FSTDT

Lindsay Maasdorp / Siyanda Gumede #racist citizen.co.za

BLF ‘celebrates’ Hoërskool Driehoek tragedy as ‘punishment’ from ‘ancestors’ and ‘God’

Daniel Friedman

The party’s spokesperson has come out in support of an extremely insensitive social media comment causing widespread outrage.
Black First Land First (BLF) spokesperson Lindsay Maasdorp has come out in support of a comment by Facebook user Siyanda Gumede, in which he said he “doesn’t have a heart to feel pain” for the three children who died after the tragic collapse of a walkway at Hoërskool Driehoek in Vanderbijlpark, who he assumed to be white.

The races of the victims of the disaster are not yet known. Hoërskool Driehoek is reportedly a dual-language school.

This didn’t stop Gumede, who was responding to an SABC post on the tragedy, from arriving at the conclusion that the three children were white. He tweeted that he was unmoved by their deaths, as they would eliminate “3 future problems” from the world.

Unsurprisingly, the post was met with instant outrage from social media users across the racial spectrum. Gumede’s Facebook account has since been blocked to the public amid the outcry he has been receiving.

This outrage did not stop Maasdorp from tweeting in support of the Facebook post, although the tweet has since been deleted.

According to the BLF spokesperson, Gumede was “correct” in posting the comment.

Maasdorp’s tweet continued to say that he believed that the incident showed “God is responding”.

“Why should we frown on the ancestors’ petitions to punish the land thieves including their offspring,” he added.

While not many had reacted to his tweet at the time of publication of this story, Maasdorp was already being slammed for his words, with one user calling him “psychopathic”.

When asked for clarification by The Citizen, Maasdorp said he was “not certain” the victims were white, adding he would mourn them if they turned out to be black.

But he added: “If our God has finally intervened and our ancestors have petitioned and seen that these white land thieves have now died then I definitely celebrate it. I celebrate the death of our enemies, their children, their cats and their dogs. That is our position.”

The BLF spokesperson has expressed similar views before.

Maasdorp came under fire in 2016 for posting on both Facebook and Twitter that “I have aspirations to kill white people, and this must be achieved!”

Last year, he had a run-in with the author of this piece, telling me my “existence is a crime” because I’m white.

The party’s leader, Andile Mngxitama, incited widespread rage late last year for similar reasons, after making hugely controversial comments at a rally calling for five white people to be killed for every black person, which he later claimed would be done in self-defence.

Many disagreed, with parties and organisations including the DA, Cope, and AfriForum laying charges against him, and the ANC releasing a statement calling his comment “an attempt to set us back to the dark ages of apartheid”.

The BLF has been accused of hate speech several times by the South African Human Rights Commission, which has recommended that the party be prevented from contesting the 2019 elections on the grounds that they have made statements violating the Electoral Act.

The IEC warned the party against further hate speech, but also said they couldn’t take action against them due to the comments coming prior to the election date being announced.

UPDATE: This article has been updated to reflect that Maasdorp deleted the tweet. 16:02, February 1.

Julius Malema #racist citizen.co.za

Malema faces backlash for “Anti-Semitic” rant

The EFF [Economic Freedom Fighters, a far-left South African political party] commander-in-chief’s vague allegation that ‘Jews’ are training right-wing snipers to kill black people has been dismissed by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.
The Jewish Board of Deputies has hit back at Julius Malema after the controversial EFF leader claimed Jews were training snipers to kill black people.

“Julius Malema’s comments are in line with what has become typical of his attention-seeking behaviour. His constant singling out minority groups in our country is aimed at creating racial tension. This is a real pity because we are at a time in our history where we need to be conscious of the dangers of inflammatory words. What we need now, more than ever, is for our politicians to show leadership and not divisiveness,” the group said in a statement issued on Facebook.

Malema made the claim at a media briefing yesterday saying, “They will kill us for that. There’s a group of white right-wingers who are being trained by Jews in Pretoria to be snipers.”

So far no evidence has emerged to back up his claims.

Controversially, he said that these snipers are being trained by “Jews.”

The mention of Jewish people has been widely slammed, with some saying it amounts to hate speech.

The South African Jewish Board of Deputies spokesperson, Charisse Zeifert, said that the organisation has chosen not to respond to the matter further as it is just “typical Malema creating mischief,” and doesn’t deserve any more airtime.

She added that “It doesn’t matter if its Jews or Indians or Afrikaners, we can’t have a politician engaging in racial incitement.”

Malema’s comments about Jews are currently facing a strong backlash on social media, with some saying that his comments constitute hate speech and others even comparing him to Adolf Hitler.

This is by no means the first time Malema has been accused of hate speech.

A judge found him guilty of the crime in 2011 for leading his followers in singing Dubul’ iBhunu, which translates as “Shoot the Boer.”

In 2017 the South African Minority Rights Equality Movement (Samrem) filed hate speech charges against him for saying that “Indians are worse than Afrikaaners” at the EFF’s fourth birthday celebrations in Durban.

This year, he made controversial comments about Indian people again, telling a Youth Day rally in the North West that he believes the majority of Indian people are racist.

And, in March, the DA announced that they would be reporting Malema to the Equality Court on hate speech charges for allegedly saying, in reference to Nelson Mandela Bay mayor Athol Trollip, “We are going to remove a mayor of PE — we are going for your white man in PE. We are going to cut the throat.”

Penuel Mnguni #fundie citizen.co.za

Pastor Mnguni makes congregation eat snakes

Penuel Mnguni, 24, the leader of End Times Disciples Ministries church in Soshanguve, north of Pretoria, allegedly declared a snake a bar of chocolate (Chomp) for the congregation to eat.

According to a post on End Times Disciples Ministries Facebook page, the pastor told the congregation the he had “the authority to change everything into anything and it will obey because of our authority”.

In the pictures uploaded on social media, the pastor can be seen holding a snake while preaching. He further helps some of the congregants, a man and a woman, to open their mouths in anticipation of the snake.

This is not the first time Pastor Mnguni has done something out of the ordinary. It was reported earlier this year he ordered his congregants to take off their clothes before sitting on top of church members and praying for them. He then jumped on a female congregant he was praying for while the rest of the congregation sang and danced in celebration.

It was again reported this year that the young pastor made his congregants eat a weave off a woman congregant’s head. He told them the weave had turned into nutritious food that would do no harm to their health.

Mcebo Dlamini #racist citizen.co.za

Axed Wits SRC president Mcebo Dlamini took to the University of Limpopo Turfloop campus to explain his love for Adolf Hitler to the students.

“He [Adolf Hitler] reduced white bodies to the same level of black bodies. Because, according to a white man, only a black man must be killed. According to a white man, only a black man must be placed in a quarantine to die.

Hitler took white people and killed them. Hitler took white people [and] starved them to death, the same way they did to black people. That’s why they hate him. I love Adolf Hitler for that,” Dlamini said during his address to the students who clapped and cheered.

Dlamini made headlines weeks ago when he posted on his Facebook account that he loves Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany who initiated World War II and oversaw fascist policies that resulted in millions of deaths.

His comment did not only spark public outrage and condemnation, but also saw him expelled as a member and president of the wits SRC.

In a statement, Wits’ vice-chancellor and principal professor Adam Habib said: “As of today, Mr Mcebo Dlamini is no longer president or a member of the Students’ Representative Council (SRC). In February 2015, Mr Dlamini was found guilty of misconduct by a disciplinary panel and given a sentence of, inter alia, one-year suspended exclusion in respect of each charge against him.”

However, Habib, who labelled Dlamini’s Hitler remarks as “racist and offensive in the extreme”, made it clear that Dlamini’s expulsion had nothing to do with the comments.

Unfazed by the public outrage, Dlamini made it clear he would not apologize for his Hitler comments.