Trump uses wrong country as proof of South African 'white genocide' accusation

US president Donald Trump’s attempt to demonstrate evidence of white genocide” in South Africa fell flat after he used pictures from an entirely different country to support his claims.

- MADELINE SHERRATT

Mr Trump met with South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, in the Oval Office on Wednesday in an effort to “reset” foreign relations. The meeting took a bizarre turn when Mr Trump produced an array of articles and showed video footage alleging ethnic cleansing in South Africa.

At one stage, Mr Trump flipped to a printout of a blog post from The American Thinker titled “Let’s talk about Africa, which is where tribalism takes you.”

The featured image on the article, which was taken from a months-old video on 7 February, showed Red Cross aid workers at a scene in the city of Goma, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a mass rape and murder incident had occured.

“Look, here are burial sites all over the place. These are all white farmers that are being buried,” the president falsely claimed while holding up the piece to reporters. Mr Trump continued to flick through pages, citing “thousands of stories” about the “death, death, death” of white South African farmers from an array of media sites, which the White House cited Wednesday.