the crosses as a “burial site” rather than a “memorial site,” even though it was obvious from the context that the imagery was symbolic. There is no country on Earth that buries their dead in straight rows along highways. The video was from a protest following the 2020 farm murders of Glen and Vida Rafferty near Newcastle. Glen was shot multiple times at their front door. Vida screamed and was executed. Their dog Jessie was shot and found dead in Glen’s arms.That is what the crosses represent. Thousands of scenes just like it. Trump should have shown footage of the Plaasmoorde Monument instead. The memorial site has far more crosses than the roadside display, each one representing a life lost in South Africa’s silent rural war.But instead of confronting the truth, the media wants you to dismiss it as fake news. They zoom in on an insignificant detail or word, knock it down, and pretend the entire issue has been debunked. That’s the essence of a straw man, and they’ve been building them for years.Straw man #1: “It’s not genocide, so there’s nothing to see here.”Whenever someone highlights the targeting of South African farmers, the media retreats to its favourite fallback: “But it’s not genocide.” That line is not just a dismissal. It is a deliberate distraction. Trump never even uttered the word “genocide” during the meeting. I checked the transcript. But that hasn’t stopped the media from stuffing it into every headline and paragraph they can.By obsessing over whether the violence meets the strictest legal definition of genocide, they ensure we never discuss what actually matters. The torture. The racial hatred. The hate speech. The political rhetoric. The inaction from the justice system. All of it gets buried under academic debate while people are being hunted.No, we are not seeing mass killings on the scale of Rwanda or the Holocaust. At least for now. But genocide does not begin with slaughter. It begins with propaganda, scapegoating, legal discrimination, economic exclusion, and the slow erosion of empathy. We are well into those stages. And the so-called watchdogs of truth and morality are the ones most eager to change the subject.By shouting “It’s not genocide!” every time someone highlights an attack, the media creates a false binary. Either it is full-scale extermination or it is nothing worth caring about. That is not just dishonest. It is dangerous.Because the question is not “Is it genocide?” The real question is: Why are so many people so desperate to pretend nothing is happening at all?Straw man #2: “It’s just ordinary crime.”The next go-to line is that these attacks are just “normal” South African crime (whatever that’s supposed to mean) and no different from what everyone else experiences. This is another deliberate distortion. Farm attacks are not ordinary. Victims are often tortured for hours, raped, mutilated, and forced to watch their loved ones suffer. These are not opportunistic burglaries. They are acts of terror. But by pretending that critics are denying all other crime, journalists flatten the issue and reframe it as a matter of racial privilege rather than racial vulnerability.Straw man #3: “Raising awareness incites hate.”Another favourite tactic: when people like Trump or local activists raise the issue internationally, they’re accused of spreading hate, fear, or misinformation. And if that doesn't work, they just throw in "treason" for good measure. This tactic demonises the whistleblower, not the killer. It's not the violent chant of “Kill the Boer” that makes people afraid, it's the actual murders that follow it. But instead of probing the political figures who make such remarks, the regime’s media mouthpieces smear anyone who shares the videos.Straw man #4: “Right-wing conspiracy theory.”Any mention of race-based laws, violent language, or the Expropriation Act is immediately filed under “right-wing alarmism.” But facts are facts: numerous race-based laws remain on South Africa’s books. The Expropriation Act, which allows the state to confiscate private property without compensation, has now been signed into law. The state has pursued policies explicitly designed to dispossess whites of their property and livelihoods. These are not conspiracy theories, they are printed in the Government Gazette. Yet by framing all criticism as a political agenda, journalists sidestep the legitimacy of the critique.Straw man #5: “It’s just bad optics.”Even the Trump-Ramaphosa meeting was reduced to stage drama. “It was an ambush,” headlines screamed, repeated word-for-word across publications. Apparently, the real scandal was not the racial hatred, incitement of violence or the deaths. The real outrage was that Ramaphosa was confronted with hard evidence, the kind neither his delegation nor the media was prepared for. To them, it felt like an ambush. Not because it was unfair, but because it was true..Read more:.The "D Word" that kills twice: Denial and genocide in South Africa - Matt Chancey.When Trump held up stacks of articles, the press zeroed in on one that included an image from the Democratic Republic of Congo and declared the whole thing fake news. But it was not. It was a real article from American Thinker that mentions South Africa’s Expropriation Act, racial policies, and discusses the dangerous fusion of tribalism and Marxism in Africa. No one bothered to read it. Because the goal was never clarity. It was narrative control.To be fair, Trump could have presented the facts more carefully. He should have anticipated what could be twisted, reframed, or stripped of context by hostile outlets. But the core message wasn’t false. It was simply inconvenient.But while journalists around the world published a tidal wave of articles dissecting every word out of Donald Trump’s mouth, dishonestly and obsessively “fact-checking” his remarks as if semantic precision mattered more than the underlying truth, not a single major outlet has applied the same level of scrutiny to President Ramaphosa.He blatantly lied when he claimed to have condemned Julius Malema. It’s simply false. In March this year, Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, stated that the President would not condemn the “Kill the Boer” chant. And why would he? Malema has been singing it since 2010, when he was ANC Youth League president. He has never been reprimanded by the party. In fact, in 2018, Ramaphosa said, “We would love to have Julius Malema back in the ANC. He is still ANC down deep in his heart. We would like to have members of the EFF back because the ANC is their home.” The President dismissed the EFF’s chants and violent rhetoric as nothing more than a fringe distraction. This is an alarming stance that ignores the party’s significant foothold in Parliament, where it holds 39 seats. More troubling is the fact that Julius Malema, the very figure behind much of this inflammatory rhetoric, sits on the Judicial Service Commission (JSC), the body tasked with selecting judges, handling complaints against them, and advising the government on judicial matters. Treating this as political noise not only downplays the real influence the EFF wields but also undermines the seriousness of having someone with a track record of incitement involved in shaping the judiciary.Included in the video shown by President Trump was footage of former President Jacob Zuma also singing "Dubul' ibhunu" (Kill the Boer). Zuma is now the leader of the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party, which holds 58 seats in Parliament, making it the third-largest political party in the country.Labelling this as the work of a "fringe minority" stretches credibility to the breaking point. When former heads of state and major political leaders publicly engage in or endorse such rhetoric, it cannot be brushed aside as irrelevant noise. It reflects a disturbing level of mainstream acceptance for dangerous incitement and raises serious questions about the health of South Africa’s democratic institutions and political accountability.No one even bothered to ask why our courts have legally sanctioned a chant that fantasises ethnic cleansing. Apparently, in South Africa, calling for the murder of a minority group is just another form of protected speech, as long as the right people are doing it.They are not reporting. They are covering up.Farm murders are the only form of violence in South Africa where the victims are mocked, not mourned. The only crime where the media works harder to discredit the whistleblower than to confront the killer. The only crisis where entire headlines are manufactured to avoid the uncomfortable truth, because that truth threatens their carefully crafted ideological fiction.So they build straw men. They burn them down. Then they walk away, smug, self-righteous, and silent on the blood in the soil.While our farmers bury their dead, the press buries the truth.

Straw men and dead farmers: SA's rural crisis meets global denial - Leigh-Ann Hallak

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