http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=248201When I completed my forthcoming book, "Into The Cannibal's Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa," some months back, the number of Boers murdered there was just over 3,000. At the most recent count, done by the courageous Adriana Stuijt , the death toll stood at 3,759. (Adriana has been on the case since 1987.)
Contrary to the fast and furious factoids published in an American Thinker editorial April 16, 2010, ("Genocide In South Africa"), "Boer" is most certainly not a "disparaging term for any white South African."
Rather, a Boer is an Afrikaner, a member of "The White Tribe of Africa." Bar the Zulus, Afrikaners were once the toughest tribe in Africa. They have a 350-year history on the continent – as long as their American cousins have been in North America. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the "Sherlock Holmes" character, dubbed the modern Boer "the most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain."
But that is no longer the case. As I document in gruesome detail in "Into The Cannibal's Pot," rural Afrikaners, in particular, are being killed off at alarmingly high rates by emboldened, politically empowered blacks. Adriana, WND in the early 2000s and I have carried these grim tidings to the West. Otherwise, America's solipsistic opinion formers and television program-makers do not provide any serious, ongoing analysis of what's afoot in the "new" South Africa. (Adriana is Dutch, I believe, and lived in SA. I am South African born.)
Indeed, the ethnic cleansing of the Afrikaner has failed to cloud pinched horizons in America. As it stands, Republicans are every bit as eager as Democrats – and the next drug-addled supermodel – to press flesh with Nelson Mandela (once a terrorist and a communist), and celebrate his "Rainbow Nation," which is really a "Rambo Nation."
Perhaps it takes a Jew to bear Christian witness.
As Ms. Stuijt reports, a "pro-Boer Israeli human rights activist" by the name of Avigdor Eskin visited South Africa on a fact-finding tour in October. Mr. Eskin has:
kicked off the Christian New Year by demonstrating in Jerusalem on Sunday against the ANC-regime's "silent genocide" of the … Afrikaner-Boers in South Africa. He said the Boers have "for the past 100 years always been the friends of the Jewish people. We must support and help them in their present plight. What is happening in South Africa cannot be tolerated, and we will not remain silent."
Bravo. Mr. Eskin is living up to the standards of great Israelis past. The Jewish state was perhaps the only friend the old South Africa had. Theirs was a firm relationship forged in the fires of international excoriation and excommunication.
Against the decree of the United States, Israel's Labor and Likud governments chose barter over boycotts. In 1986, Yitzhak Shamir, at the time Israel's foreign minister, gave a remarkable – even Jeffersonian – speech in New York. He told his audience "that Israel would not institute sanctions against South Africa." Instead, Jerusalem would leave "entangling alliances" to the great powers and continue its "normal" relations with Pretoria. And so it did. Back then, it was South Africa and Israel against the world.
Further proof of the depth of this relationship surfaced in May of 2010, when, perhaps inevitably, Israel was credibly accused of offering to provide apartheid-era South Africa with nuclear warheads. "The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa," a book written by Sasha Polakow-Suransky (one of those academics with a gender-neutral double–barreled name), was meant to disgrace Israel, but it warmed the cockles of this heart.
I must be one of the few Jews who is proud of the fact that Israel – in the person of the tough, laconic Yitzhak Shamir – told the U.S. it would take no part in its attempts to cripple South Africa. (For fighting the British mandate in Palestine, Shamir has been referred to in the West as a terrorist. Afrikaners, who had been likewise brutalized by the British, clearly disagreed. If anything, the Afrikaners and the Israelis would have been united in their shared hatred of the British.)
As did I rejoice to read of a 1974 "Top Secret" letter that Minister of Defense Shimon Peres wrote to Eschel Rhoodie, a minister in the Vorster government. The letter was declassified recently by the ANC cobra-head to embarrass Israel. In it, Peres speaks about the two countries' shared determination to resist their enemies and to refuse to submit to the injustices against them.
Israel is still kicking. But the Anglo-American axis of evil successfully ganged up on the Afrikaners and forced them "to legislate themselves into a permanent position of political subordination." In Africa, that means sure death. Disconsolately for the Boers, at least a couple of powerless Jews are willing to bear Christian witness to this death rattle.