Category Archives: South-Africa

Israel: Why So Safe

Crime, Israel, Neoconservatism, South-Africa

The positions advanced by the “American” Israel Firster, neoconservative fifth column are riddled with contradictions. On his Facebook Timeline, Jack Kerwick points to one of many such gaping inconsistencies.

Jack Kerwick: I don’t speak much of Israel. It’s just not one of my interests. But to hear some movement “conservatives” in the so-called “conservative” media speak, you’d swear that Israel is infallible, for never, ever, do they utter a so much as a peep’s worth of criticism of it. And any criticism aimed at it is abruptly dismissed as a function of “anti-Semitism.” Israel, we are incessantly told, faces an “existential threat” to its existence. But then such ardent Israel supporters as Dennis Prager and Mike Gallagher, while encouraging listeners to sign up for the trip to Israel that they will be hosting later in the year, swear that Israel is among the safest places on Earth, and certainly far safer than many AMERICAN cities. But I thought that it faces an “existential threat?” Can someone please tell me: What’s really going on here?

My reply:

The Israeli state protects its own, unlike the US. I suspect it’s because even politicians can’t emigrate with ease; and their kids must serve in the army as well. No exemptions. Israel, in fairness, is not like the US, where elites and dynastic families, as opposed to the natural aristocracy, run the show to their advantage. Moreover, crime rates are very low. Last I checked, for my book, death-by-murder rates in Israel were 3.7 per 100,000 for civilians only; 4.3 when soldiers were included. That is dazzlingly low—read “Exodus from SA to Israel”—a function, in part, of population composition; its homogeneity, etc., although this too is changing.

Josh Gelernter On South Africa

Ilana Mercer, South-Africa

SOUTH AFRICA. Many thanks to uncle David Cumes who sent me notice of Josh Gelernter’s mention, in National Review. Writes Mr. Gelernter:

Before the end of apartheid, South African writer Ilana Mercer moved, with her family, to Israel; her father was a vocal opponent of apartheid, and was being harassed by South African security forces. A 2013 piece on World Net Daily quotes Mercer as saying, with all her anti-apartheid chops, that “more people are murdered in one week under African rule than died under detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.”

Let’s hope Mr. Gelernter takes note of the exhaustive work done in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2012), not least of The Cannibal’s analytical framework.

South-African Zealot Helen Zille, A Disgrace To Liberalism In The Classical Tradition

Classical Liberalism, Constitution, Free Speech, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, South-Africa

For the infinitesimally small incidents of white-on-black crimes of violence in South Africa, “Helen Zille, the left-liberal leader of [South Africa’s] ‘official opposition’ in parliament,” dares to blame courageous individuals like Dan Roodt. For he has deigned to stand up for the rights of Afrikaners, and has spoken out tirelessly on behalf of Afrikaner history, culture and self-determination. (More about Afrikaner history in Into The Cannibal’s Pot.)

For that, zealot Helen Zille has saddled Roodt with the responsibility for crimes he has never advocated nor committed. Moreover, this ignorant female dared to depict Dan, a highly educated former leftist, as an ignoramus:

Gone are the khaki-clad, gun-toting, horse-riding para-militaries of old. They have now been replaced by one pop star and one self-proclaimed intellectual, in Steve Hofmeyr and Dan Roodt. I often wonder what happened in Steve Hofmeyr’s life to turn him into the man he has become. It was not always so. And few people know that Dan Roodt went into self imposed exile rather than serve in the SA Defence Force during apartheid. What happened?
Both these men are outspokenly offensive on issues of race, Hofmeyr through his concerts and Roodt through his website and twitter. Their strategy is to be as racially provocative as possible, under the guise of language and cultural freedom. Nothing particularly unique about that approach. But they then cry foul when people respond. Social media is a tough space and they should stay off the playground if they can’t take the punches they dish out.
Cloaked in flowery prose and intellectual bluster, their racism has emboldened some of their followers. I doubt it is a coincidence that the increase in racist incidents across the country has run parallel to the increase in their public profiles.

This woman is a disgrace to liberalism in the classical tradition (libertarianism). Scrap that. Zille is a plain disgrace. And stupid to boot.

Dan distills the mindset of the likes of Zille The Zealot:

When a blacks torture or hurt whites, even a baby as was recently reported by the Beeld newspaper, whites are to blame. That is the gist of Zille’s and cultural-Marxist discourse in South Africa. And if you question that dogma, as some of us are wont to do, you are an ogre, a racist, an “apartheid denialist” in the language of Webber Wentzel’s band of legal inquisitors.

What Zille understands under “challenge” is a euphemism for vilification, censorship and persecution. If you deviate from the cultural-Marxist canon of South African history, you will be fined, imprisoned or both. That is what is being planned for us and Zille’s “liberal” DA – which has of course as little to do with classical liberalism as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had to do with democracy – will support these draconian measures to suppress our free speech.

No doubt, this crushingly stupid cow would describe my book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot, in the same vain, although she would be hard-pressed to offer textual proof for her demonstrable falsehoods.

Stalinist speech laws, and Kangaroo courts like the one before which Dan will be hauled, are instantiated in that obese and obscene document the South Africans call a Constitution—these Sovietized laws preclude my visiting the country of my birth. The Cannibal is used by immigration lawyers to help white refugees remain in the West—the La Raza has lobbyist like the Democratic Party and the Demopublican US presidents. Whites don’t!

If not the usual ANC cognoscenti, you just know that some South African Jewish quorum will pitch up to protest the presence of the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot in the country of her birth, South Africa.

Tyranny Strives For Uniformity: The Onslaught Against Steve Hofmeyr

Free Speech, Media, Natural Law, Political Correctness, Race, Racism, South-Africa

South African media (even more illiberal than America’s) have almost nothing positive to say about Steve Hofmeyr, an immensely popular singer, songwriter, actor and Afrikaner activist. (In the new multicultural South Africa, Afrikaner identity is tantamount to a “racist” identity, naturally.) For speaking out of turn, the forces of tyranny have converged on Hofmeyr with the intent to silence him, and worse. Note the sovietized nomenclature used to bring one man to heel and to induce conformity: Hofmeyr is said to go against “nation-building,” to be “extremely abnormal,” to express a “startling sentiment.”

OMG!

A fellow named Brad Cibane, in training at the American Ivy League (which, increasingly, does not stand for true intellectual excellence) to excel as Conformity Enforcer in South Africa, illustrates his terrifying notion of allowable speech. Deploying somewhat specious distinctions such as the “vertical right to free speech vs. horizontal right to free speech”— Cibane does, however, make a valid point with respect to Hofmeyr’s court injunction against a clown called Conrad Koch. Both have a natural right to speak out of turn. Nevertheless, I do understand Hofmeyr wanting to use all arrows in his quiver because the deck—the state included—is stacked against him and his cause.

The libertarian imperative here is to deal with the meta-issues, leaving out the substance of the offending words: They are irrelevant. As this column has explained, policing what people say for political propriety is not a dance in which libertarians should partake—it is “a dance adopted by the political establishment to cow contrarians into submission. By going on the defensive—allowing themselves to be drawn into these exchanges—libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone, and deserve to be purged from “polite” company.”