President Donald Trump used a White House meeting to forcefully confront South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, accusing the country of failing to address Trump's baseless claim of the systematic killing of white farmers.
Trump even dimmed the lights of the Oval Office to play a video of a far-left politician chanting a song that includes the lyrics “kill the farmer.” He also leafed through news articles to underscore his point, saying the country's white farmers have faced “death, death, death, horrible death.”
"We have thousands of people who want to come into our country. And they're white farmers, and they feel that they're going to die in South Africa. And it's a bad thing," Trump said.
Ramaphosa pushed back against the allegations, insisting, “We are completely opposed to that."
"That is not government policy," Ramaphosa continued to say.
"There is criminality in our country. People who do get killed, unfortunately, through criminal activity, are not only white people. Majority of them are Black people," the South African president argued.
Trump was unmoved.
“When they take the land, they kill the white farmer,” he said
Experts in South Africa say there is no evidence of whites being targeted for their race, although farmers of all races are victims of violent home invasions in a country that suffers from a very high crime rate.
The South African leader had sought to use the meeting to set the record straight and salvage his country’s relationship with the United States.
The bilateral relationship is at its lowest point since South Africa enforced its apartheid system of racial segregation, which ended in 1994.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by HOOK Desk and is published from a syndicated feed AP.)
