South Africa, which brought genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice, a U.N. body in The Hague, should “sit this one out,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) said on Wednesday at an Orthodox Union lunch on Capitol Hill.
The Pennsylvania Democrat, who has developed a reputation as one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress, said that Hamas’s terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7 cannot be compared to Israeli self-defense and critics of the Jewish state should not accuse the latter of asymmetrical response.
“Who are they really fighting? It’s a group of cowards. They hide in tunnels. They hide behind civilians. They attack, kill and mutilate children, women,” he said. “Stop talking about ‘proportion.’”
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Israel is scheduled to present its side of the case to the court on Friday.
A clip of Fetterman’s comments criticizing South Africa went viral on social media overnight, with right-wing accounts that have large followings suggesting that Fetterman was referring to attacks on white farmers in South Africa as genocide.
“Did John Fetterman (D) just call out the white genocide in South Africa?” wrote an account called End Wokeness to its 2.1 million followers. Elon Musk, who owns X, shared the End Wokeness post with his 168.9 million followers. “He is right,” Musk wrote.
“A great deal of South Africa’s best farmland is owned by white farmers, as a result of the eviction of black farmers when the country was ruled by a white minority,” Fox News reported.
“Although South Africa now has majority rule, land ownership remains a contentious issue, with parties like the leftist Economic Freedom Fighters mobilizing supporters and urging the government to seize white-owned land without compensation and return it to black families,” it added.
Others have claimed that black South Africans aim to commit genocide against white South Africans, and on Aug. 22, 2018, then-President Donald Trump posted, “I have asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. ‘South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.’”
The Anti-Defamation League calls the theory “a longstanding (and false) white supremacist claim.”
“For decades, white supremacists globally were cheerleaders for the institutionalized white supremacy of apartheid in South Africa. They have reacted bitterly to the end of the racist policy, and to the progress South Africans have made in pursuit of racial equality and reconciliation,” the ADL wrote.
“White supremacists have seized upon some of the farm-related violence in South Africa since the end of apartheid to peddle a propaganda campaign that exaggerates and distorts the situation to imply that South African whites are imperiled,” it added.
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“Hamas is anathema to peace,” he added. “We’ll never have a stable, two-state solution, we’ll never have any peace for Israel until they are fully eliminated.”
View this Jewish News Syndicate Report from January 11th