JOHANNESBURG: The U.S. ambassador to South Africa has hit out at the countrys President, Cyril Ramaphosa, telling Fox News Digital, “You’ve got a president of South Africa who refuses to condemn an incitement to kill.”Â
Ambassador L. Brent Bozell III was responding strongly, in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, to being summoned this past week to South Africas foreign ministry and criticized for undiplomatic conduct.”Â
This is the third time the ambassador has received a démarche â a diplomatic rebuke â from Pretoria in the nine months since he arrived here. The ambassador has been slammed by South Africa for relaying President Trumps condemnation of South African policies and statements. Bozell is a former Fox News contributor and founder of the largest conservative media watchdog, the Media Research Center.
He has repeatedly pushed for issues brought up by President Trump in a testy confrontation in the Oval Office with South Africas President Ramaphosa 16 months ago to be addressed. Among other points, these include alleged race-based discrimination, allegations of murder and torture of farmers, plans for uncompensated land seizures and the incitement of violence against minority groups.
The ambassador said three of the five specific asks the Trump administration wants have been ignored by South Africa.
High up the list of asks is President Trumps demand that President Ramaphosa stops people in South Africa from shouting “Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer!” A Boer is a white man, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. It defines it as “a South African of Dutch or Huguenot descent”. Ramaphosa has claimed he cant stop people chanting this slogan because its been cleared for use by the countrys supreme court.
Bozell told Fox News Digital, “You’ve got a president of South Africa who refuses to condemn an incitement to kill.”
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He added, “You’ve got a government that has said it’s not going to do any more for the Afrikaner rural community, and it’s got a government that’s saying no, your mining has to go through race-based programs. We’re not going to allow your investments to go the way everyone else has been allowed to go”.
“Those were three strikes and you’re out as far as we were concerned,” Bozell said.
“Ask 100% of the world if “kill the farmer!, kill the Boer” isnt hate speech,” he continued. “If that isn’t hate speech, I don’t know what hate speech is: inciting people to commit murder. So the answer we’ve gotten is, well, the court said it isn’t. To which our response is look, in the United States, the president can disagree with the court and does about every five minutes because that’s what you do in a democracy when you disagree with something.”
Bozell added, “So, to say, well, you can’t do it because the court said it’s not, you know, that’s poppycock. If President Ramaphosa, if he wants to, he can do it. It’s just as simple as that.”
The ambassador pushed hard on the point, saying “How hard is it to say this chant, where some, where people do it, 50,000 people in the stadium jump up and down, pantomiming guns, shooting people, how hard is it to say, stop it? This is awful that anybody would be inciting people to kill.”
South Africa, analysts say, is drawing ever closer to Iran, Russia, China even Cuba. The
