"Islamophobia" case in South Africa, and the media's stereotying of whites.

(I may take some more moment to construct the thread from various sources.)

Yesterday I watched a repeat of the following program on E-TV in South Africa: 3rd Degree - Stop the Terror.

This program was about a case that occurred at a fast-food chicken outlet in the Magaliesberg area, where two white males made snide remarks about two Muslim men's beards, and a comment comparing the one to Osama Bin Laden. According to eyewitness accounts (which are rather sketchy at this point) the snide remarks were returned from the Muslim man, and the two whites assaulted the two Muslim men.

Things went very wrong when the one white male ended up killing the Muslim man.

It's a terrible thing that happened, and as a gay man I'm well familiar with such local "bully boys", and I know when to shut up.

My deepest sympathy goes out to the Muslim man's wife and his family.

However, what I didn't appreciate at all was how the media sensationalized and framed this.

Talk was about South Africa returning to the "old days" (as if whites ever beat Muslims to death in the "old days").

The 3rd Degree program tried to frame it as a discussion on (white) racism and (US/European) Islamophobia.

Tragic as it was, I do not think this was intentional Islamophobia.
In fact, this was a horrible exception.

To me, the program should have rather looked at violent masculinity.

Well, I found it very ironic, because racism was discussed without any reference to 3 700 white farmers who have been murdered in SA since 1994, often in the most torturous and gory way imaginable, and frequently with clear anti-white racial messages on the scene.

But what I found most astounding is that the clearly planned and intentional firebombing of immigrant Muslim shops by local black people this year was completely ignored.
The numbers of Somalis, Bangladeshis and other Muslims targeted by blacks are astounding, even this year alone.
South Africa's xenophobia claims ten Somali traders killed in five days.
700 Somalis killed in South Africa

In a program that purported to be about racism and Islamophobia, the burning to death of Muslims was completely ignored, as were the government policies like rendition.

Although it had a sentence or two about "good whites" and wider racism in fairness, I feel the way in which the media represented this was an attempt to stereotype a white minority unfairly.

My sympathy is with the widow and the family, and my gripe is with media representation and sensationalism.

At worst this should have been "xenophobia", but that label seems to be reserved for when any other race but whites burn and hack people to death.

The white minority in SA is not Islamophobic, and with all the other gruesome attacks this year it boggles the mind how this could be considered "fair journalism".

My main concern is that people from other countries may view this uncritically as such programs spread, so while all victims of intolerance and violence deserve respect and sympathy, I wanted to supply some perspective and context.
The demonizing of the white minority in SA will not resolve violence or racism in our country.

Here follows the 30-minute clip in three parts: 3rd Degree - Stop the Terror.

Firstly I'd like to know what "terror"?
A terrible case for sure, but do these immigrant Muslim communities really feel general terror when settling in traditionally white towns and suburbs?

What a strange and forced title.

This is how the program is generally described on Youtube:

The weekend before the Muslim celebration of Eid, which marks the end of Ramadan, a Muslim man was ridiculed, then attacked. He later died. The incident took place outside a fast-food outlet in the small village of Magaliesburg. Businessman Mohammed Kazi was allegedly called Osama Bin Laden because of his beard by two white men. Both are now charged with assault, one of them with murder. Now, eighteen years into democracy, South Africans gather in a court to hear a case which could be a religious hate crime - the first such case, according to Krugersdorp Magistrate Reginald Dana. Have we moved on from the old South Africa? This week on 3rd Degree, we ask three experts about a cure for racial division and prejudice.

Christaphobia, Islamophobia, homophobia,...

If you disagree with anybody at any time, it turns out you have a phobia

reply to post by halfoldman


Isn't SA still pretty racist? Didn't apartheid only end like 15 years ago?

A terrible case for sure, but do these immigrant Muslim communities really feel general terror when settling in traditionally white towns and suburbs?

Well a Muslim did just get beat to death...

The 3rd Degree program tried to frame it as a discussion on (white) racism and (US/European) Islamophobia.

How? The black guy in the last video straight up said blacks commit hate crimes on other blacks and on whites and how polarized the society is by race.

reply to post by RealSpoke

Good points, and of course people are welcome to agree with the program.

I just don't like the insinuation that whites are uniquely racist and go about beating up Muslims.

Apartheid ended in 1994, or 18 years ago.

Is South Africa very racist?
Well, like in many communities that is difficult to answer.
In public life, I'd say no, racism is very rare.
Privately racism has certainly increased from what it was in 2008, since some politicians like Malema keep raising the temperature.

There is however a media discordance between dismissing black racism as "crime" or "xenophobia", while white incidents that have even a hint of racism are blown out of all proportion. These are often misleadingly represented and usually lead to sanctimonious calls for national reconciliation.
Gruesome violence against whites is rarely seen as racist.

These two perpetrators deserve a harsh and possibly exemplary punishment, although this seems like an unplanned incident that spiraled out of control, but to turn it into a torch-song against Islamophobia and religious intolerance is a bit much.
I doubt these guys from a fairly rural town even know about any of those issues.

Meanwhile we have a state that has supposedly falsely imprisoned Muslim anti-drug activists from PAGAD, and has been involved in renditions.
We rarely hear that anyone gets jailed for the xenophobic murders of Muslims, and there's all kinds of rumors on who is involved in that violence.
Seemingly some Muslim victims are more deserving of attention than others ... mmm I wonder on what criterion that could be based?

When discussing Islamophobia shouldn't that at least feature?

Yes, the black gentleman in the last clip does mention all kinds of racism between groups, and he is the only one to do so, so kudos to him.

The rest seem so desperate to be liberal and not rocking the boat that they don't say much really.

As far as racial tensions go in SA, Muslims don't really feature to whites at all, and in the Western Cape Province (which has a large historic Muslim community) we speak Afrikaans and generally vote for the same party.

Of course SA is not a monolithic place, and things can vary regionally.

We do have a violent and militaristic history (in all population groups), and that's why I would have framed the program in terms of violent masculinity, where a joke or snide remark can quickly end up in violence.
Some gender activists have also examined the Marikana mine violence in those terms, and then there's the epidemic "corrective rape" of lesbians in the townships, and violence against women in general.
Although justifiably much focus has been on male violence against women, men are even more likely to die in violence from other men, and for me this case was a good example of this.

What I find even more perplexing is a quote form a Muslim community leader in part 2 above (from 4:50 into the clip).

Here it is said that calling a Muslim "Bin Laden" is an "extreme insult", although the logic seems rather abstract:

I quote as best as possible:

"Osama Bin Laden has been looked at as an embodiment of evil across the world due to the 9/11 attacks that happened, so I would take offense to it ... and many Muslims throughout the world ... and it's an unjust tag that Osama Bin Laden had carried, and the Muslim community of the world has to carry."

Huh?
Did I hear that wrong?

I'm truly starting to expect some agenda behind this program now.

Are they seriously trying to make a program about Islamophobia, and then proceed to explain the initial "insult" of calling somebody with a beard "Bin Laden" with a conspiracy theory about Bin Laden having an "unjust tag" of evil?

I could think of many people who would also find that statement highly offensive.
What's going on at this station?
One wonders.

reply to post by halfoldman


I can't really consider the video as anti-white because the black guy at the end. If it were meant to make just white people look bad, then that guy never would have been included in the piece. It did discuss a real crime that took place, in which an altercation occurred after "racist" comments. I just think you're so used to seeing white racism focused on, that you consider everything and anything an attack on white people.

In public life, I'd say no, racism is very rare.

Yeah but private racism doesn't really exist. If you're racist, you're racist...it's going to affect how you treat people..who you hire, etc.

Gruesome violence against whites is rarely seen as racist.

Well just because violence occurred between people of a different race doesn't make it racist. I've seen man interglacial fights, none of them happened over racism.

"Osama Bin Laden has been looked at as an embodiment of evil across the world due to the 9/11 attacks that happened, so I would take offense to it ... and many Muslims throughout the world ... and it's an unjust tag that Osama Bin Laden had carried, and the Muslim community of the world has to carry."

lol, wowwwww, he really did say that. I didn't notice it when I first watched it. I don't think there's a conspiracy behind that, a lot of Muslims probably feel that way. There's a lot of extremists and a lot of conspiracy theorist Muslims who think hat Osama had nothing to do with 9/11.

What's going on at this station?

Who owns it? If that were the USA there'd be a huge outrage. You can openly say you wish all Muslims were dead and no one would really care, other than liberal stations here.

reply to post by RealSpoke

Good, I'm glad you don't consider the clip as anti-white racism, because my main concern was how it painted white South Africans, and if it failed to stereotype them as uniquely racist and Islamophobic then I'm thrilled.

Despite the vague but useful comment at the end about general inter-group racism, there was another commentator who was quite misleading. He said that the victims of the 2008 xenophobic attacks were black, but he fails to mention that the perpetrators were also black (which is a typical trend in the media). For somebody outside SA that could imply that the attacks were perpetrated by whites on blacks.

The altercation is also unclear. The men called the Muslim "Bin Laden", he then confronted them, but what this entailed or what he said to them is absent. That's when things got racist and physical when they were all thrown out of the fast-food shop. So we only hear the insults they called him. What they did is still terrible, and perhaps at a later stage more details will be revealed of the altercation.

You asked about racism in SA in general, and what I can say is that you can come here as a person of any color and not experience racism. But there are tensions beneath the surface.
South Africa has strict laws on racism enforced by the Human Rights Commission, and employment is governed by Affirmative Action statistics, which are quite lengthy issues on their own. In "safer spaces" people tend to express their true feelings, although these are not unanimous within groups.
Many whites live in dread of being accused of racism, so in public such issues are ignored or they will strongly express liberal positions, and it's unsure what people really think.
Perhaps it's significant that the only person to mention racism between blacks, and black on white was a black person.
Liberal whites don't mention such things.

As for the gruesome murders against whites, especially the farmers, in some cases racial insults are hurled at the victims, or slogans like "white pig" have been scrawled in blood on the walls.
Most of the sites that illustrate this are too gory to link here, and a danger of the media in SA and other countries to discuss the issue in terms of racism means that the far right and extremists often capitalize on farm murders.
Also in a wider context of hate songs and speech in politics Genocide Watch certainly feels that the farm murders have a racial character.
www.genocidewatch.org...

Perhaps one day 3rd Degree will explore the issues of anti-white racism in South Africa, or albophobia, but I'm not holding my breath.

Eight South Africans murdered by militant Muslims in Kabul terror attack over Youtube video:

www.bdlive.co.za...

I'll be waiting from E-TV for the outpouring of grief and sympathy from the Muslim community for the victims as they pose the question: Are Muslims extremists?
Well, let's wait and see, not much yet though.

Why South Africans?

A fear based on a real perception is after all no longer a "phobia".

I'm sure there are many moderate Muslims in SA, but from the E-TV clip we see a person who does actually identify with Bin Laden, and it's getting mightily confusing when a clip that is supposed to cause sympathy for Muslims is edited to include such a remark.

Hussein Solomon on Al Qaeda activities in South Africa:
voices.news24.com...