Left-liberal activists have been enraged by an Australian proposal to help South Africa’s persecuted white minority, branding it “ridiculously racist”.
Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton had said his department was considering ways to fast-track visa applications from South African farmers, who are being killed on their homesteads in large numbers, often with extreme brutality.
Indeed, Sky News Australia recently reported how farmers “are being murdered at a rate of more than one per week” in South Africa — and the country’s parliament has just voted through a bill to seize their land without compensation.
This bill was proposed by Julius Malema, a Marxist and black supremacist who said those who did not support it would be “dealt with” during the parliamentary debate, and stated ominously that he was “not calling for the slaughter of white people‚ at least for now” in 2016.
“If you look at the footage and read the stories, you hear the accounts, it’s a horrific circumstance they face,” Dutton had said, arguing that South Africa’s farmers “deserve special attention”.
“I do think, on the information that I’ve seen, people do need help and they need help from a civilised country like ours,” he added — prompting furious demands for a retraction from the South African government.
But rather than welcoming the country’s white minority as refugees, as they would for almost any other group, left-liberal media outlets and pro-migration non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were quick to condemn Dutton, insisting the farmers should be left to their fate.
“Instead of white South African farmers, Dutton should listen to the moving stories from people on Manus and Nauru who have fled persecution,” complained Elaine Pearson, who leads Human Rights Watch in Australia, referring to the illegal boat migrants Australia redirects to the Pacific island nations in order to disincentivise their dangerous journeys.
“International law doesn’t let Australia pick and choose refugees on the basis of [the] colour of their skin,” she sniffed.
Luton-based social justice activist Mike Stuchbery, who was born in Australia, also derided Dutton’s proposal as a “ridiculously racist gesture” — despite having conceded “I’ve been thinking and yes, the world really needs to turn its gaze towards South Africa over this land appropriation business” as recently as March 1st.
The left-wing Guardian, too, hosted an opinion piece by Jason Wilson, who complained that helping South African farmers was a “far-right obsession”, asserted that claims farming in South Africa is the most dangerous occupation in the world is “not supported by the evidence”, and referred to the expropriation act only obliquely as “land reform”.
The Australian government seems to have buckled in the face of the leftist backlash, with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull emphasising that his immigration policy is “thoroughly non-discriminatory”, and asserting that “Australians of South African ancestry, from every background … make a phenomenal contribution to our very successful multicultural society.”
Foreign minister Julie Bishop also appeared to reject any specific reaching out to South Africa’s white minority, although she admitted that “Australia does monitor the rate of violent crime in South Africa, and there has been a dramatic increase in recent years,” adding: “Last year there were about 19,000 murders in South Africa, and that’s a very high number for a country of that size.”
She also voiced some “concerns about land reforms that the South African government has been implementing”, but stopped well short of robustly condemning the Zimbabwe-style farm seizures Julius Malema has hinted at.