HEY, IT’S GOT A GREAT BEAT AND YOU CAN REALLY DANCE TO IT:
The South African president rejected President Donald Trump’s assertion that the South African communist leader who leads chants about killing white farmers should be arrested.
President Cyril Ramaphosa met with President Trump last week in the White House, where he firmly denied the existence of a genocide or even targeted killings of white South African farmers known as the Boers.
During their meeting, Trump suggested to Ramaphosa that the South African government should arrest Julius Malema, a political leader who has led chants of “shoot the Boer” and “shoot to kill” to a stadium full of supporters.
Upon returning to South Africa, Ramaphosa spoke to reporters about the idea of arrests and asserted that his country is a sovereign nation with its own laws and processes. He also excused the racist chants as freedom of expression.
“We take into account what the constitutional court also decided when it said that, you know, that slogan, ‘kill the Boer, kill the farmer,’ is a liberation chant and slogan.”
“It’s not meant to be a message that elicits or calls upon anyone to go and be killed,” the president claimed. “And that is what our court decided. … We follow the dictates of our constitution because we are a constitutional state, and we are a country where freedom of expression is in the bedrock of our constitutional arrangement.”
Or as America’s Newspaper of Record reports:
