Last week, when images of charred bodies and bombed-out hospitals in Gaza should have dominated global headlines, the stagecraft of American politics instead offered a grotesque display of deflection.
While over 53,000 Palestinians—70% of them women and children—have been killed and hundreds of thousands wounded, President Donald Trump chose to focus on a fabricated crisis half a world away: the alleged “white genocide” of Afrikaner farmers in South Africa.
Behind the Resolute Desk, Trump staged a performance. Clutching doctored visuals and sensational headlines, he confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with a fantasy.
One video showed symbolic white crosses—meant as protest art—misrepresented as a graveyard. Another was lifted from unrelated rebel violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet Trump insisted: white South Africans were victims of genocide, and the U.S. must act.
Act it did. Last week, some 50 Afrikaner “refugees” arrived at Dulles International Airport to an orderly and patriotic welcome. They were fleeing no war, no mass violence, no state persecution. But they fit a narrative. They were all white.
A manufactured crisis
The myth of “white genocide” in South Africa is not new. Propagated by far-right corners of the internet and echoed by figures like Elon Musk, born in South Africa, it claims a deliberate campaign to exterminate white farmers. But South Africa’s own statistics debunk this.
Between October and December 2024, just 12 people died in farm-related attacks. Only one was a white farmer. Murders in farming communities account for a tiny fraction of the nation’s high crime rate.
Land reform legislation—another bogeyman Trump invoked—has not led to any uncompensated land seizures. It is a policy designed to correct apartheid-era dispossession, and it mirrors eminent domain practices familiar in the United States. Yet Trump used it as evidence of “ethnic cleansing.”
Ramaphosa, accompanied by a diverse delegation including white Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen, attempted to clarify this. Trump dismissed them. “The farmers are not Black,” he snapped, reducing a complex national reality to racial grievance theatre.
His administration’s actions followed suit. Despite the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees finding no evidence of persecution, Trump fast-tracked refugee status for Afrikaners. At the same time, his administration continued denying asylum to Afghan interpreters, Haitian migrants and war-displaced Palestinians.
While Washington manufactured moral panic over a non-existent campaign in South Africa, Gaza descended deeper into horror.
Hospitals have collapsed. Food and water are scarce. The dead are buried beneath rubble. Over 53,000 have perished, with the UN warning of famine and human rights groups citing war crimes. Civilians, not combatants, bear the brunt. A real genocide is taking place while the world looks away.
Yet there are no chartered flights from Gaza. No red-white-and-blue flags welcoming survivors. No Oval Office briefings with posters of bombed schools. Instead, Trump’s administration has actively enabled the carnage—slashing funding to UNRWA, vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the UN and supplying the very bombs that devastate Rafah and Jabalia.
In stunning contrast, South Africa—dismissed by Trump as an alleged persecutor—has filed a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Their evidence? Systematic targeting of civilians, the destruction of infrastructure and a blockade designed to starve a population into submission.
Hollow humanitarianism
This duality isn’t just hypocrisy, it’s racialised statecraft.
Trump’s embrace of the Afrikaner refugee narrative is no accident. It caters to a base primed by years of grievance politics and racial nostalgia. His is an administration that dreams of Norwegian immigrants while banning travellers from Muslim-majority countries; that deports Black and brown migrants en masse while rolling out the red carpet for white South Africans who are neither stateless nor endangered.
Even prominent Afrikaner voices in South Africa have opposed these Trumped up fears. “We are not victims,” wrote Afrikaans journalist Max du Preez.
There is no genocide.
Yet this fabrication has become U.S. immigration policy. Trump’s pantomime of humanitarian concern for privileged whites, while denying the existence of genocide where hundreds are dying daily, is not just tone-deaf, it’s duplicitous.
The visual disparity says it all. At Dulles Airport, orderly receptions and media fanfare. In Gaza, the charred remains of children pulled from collapsed buildings. One group is awarded refugee status for fears unsupported by data. The other is at the receiving end of drones, blockades and the cold language of “collateral damage.”
Trump’s performance with Ramaphosa felt surreal. It resembled how he dealt with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky not too long ago. This tactic diverted attention from American complicity in one of the most devastating modern-day humanitarian crises.
Even as Ramaphosa attempted to discuss trade, cooperation and South Africa’s multiracial democratic aspirations, Trump clung to his fictions. This is not diplomacy; it is demagoguery.
A reversion to racism
Trump’s fixation on South Africa reveals deeper animus. His administration’s hostility toward the country—cutting aid, expelling ambassadors, threatening tariffs—has been thinly veiled racism masquerading as foreign policy. South Africa’s post-apartheid commitment to non-racialism stands in stark contrast to the ethno-nationalist politics Trump promotes.
His disdain isn’t limited to South Africa. He has expressed admiration for “orderly” societies like Norway while calling African nations “shithole countries.” He has shown more sympathy for Russian soldiers than for Sudanese refugees. His policies reflect this worldview.
In Gaza, the cost of this selective empathy is measured in lives.
When sanctuary is extended not to the endangered but to the electorally convenient, what remains of American moral leadership? If genocide can be ignored while fantasy becomes foreign policy, then humanitarianism is hollowed out—wrapped in flags, drowned in hypocrisy and weaponized against the very people it claims to protect.
What Trump has done in spotlighting the fantasy of “white genocide” while ignoring the actual one in Gaza is not just an abandonment of truth is an abdication of responsibility, a moral collapse.
The U.S. cannot claim to lead if it cannot even see. Gaza does not need America’s pity—it needs its protection. That it receives neither is more than a policy failure.
Irony is dead. It lies buried in Gaza, under the rubble the West helped create.
E.D. Mathew is a former UN spokesperson.