Other images displayed by Trump during meeting with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa were false or misleading

Other images displayed by Trump during meeting with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa were false or misleading

The evidence of supposed mass killings of white South Africans presented by Donald Trump in a tense White House meeting on Wednesday were in some cases images from the Democratic Republic of Congo, while footage shown during the meeting was falsely portrayed as depicting “burial sites”.

“These are all white farmers that are being buried,” said Trump, holding up a print-out of an article accompanied by a picture during the contentious Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

The picture accompanying the article was in fact a screengrab of a video published by Reuters on 3 February and subsequently verified by the news agency’s fact check team, showing humanitarian workers lifting body bags in the Congolese city of Goma. The image was pulled from Reuters footage shot after deadly battles with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.

  • Distractor@lemm.eeEnglish
    241·
    12 hours ago

    The one was a picture of a large number of crosses which Trump said was a burial site for 1000s of white farmers, when it was in fact a memorial following the death of 2 farmers. The memorial was intended to represent all farm deaths of all races. Farm deaths are an issue but the victims are of all races - they kill the farmers, their families and the workers.

    There was a video of a political leader singing a song that translates to “Kill the Boer” i.e. kill the white Afrikaans farmer. This video is: a) more than a decade old, b) from a rally of a minority opposition party i.e. not the political party of the people Trump was meeting, c) from a political party that has been losing votes in recent elections, led by someone who was expelled from the ruling party, d) is of a historic protest song from the apartheid era i.e. more than 30 years ago.

    This video resulted in a court case, where the court concluded that a “reasonably well-informed person” would understand that when a protest song is sung “even by politicians, the words are not meant to be understood literally, nor is the gesture of shooting to be understood as a call to arms or violence.”

    This video was a big deal at the time but it’s not current, not representative of the government’s view, and the person depicted in it is increasingly being sidelined in South African politics.