From my new WND column, “The Golem Goldstone Goes To Gaza”:

“When introducing Judge Goldstone, Fareed Zakaria described the judge as having made his name, among other acts of greatness, in pursuing an end to the political violence that came with apartheid in his home country of South Africa.

Ostracized for his convictions, this writer’s father – Rabbi Ben Isaacson – was a leading anti-apartheid activist. Goldstone had no such history of protest, father assures me. The roaming judge attached himself like a limpet mine to the anti-apartheid cause only once it became fashionable, safe and professionally expedient.

Goldstone’s Wiki biography corroborates father’s recollection. The judge joined the cause du jour in ‘the latter years of apartheid in South Africa.’ Goldstone’s “courageous” judicial decisions in the cause of freedom, moreover, comported with what South Africa’s Western system of Dutch-Roman law provided – a system currently being replaced, by the African National Congress, with a blend of tribal and totalitarian laws.

To this expatriate South African, the most anodyne assertion Goldstone made to zombie Zakaria was this one…”

Read the complete column, “The Golem Goldstone Goes To Gaza.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update (Jan. 9): A few readers, some via my WND mail box, have told me I’ve erred as far as the meaning of Golem goes. I’m relatively confident that my commonplace use of the term is accurate (if perhaps not true to the original meaning), so I’ve left it. Usually, I hurry to correct blatant errors.

So why am I comfortable with the column’s usage?

I’m an ex-Israeli. My first language is Hebrew. Although I once spoke and wrote a sharp Hebrew (much like my English), slang has since (as in the US and the UK) changed older, popular usage. As old-timers like myself are in the habit of saying, no one speaks Yerushalmic Hebrew on the news any longer as the wonderful Haim Yavin used to. Yavin was the most elegant anchorman in looks and language.

Back to the topic. “Golem” in popular, modern usage is a derogatory term. Call an Israeli of my age group (still way younger than Yavin, of course) a Golem, and, while you’ve not wounded him mortally, you have, in good humor, berated him.

Oscar is my recent rescue: a rare Cape Parrot. Or, more accurately, an Un-Cape Parrot (Poicephalus fuscicollis). One more homie. (You’ve already met T. Cup, my adorable, feisty, Senegalese Parrot.) Oscar is even closer to home (I hail from South Africa; his forefathers from South-Central Africa.)

The African parrots are the smartest of the Psittacidea family. I wonder why? Is it evolution’s answer to the sorry state of the Continent? Perhaps Africa’s parrots have evolved to take over. (Humor alert for the grim among you.)

The African Grey, in particular, is the most intelligent parrot. It can acquire upwards of 1000 words, sentences included, and displays considerable cognition. Observe Einstein in action. By her own admission, she’s a “Super Star.”

The pioneering researcher into African Greys is Dr. Irene Pepperberg. Here she is on CNN explaining how her work with the late Alex (for “Avian Learning Experiment”) shattered all preconceptions about the parrot as no more than a mimic. Pitted against a primate, Alex always won out.

Here Dr. Pepperberg both demonstrates and explains Alex’s cognitive and communicative accomplishments. (Of course, Alex would never have committed the syntactical infelicity committed by the human who titled this YouTube segment: “ALEX – One of the most smartest parrots ever!”)

My Oscar has the potential to be as smart as the Grey, but first he has to overcome the stunting effects of shop life. No matter how dedicated the breeder, three years with little individualized attention leaves its mark on such a sentient, sensitive, highly intelligent creature. In the case of Oscar, it is a plucking habit.

Here Oscar has climbed to the top of his giant castle, and is posing alongside my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Ask Oscar. Get your copy (or copies) now!

And do pray that no more little, fluffy green feathers find their way into my gentle giant’s mother-of-pearl beak.

I had to search the dictionary for the grandiose title of Clint Eastwood’s new film, “Invictus.” If so inclined, you can read up about it too, although all you need to know, in this context, is that the “short poem by the British poet William Ernest Henley is the source of a number of familiar clichés and quotations.” “Invictus” is Latin for “unconquered.”

For the sake of its viewers, I do hope that “Invictus” is not, as The Independent promised, an “over-reverent biopic, but … instead a surprisingly entertaining sports movie which for the most part follows the conventions of the genre.”

Here’s what you need to know about the sainted Mandela and the game of Rugby, excerpted from my near-complete book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post Apartheid South Africa:

“Of late, local and international establishment press has showered Mr. Mandela with more praise for serving as the mighty Springboks’ mascot.

The Springboks are the South African national rugby team, and the reigning world champions. But has Mandela ever raised his authoritative voice against the ANC’s plans to force this traditionally Afrikaner game to become racially representative? Not on your life. … Has Mandela piped up about the ANC’s unremitting attacks on Afrikaans as the language of instruction in Afrikaner schools and universities? Again, no.” (©2009 by ilana mercer)

This Live Leak depicts a typical South African crime scene. A relative endured a similar ordeal, except that she was knocked on the head with a gun and packed into the trunk. By dint of a miracle, the car the black criminals intended to drive away with my relative in tow would not start. The black “guard,” like this Live-Leak specimen, cowered in his sealed booth. The damage was done… The life of a person beautiful inside and out was devastated by scum.

Watch how said guard puts up no fight. Observe how the savages head straight for the woman who has just driven in. Not content to simply steal her belongings, pay attention to the way they gratuitously kick and repeatedly shoot her. Do they abuse the proverbial fox guarding the chicken coop? Not on your life. The Brother is unharmed. Finally, I hope you didn’t need me to point out the manner in which other black onlookers swarm the crime scene … after the fact, once the danger has passed.

A day in the life of white South Africa.

Please read our Articles Archive and blog entries under “South Africa.”

Steven Malanga, the author of “Feral Detroit,” an only slightly politically incorrect City Journal tract, fails to mention the Other Method deployed in driving middle-class whites away: cruel, craven, targeted crime.

“Over the last half-century, [Detroit’s] population has shrunk by 50 percent, from about 1.8 million people to fewer than 900,000. Since 2000, the city has lost 35,000 residents. Detroit officials acknowledge that they see little prospect for a population turnaround soon. …”

“Though some blame Detroit’s population losses on larger economic forces, economists Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer argue in a groundbreaking paper that the city’s problems are mostly self-inflicted. (The paper, called ‘The Curley Effect,’ gets its name from legendary Boston mayor James Curley, who favored Irish residents and pushed other groups out.) After winning election in 1973, Detroit’s first black mayor, Coleman Young, consolidated his power, driving white residents, who had voted against him, out of the city by withdrawing services from their neighborhoods. Eventually, Glaeser and Shleifer write, Detroit became ‘an overwhelmingly black city mired in poverty and social problems’—and shrinking fast.”

[SNIP]

In South Africa, the wanton acts at Wichita and Knoxville are a daily occurrence. And here’s a filthy little secret I discovered in researching my near-complete book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa: Whites are being culled in greater proportion to their numbers in the population. (Stay tuned)

The caliber of Anglo- and Afrikaner human capital lost to black crime is inestimable. An example is Brian Hahn, my husband’s (Ivy-League educated) mathematics professor at UCT. (“After completing his BSc in applied mathematics and physics and his BSc (Hons) in theoretical physics at UCT, he undertook a PhD on the optimisation of scattering amplitudes at the University of Cambridge.”)

There are hundreds of examples of true brilliance extinguished by barbarism. Other than untold sorrow, what are the financial costs of such losses?

Shimon Peres of the Labor Party is Israel’s president (Bibi is Prime Minister). Now even the leftist Peres has disavowed Richard Goldstone’s report for the U.N., the culmination of the South African justice’s “investigation” into the Israeli offensive in “Gaza from December 27 to January 18.” “The supremely smug Richard Goldstone” accused Israel of committing “actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity.”

To which Peres responded:

“Out of the 26 suggestions that the [Goldstone] Commission made, none deal with how to fight terrorism.” … “The Goldstone Commission Report says that the Palestinians have the right ‘to forceful resistance based on the right of self-determination.’ What is ‘the right to forceful resistance?’ To fire on civilians?”

Some days back I reminded readers of Godstone’s proud pedigree: “He began his career by helping to demote a lesser evil (the National Party) and promote the quintessential evil (Mandela’s African National Congress).

The supremely smug Richard Goldstone began his career by helping to demote a lesser evil (the National Party) and promote the quintessential evil (Mandela’s African National Congress). “We now have, I’m proud to say, a working, wonderful democracy in South Africa,” boasted the venerated singularly charmless gentleman to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

The South African justice, who presided over “the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda from 15 August 1994 to September 1996,” continues his celebrity career with a report about Israel’s alleged war crimes in Gaza. “The report,” writes Ha’aretz, “which accuses both Israel and Hamas of war crimes, was formally presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday.”

I suggest Goldstone might want to look in his own plate before he goes passing judgment on (an admittedly imperfect) Israel. Since he helped usher in this “wonderful democracy,” upward of 300,000 innocents have been murdered. The New savage South Africa is now the most violent country in the world.

Here is the CNN interview the singularity boring Zakaria conducted with the singularly smug justice:

ZAKARIA: South African Justice Richard Goldstone made his name with legal cases of world importance but also of great delicacy and sensitivity. First in his home country of South Africa, pursuing an end to the political violence that came with apartheid, then on to the international stage as Chief Prosecutor of the UN Tribunals for War Crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

But his latest job is more controversial. In April, the UN Human Rights Council appointed Goldstone to head a mission to investigate allegations of human rights violations in the 22-day conflict between Israel and Gaza that began last December. From the start, some on both sides questioned whether a fair inquiry could be made, and in the end Israel, which took much of the blame in the final, almost 600-page report, though not exclusive blame, has reacted angrily.

Listen to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressing the UN General Assembly last week.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: A democracy legitimately defending itself against terror is morally hanged, drawn and quartered and given an unfair trial to boot. By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals.

What a perfect version of truth. What a perversion of justice.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Netanyahu said that the report threatens to derail the peace process. Now listen to my conversation with the man at the center of this storm, Justice Goldstone.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Judge Goldstone, thank you for doing this.

JUDGE RICHARD GOLDSTONE, HEAD OF UN GAZA INVESTIGATION: It’s a pleasure.

ZAKARIA: The Prime Minister of Israel, as you know, denounced your report effectively on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, and his basic argument is that the report is morally obtuse because it does not just distinguish between a democratic state that is being threatened by this hail of rockets and a terrorist organization, in his words, that is trying to inflict disproportionate and random violence on civilians.

GOLDSTONE: I think – I think, with respect, Prime Minister Netanyahu, misunderstands the basis on which we investigated. We – we didn’t question the right of Israel to defend itself or to defend its citizens. It clearly has that right. What we looked was the methods used in doing that. So we didn’t – we didn’t question Israel’s right of self-defense. We, in effect, in a way, took it as a given. It was, as I say, the – the – whether it was a proportionate response or a disproportionate response that we looked at.

And the other way, too, we – we didn’t look at whether Hamas is entitled to use military force to – to gain independence for the Palestinian people. We – we looked at what – what methods Hamas used, and we found those to be unlawful.

ZAKARIA: The Israelis claim that Hamas put themselves in hospitals, forced the Israelis to attack – to strike there, and that would produce an international public outrage. What did you find?

GOLDSTONE: Well, we didn’t exclude all of those allegations. We couldn’t. We – we had a short-time line (ph), we had a very, very scarce resources. We investigated specific incidents and we didn’t find, in respect of those incidents, that the Israeli claims had – had been – been justified. But certainly we can’t exclude it across the board.

ZAKARIA: You spoke of the Israeli behavior during Gaza as being part of a pattern that you described as, the Israeli term, ‘dahia’ (ph). What does that mean?

GOLDSTONE: Well, the – the – the attitude of Israel and the policy of Israel, especially since the Hamas victory a few years ago, has been really to turn the screws on – on Gaza. We felt that one of the purposes was to make life so difficult for the people of Gaza that they would turn their back on Hamas and it would lose support. In fact, if anything, it was my personal impression that it’s had the opposite effect.

ZAKARIA: What was the infrastructure damage like? Describe so that people can get a sense of what – what you regard as excessive.

GOLDSTONE: Well, the – the infrastructure damage, first of all, that had no military justification at all, was the bulldozing of agricultural fields. Huge tracks of land were just bulldozed by – by tank bulldozers. The only operating flour factory in Gaza. Obviously, flour is terribly important to feed – for making bread, a staple part of their diet. The only flour factory was – was effectively destroyed. They destroyed most of the egg production. They – they killed tens of thousands of chickens. You know, and this has got nothing to do with firing of rockets and mortars. It was the destruction of infrastructure — of part of the infrastructure of Gaza.

ZAKARIA: How will you describe Hamas’ responsibility here? You dealt with that in the report as well. Would you describe Hamas as guilty of war crimes?

GOLDSTONE: Oh yes, absolutely, of serious war crimes, which do amount crimes against humanity, and that’s the firing of thousands of rockets that have no precision at all into civilian areas. That’s a very serious crime.

But we also criticized its use of civilians and not protecting civilians sufficiently in its launching of rockets. And they put civilians in harm’s way.

ZAKARIA: And you found that both Israel and Hamas in a sense did not take enough precaution about the potential for civilian casualties?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Absolutely.

ZAKARIA: Judge Goldstone, you’re Jewish.

GOLDSTONE: Right.

ZAKARIA: How do you react when you hear Israelis accusing you of anti-Israeli bias, anti-Zionism, some have used the phrase “self- hating Jew”?

GOLDSTONE: First, there’s obviously no truth in it. I’ve got a great love for Israel. It’s a country that, as I said, I’ve been to many times, and I’ve worked for many Israeli causes and continue to do so. So it’s factually incorrect.

But what saddens me is the fact that Jews, whether in Israel or outside Israel, feel that because I’m Jewish I shouldn’t investigate Israel.

If anything, I think I have a greater obligation to do that. If I’ve investigated war crimes in other countries, why should Israel be different? And it seems to me that that should be welcomed and recognized.

ZAKARIA: When you look at these crimes against humanity, these war crimes, how do they compare? You have a long career. You’ve seen many of these kinds of things, investigated some. Where does this stand? How should we think of it?

GOLDSTONE: Well, you know, I don’t like making comparisons because each situation is so different. But certainly one can compare what has happened here to situations that I’ve investigated in the former Yugoslavian genocide. One doesn’t here in respect of Gaza get anywhere in my view anywhere near that sort of situation.

It’s very different. Many people are comparing what’s happening in the occupied territories to apartheid South Africa. I don’t like that comparison. There’s some similarities, but there are more differences.

ZAKARIA: Do you see this as the end of the report and your role?

GOLDSTONE: Absolutely. It’s now in the political arena. I hope that we have provided a road map for both sides to investigate themselves and to come to their own conclusions, their own investigations, and where relevant their own prosecutions.

ZAKARIA: Spending time dealing with this, do you have any thoughts or insights into the Israeli-Palestinian divide? Do you think there will be peace? How do you look at this?

GOLDSTONE: No South African can be pessimistic about the prospects of for peace. We had an impossible situation and a certainty that we were going to have bloodbath, and because we had good leadership it was averted, and we now have, I’m proud to say, a working, wonderful democracy in South Africa. We’ve got problems but we’re moving in a good direction.

ZAKARIA: You will be back in Israel anytime soon?

GOLDSTONE: No plans at the moment, but I certainly expect to. I don’t have close family, but I have many, many friends there. I’d love to see them.

ZAKARIA: Judge Goldstone, thank you for doing this.

GOLDSTONE: Thank you very much.

Update (Oct. 7): My father, who was steeped in the anti-apartheid movement and ostracized for his convictions, informs me that Goldstone had no such history of protest. The judge attached himself to this fashionable cause once it became safe and politically prudent. Goldstone’s bio corroborates my father’s assessment, noting only that he joined the cause du jour in “the latter years of Apartheid in South Africa,” when,

Goldstone served as chairperson of the South African Standing Commission of Inquiry Regarding Public Violence and Intimidation, later known as the Goldstone Commission.[1] The Commission played a critical role in uncovering and publicizing allegations of grave wrongdoing by the Apartheid-era South African security forces and bringing home to “White” South Africans the extensive violence that was being done in their name. The Commission concluded that most of the violence of those years was being orchestrated by shadowy figures within the Apartheid regime, often through the use of a so-called “third force.” The Commission thus provided a first road map for the investigations into security force wrongdoing that, after democratization, were taken up by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

He was called a “white dog” and a “settler” by his black countrymen, and was attacked seven times by said people, including three stabbings inflicted during muggings and robberies. Then he moved to Canada, which has granted him refugee status. Now “Brandon Huntley, 31, originally from Cape Town, South Africa” gets to live where his life will not be imperiled daily.

The British Telegraph reports on this landmark case: “It is thought to be the first time a white South African man has been granted refugee status in Canada claiming he was the victim of black aggression.”

“‘I find that the claimant would stand out like a ’sore thumb’ due to his colour in any part of the country,’ tribunal panel chair William Davis was quoted as saying.”

The Ottawa Sun reveals more than the British paper is prepared to:

The decision also took into account testimony by Laura Kaplan, 41, the sister of Huntley’s lawyer, who immigrated to Canada last year from her native South Africa.

Laura Kaplan testified about being threatened by armed black South Africans and the torture of her brother Robert in 1997 when a gang of black men broke into his house, tortured him for eight hours, shot him three times and left him for dead.

Davis said the evidence of Huntley and Laura Kaplan “show a picture of indifference and inability or unwillingness” of the South African government to protect “White South Africans from persecution by African South Africans.”

Reuters is quick to second the “The African National Congress’ response: “The ANC views the granting by Canada of a refugee status to South African citizen Brandon Huntley on the grounds that Africans would ‘persecute’ him, as racist,’ the party said in a statement.”

That’s rich. The sadistic atrocities described in this article could not possibly be a manifestation of seething racial hatred, now could they?

On the status of mercy in America I quote the American Renaissance: “there has been a trickle of South Africans applying for asylum in the United States on the grounds of racial persecution. Almost all have been deported.”

Update (Sept. 2): The Republicans, the Party of Lincoln, are least likely to feel sympathy for the plight of South African whites.

Here’s a relevant excerpt from my book, © Into the Cannibals’ Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa:

Ronald Reagan favored ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa, together with a tough resistance to communist advances in the Third World. But political pressure, not least from the Republican majority, mounted for an increasingly punitive stance toward Pretoria. This entailed an ‘elaborate sanctions structure,’ disinvestment, and a prohibition on sharing intelligence with the South Africans.

For advocating ‘constructive engagement,’ members of his Republican party issued a coruscating attack on Reagan. Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr., in particular, stated: ‘For this moment, at least, the President has become an irrelevancy to the ideals, heartfelt and spoken, of America.’ Republicans had slipped between the sheets with the fashionable left.

The radical Republicans like to forget how completely conservative Reagan was about forcing change in South Africa. Conservative and wise. There is not one Republican, bar Ron Paul, who is as weary of democracy and mass society as was Reagan.

Ted Kennedy (see “Ted’s Dead: Sacred Cow Syndrome Strikes”), the great humanitarian, never piped up about the craven carnage of murder and mayhem in my homeland, South Africa. Why would he? The slaying is done by Africans; the worst fate is often reserved for Afrikaner and English men, women and children, who’re being culled preponderantly and disproportionately to their population numbers.
Kennedy excelled at perpetrating the narrative of the officially excluded and oppressed. His worldview did not expand to accommodate Un-PC realities. As the obscene orgy over the passing of Kennedy, at a ripe age, proceeds shamelessly, mull over a truly tragic waste of lives.

Silent Acquiescence In Daily Terror
Written by PARATUS
Friday, 28 August 2009

South Africa is experiencing extraordinary levels of violent crime. Since the country’s democratic transition in 1994, some 300,000 South Africans have been murdered. Much of this crime is unprecedented in its brutality and is directed at the elderly and the young. Bizarrely, much of the Western media are silent about the calamity which has befallen South Africa. Is this an intentional oversight to avoid accusations of racism or denigrating one of the few African democracies? Or, are the Western media – and, by implication, its consumers – disinterested in accounts of murder and bloodshed far removed on the southern tip of a forgotten continent?

Marinda O’Dell was a compassionate and hardworking occupational therapist at a school for disabled children in Krugersdorp, an hour’s drive north west of Johannesburg. In early August, two young men entered her house just after lunchtime, bludgeoned her 17-year-old daughter unconscious, and cut Marinda’s throat. Marinda became one of the 50 people murdered on an average day in South Africa.

Last month, Cobi Venter, a dedicated anti-apartheid campaigner, and her husband George, an 78-year-old entrepreneur, were brutally murdered in their middle-class suburban home in Port Elizabeth. Six men forced their way into the Venter’s home, which had been barricaded after a previous robbery attempt. George was struck several times with a hammer, tortured and dragged by his feet from room to room, and then killed. After witnessing the terrifying events, Cobi was gang-raped and fatally beaten to death.

According to the Venter’s son: “Blood was on the walls of every single room in the house; it was on the ceilings. It was like evil just exploded there – I mean, all eight of the main windows were smashed as well.” Veteran policemen cried at the scene.

More than ten years ago, Anne Paton, the wife of the celebrated late anti-apartheid author, Alan Paton, fled South Africa in terror. A number of her friends had been murdered, and she was almost killed by two robbers who throttled and assaulted the then 70-year-old as she was enjoying an afternoon nap. Realizing that the government was unwilling to protect its taxpayers and citizens, she finally left South Africa . At the time, she wrote:

I love this country with a passion, but I cannot live here any more. I can no longer live slung about with panic buttons and gear locks. I am tired of driving with my car windows closed and the doors locked, tired of being afraid of stopping at red lights. I am tired of being constantly on the alert, having that sudden frisson of fear at the sight of a shadow by the gate, of a group of youths approaching—although nine times out of 10 they are innocent of harmful intent. Such is the suspicion that dogs us all…

While some people say I have been unlucky, others say: “You are lucky not to have been raped or murdered.” What kind of a society is this where one is considered “lucky” not to have been raped or murdered—yet?”

While difficult to believe, it appears that the level of brutality employed by criminals is on the rise in South Africa. Deputy national police commissioner, Andre Pruis, recently announced an investigation into the excessively violent nature of crime in the country.

Especially at risk are the elderly and the young. According to official South African Police Service (SAPS) figures, in 2007/08 (the latest 12-month period for which data have been released) an average of 30 children were murdered every week. During a typical year, as many children are murdered in South Africa as the number of all people murdered in both the United Kingdom and Germany , notwithstanding the fact that the latter two countries have a combined population of 141 million, compared to 48 million in South Africa.

The risk of being murdered in South Africa today is almost six times as high as in the United States . Compared to the United Kingdom , the risk is 19 times higher, while the risk is an incredible 40 times higher than in Germany.

Sexual crimes are also at intolerably high levels in South Africa. Gang-rape and the rape of toddlers and even infants has become a common occurrence. Only countries at war suffer as much sexual violence as South Africa , Doctors Without Borders said in March in a global report on rape.

According to the SAPS, children are the victims of 41 percent of all rapes and attempted rapes reported in the country; approximately 60 a day. Over 15 percent of all reported rapes are against children under 11, and another 26 percent against children 12-17 years.

Given that a large proportion of all violent crime – but sexual offenses in particular – go unreported, the true figures are likely to be substantially higher. A bizarre belief among some African black men that sex with a virgin can cure HIV/AIDS is further fueling the high levels of child sexual exploitation in South Africa.

According to Max Coleman’s authoritative book, “A crime against humanity: Analyzing repression of the Apartheid State ”, published by the South African Human Rights Committee, 21,000 people died in political violence in South Africa during apartheid. Included in Coleman’s figures are deaths due to SA Defence Force actions in Angola , security force action in South Africa , and intra-black (or “black-on-black”) killings.

Since the end of apartheid in 1994, over 300,000 people have been murdered in South Africa . To put this horrifying number into perspective, it is sobering to recall that the United Kingdom suffered 383,000 military deaths during World War II, after years of intense fighting across France , Germany , and the Mediterranean basin.

An epidemic of criminal violence has afflicted South Africa since its first non-racial franchise in 1994. Yet, as one astute observer points out: “This story has been largely ignored by the mainstream media in the United States and the Western world, in order to perpetuate the Mandela myth of the wonderful New South Africa.”

Why are the Western media largely silent about South Africa ’s crime wave? Is it for fear of being thought ‘racist’, notwithstanding the fact that most victims of violent crime in South Africa are black? Is it for fear of blemishing the miracle of South Africa ’s (relatively) peaceful transition to democracy, having to admit that the value of reconciliation on which the “rainbow nation” was built has given way to mistrust and animosity? Whatever the reason, the Western media is doing its consumers a disservice by ignoring the tidal wave of violent crime which has engulfed South Africa.

“My child has been murdered; he lies in the room at the back and there is blood.” With these words the father of the 29-year-old Gericke Smit, an attorney, had to report his son’s death to an ex-policeman. Gericke was killed in Pietersburg last month by two men who battered him to death, striking him across the head with shovels more than 18 times.

Every day – every hour, even – men, women, and children in South Africa are being murdered in their homes. They share the faces, the names, the broader history of the best in the West. When will this daily terror be reported in the daily news of the West?

[This writer, WND.COM, and a woman named Adriana Stuijt are the only journalists I know who've covered the killing fields of South Africa with any consistency. My near-complete book does justice to the topic. Please read our Articles Archive and blog entries under "South Africa."]

Wikipedia is the Southern Poverty Law Center of online “resources.” It is an example of why populism in data is a piss-poor idea. Any rightist who’s had to fight that outfit for the removal of libel and lies knows of what I speak.

In short, Wikipedia is the encyclopedia of and for the Age of the Idiot. (And the malevolent.) Of course, libertarians love it—and their motives are lefty, as is often the case: Behold spontaneous order! (More like disorder.) The fact that millions of people have mastered enough technology to post online falsities masquerading as fact about those they dislike is no more significant to freedom than the fact that billions of humans have a bowel movement every day. So there!

And, as Derb demonstrates, Wikipedia makes “correcting” very difficult indeed. personally, I’ve opted for letters c/cd to a lawyer (and when I obtain proof traceable to the woman I suspect of saucing up the barely true tales posted about me … it won’t be pretty).

Truth in advertising is the issue here. Wikipedia needs to be labeled differently. It cannot be allowed at once to post lies and pose as a purveyor of truth. Right now, it uses its credibility as an encyclopedia to damage the good name of a person and present it as fact. Think of the debate over holocaust denial. Free speech always. The only question vis-a-vis denial is how and where you file it. In the library, the Dewey Decimal Classification for denial ought to be “Pseudo-history.” Right now Wikipedia bios fuse fact with fiction, yet this amalgam is filed as fact. This dubious syndicate needs to be “reclassified” itself. (Ideas?)

So far generalities. Now to more particulars. Today I was researching Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi for a section of my interminable book. Without going into detail, the Zulu chief is one of the good guys of South Africa; Mandela’s mafia—the ANC—is the bad element. Of course, Buthelezi being a free market man, who fought for the devolution of power rather than its concentration in a dominant-party state (the endgame of the ANC and its Anglo-American buddies)—he was tarred as the bad guy by the same axis of evil.

And by WikiLibel. As far as I know, “necklacing,” the indigenous practice of placing a car tire around a putative offender’s neck and igniting it with gasoline, was invented by the ANC as a method of punishing collaborators. Nelson’s wife, Wini Mandela, was an avid practitioner. No, I’m not claiming there was never any cross-fertilization in the ethnic war between the Xhosa (ANC/Mandela) and the Zulu (Buthelezi). However, the ANC should take credit for inventing and perfecting this technique.

But not according to our falsifiers, who give Buthelezi the good old WikiLibel treatment.

Update (August 3): AGGRESSION AGAINST NON-AGGRESSORS. A syndicate poses as a transmitter of immutable fact. The outfit’s process allows for the repeated trashing of vulnerable individuals in its bio section—vulnerable because mass support is not behind them. Individuals enjoying the support of the masses and their crooked cognoscenti are spared. All this under the guise of truth and objectivity.

As I predicted, those whose life’s work is in undermining ordered liberty, and elevating the virtues of populism and anarchy, rush to the defense of this bully pulpit. I speak of libertarians, naturally.

Their analytical tools? Accuse the “little woman” (moi) of personalizing the matter, sulking, and not being willing to, periodically, forfeit her good name and the integrity of her record on the alter of the Collective Good—namely data disseminated by the masses.

Predictable.

It doesn’t take much mental acuity (entirely lost in the herd instincts of my interlocutors) to distill the argument of this post. All one has to do is READ IT. Again.

What moved me to write was not my ongoing libel by Wikipedia, but the blatant, malicious, cunningly embedded slander in the bio of Prince Mangasutu Buthelezi. The latter is one of the good guys of South Africa, RIP. Yet the Zulu royal has been tarred over the decades by westerners—from the state department, to the New York Times to every petty diplomat blindly doing the business of democracy in that part of the world.

In their support for Saint Nelson and the revolutionary ANC—Acorn with machetes—the majority of libertarians (not all, mind you) have been as zealous as the neoconservatives. So sure, they’d dismiss my motives for writing this post. What do these plebs, every bit as ahistoric in their sympathies as the neoconservatives, know of Buthelezi?

According the WikiLibel, the grisly tradition of necklacing (see above), originated with the prince and his political party. Wrong. Necklacing was invented and perfected by the Saint’s syndicate and put to use by his wife.

If you’re not really famous—anointed by the intellectual monopoly in the Age of the Idiot—and WikiLibel doesn’t look too shabby if it lies about you; then they’ll sanction your maligning. Good luck in trying to remove the libel. Read Derb’s experience, one among many. Otherwise you, a non-aggressor, is aggressed against and it’s up to you to keep fending off attacks you did not provoke. How excellent

Some anarchists have no problems with libel, and even advance arguments for it. Free speech baby. Fist in the air; power to the pitchfork wielders.

I predicted libertarians would ooze all over this particular spontaneous bowel movement. I was right.