Posted on 05/14/2025 2:33:25 PM PDT by Miami Rebel
When Donald Trump entered his second term as president, he found a full-throated supporter in South Africa’s chief rabbi.
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein said in February that South Africans “should welcome the Trump administration’s interventions” in the country’s affairs, praising the president in a widely distributed video message.
A vocal critic of the South African government, Goldstein backed Trump’s opposition to South Africa for its cooperation with Iran and its new land expropriation law, which Goldstein believes will slow the country’s already sluggish economy.
But since Trump decided to admit some white South Africans into the United States as refugees — the only refugees he is letting in — Goldstein has changed his tone. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he sees the move as a “mistake.”
“It is wrong to think that the problems that saw white South Africans take up residence in the U.S. are unique to the white community,” said Goldstein. He challenged the Trump administration’s contention that the Afrikaners — a minority that arrived in South Africa in the 17th century whose members led the country’s system of apartheid until its end in 1994 — are being singled out for persecution and what Trump called “genocide” because of their identity.
Like Jewish leaders in the United States and elsewhere, Goldstein finds himself walking a tightrope when it comes to a U.S. president whose pro-Israel and philosemitic rhetoric is often matched by policies that many Jews oppose. Some American Jews have welcomed the attention the administration has paid to campus antisemitism, for example, but many have worried that his attack on universities has been too harsh, blunt and undemocratic.
In South Africa, where Jews strongly identify with Israel, Trump’s general pro-Israel stance is welcome. But there too that stance has clashed with local politics.
Milton Shain, an emeritus professor of South African Jewish history at the University of Cape Town, said the overwhelming majority of South Africans — Jews and non-Jews alike — were perplexed by the idea of some Afrikaners receiving refugee status. He called the rhetoric about a genocide against Afrikaners “absurd” and speculated that there could be a connection between Trump’s policy and South Africa’s decision to file genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
“It seems to me that the Trump regime wants to target South Africa for taking Israel to the ICJ,” Shain said. “That is the only reason I can think of for such an odd and sustained initiative.”
But even before the war in Gaza that led to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, both Trump and his South Africa-born advisor Elon Musk hurled accusations of “genocide” and “the large scale killing of farmers” at South Africa. Their claims are based on documented attacks against white farmers and the complaints echo a subset of South African white nationalists. Although the farm attacks have persisted for years, they represent a small percentage of the country’s high violent crime rate, which affects all parts of the population.
Goldstein said Trump has wrongly framed South Africa’s economic, social and political challenges in racial terms. He pointed to a poll by the Social Research Foundation, which found that 67% of Black South Africans wanted their children to live and work abroad for a better future.
The first group of 59 Afrikaner refugees arrived at Dulles International Airport on Monday. They were greeted with fanfare by Trump officials, including the Jewish deputy secretary of state Christopher Landau, who compared their journey to his father’s escape from Nazi-annexed Austria in 1938.
In the United States, some migration aid groups have said they are morally opposed to resettling the newly arrived Afrikaners. The Episcopal Church said on Monday that it was ending its decades-long partnership with the federal government to resettle refugees, citing its “steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation” and “historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.”
The U.S.-based Jewish refugee aid organization HIAS said it would support Afrikaners in their new home. But HIAS’ president Mark Hetfield told The New York Times it was “not right” that this group was singled out for admission.
“We are profoundly disturbed that the administration has slammed the door in the face of thousands of other refugees approved by DHS months ago, notwithstanding courts ordering the White House to let many of them in,” said Hetfield.
On Monday, Trump said he welcomed Afrikaners despite his anti-migrant stance because they were victims of a “genocide.” He suspended resettlement programs for other refugees around the world almost immediately after taking office.
White South Africans, of whom about half are Afrikaners, comprise some 7% of the country’s population and own about 78% of private farmland. Research shows white South Africans collectively have roughly 20 times the wealth of Black South Africans.
South African Jews are a small minority within the white minority, and their ranks are shrinking — after peaking at 120,000 in 1970, the population has declined to less than 50,000. Many Jews have connections to Israel and feel isolated by the frayed relations between Israel and South Africa. Some, said Shain, worry about being identified by their government as allies to its foreign adversaries.
“I believe Rabbi Goldstein’s supportive comments [of Trump] are problematic,” said Shain. “Jews are rapidly being identified as a fifth column, like the far-right Afrikaners, working against the interests of the country by cozying up to the Trump administration.”
Goldstein’s support for Trump drew criticism from other members of the local community. Journalist Anton Harber wrote an essay in February titled “The Chief Rabbi who lost his soul,” writing, “Something is very wrong when a Chief Rabbi sings the praises of political and business figures without mentioning their neo-Nazi affiliations.” Harber referenced a gesture by Musk that drew comparisons to a Nazi salute and his ringing support for Germany’s far-right AfD party, as well as Trump’s past socializing with antisemitic conspiracy theorists.
However, Shain and Goldstein agreed that Jewish South Africans have the same concerns as most South Africans as a whole — violence, corruption, poverty and high unemployment. Many young Jews are leaving South Africa for opportunities elsewhere.
“The challenges facing the community are the same as those facing the country,” Goldstein said. “The more that South Africa as a country will achieve economic growth and thrive, the more the Jewish community will.”
If the main attitude of the Jews in SA is that the “talk of genocide in their country is nuts”, then I can kind of understand why this guy would feel the way he does about them.
Why should he be expected to have any warm feelings toward people who are completely indifferent to the plight of him and his kin?
If you had a choice of living in a neighborhood where you'd be surrounded by Somalis vs. a neighborhood populated by Irish or Polish Americans, I doubt you'd pick the Somali neighborhood. That's the rub with multiculturalists and all Third World immigration enthusiasts - they want the consequences of their policies and ideologies to be someone else's problem.
The second group, Italians, Poles, and Eastern European Jews were restricted in immigration acts in 1921 and 1924 in an attempt to limit non-Northern European immigration. Congress was motivated by racial theories that idolized Northern Europeans. The quotas imposed were based on the U.S. population in 1890.
The third group, the Irish, were not restricted by any of the immigration restrictions because they are Northern Europeans and had been immigrating to America since colonial times. Although mostly Catholic, the Irish were racially Northern European and closely akin to the Scots and the Welsh. They were also a large percentage of the American population as of the 1890 base line.
and you did ZERO research on the Barbaras from England and Sweden and robot Lentin in Ireland, or the NGOs like HIAS (the HEBREW immigration aid society) orchestrating the demographic destruction of America because if you did, you would be quiet. The kalergi plan is rael, the deliberate attack on the USS Liberty is rael, the dancing Israelis… rael. And communist china would still be a third world dump if not for the Jews who trained Mao, and Kissinger, who CONvinced tricky dickie to make them richer and stronger, while making us poorer and weaker.
You are out of your element on this one , lady.
news flash: you are not gonna meet Jesus because you will kiss the ass of bibi nuthinyahoo or the STATE of Israel, founded in 1948 by the Rothchilds. What will help is recognizing the bad actors among us
I DON'T know where YOU got your supposed "factual" info from; HOWEVER, "FACTUAL" IS A LARGE STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION!
Just how many for REAL Afrikaners do YOU know...PERSONALLY and in depth?
How many "family stories" about THE BOER WAR, from Afrikaners have YOU been told?
How many different books, and written BY WHOM, have YOU read about that war and the history of RSA?
The Afrikaners, in toto, have NEVER been Socialists; FACT! Could there/would there NEVER have been any? Sure, maybe a very few might once have been/are; but there has ALWAYS been good and bad, intelligent/stupid, well educated/uneducated in every era and in every place throughout the history of mankind.
Re early V later East Coast populace...your overtly broad, sweeping generalizations are those of someone who neither knows nor understand American history.
Go get your hood and gleaming white robe from the closet and go off to your beloved KKK meeting!
Yes,that IS very true.
I really don't understand why he is so blind to reality, but he stupidly is.
Neither do those who adamantly refuse to try to leave.
Even many blacks, as far back as one year AFTER Mandela was president, wanted Apartheid back!
The thing is, now, in present day RSA, a VERY large part of the black populace NEVER even lived under Apartheid! Some weren't even born back then and MANY are ILLEGAL ALIEN INVADERS, from neighboring nations, who came in once the military were pulled from the borders and their spawn.
Right you are and they also HATED legal immigrants from Europe.
You are an uneducated BIGOT, have less than NO idea at all, about RSA, Afrikaners, the Boer War, nor anything else.
Calling Mr. Nixon, the far lefty/Pinko/STINKING COMMIE catch phrase, begun when he beat that rabid lefty nutter, Helen Gahagan Douglas for the California Senate seat in Congress, proves, beyond a shadow of any doubt just HOW bereft of factual, historical knowledge,critical thinking ability, and discernment you are.
FYI...I'm not Jewish, kissing BiBi, ANYWHERE, isn't anything that I have ever considered doing, nor would I, and as far as entering heaven is concerned, YOU shan't pass through those pearly gates!
Pssssssssssssst...Jesus, the Christ was, in HIS human form, an OBSERVANT JEW!
You really are seriously too filled with abnormal hatred; it's making you quite insane.
A society of laws is not based on how you feel about your neighborhood.
Because the Afrikaners are principally Dutch Reformed Church. There is also a good sprinkling of Huguenots [French] among them which explains the French names among the Afrikaners. One of the reasons for great wines coming from South Africa is that the Huguenots took French wine-making techniques with them to the Cape.
I'd understand how ruining western countries doesn't really distract anyone from Jeffery Epstein, AIPAC or spying.
And then what?
Haven’t plenty of Jews already left South Africa? Shain is wrong to ridicule the fears. Have we learned nothing from history? Who can see what’s coming 5, 10, 20 years down the road? But I can understand the rabbi not wanting to see a stampede out of South Africa now. It’s his home and home to the Afrikaners and they understandably don’t want to hand the country over to the radical white-haters.
As I mentioned elsewhere, there's a prevailing myth that the Thembu and other Bantu peoples of South Africa are somehow "native" and that they were displaced by Afrikaners. In fact, most of South Africa was uninhabited except for the (actually indigenous) Khoisan hunter-gatherers, who were displaced by the Bantu Africans who now make up SA's majority. In that sense, most SA blacks are no more "native" than the Afrikaners.
A society of laws decides who can and who cannot enter the country. Criteria for doing so include asking whether the people in question can make a positive contribution and integrate into society, as opposed to contributing to poverty and crime.
Based on your views on immigration, I'm guessing that you're probably still sore that Jeb Bush wasn't the 2016 Republican nominee, or that someone along his lines didn't get nominated in 2024. Whatever Trump's faults, at least his immigration platform has finally made views like yours the marginal minority in the Republican Party, as they ought to be.
Re French last names...yes indeed;however, when they fist fled to The Netherlands, the Dutch influenced them to change the spelling to the Dutch way. LOL
But yes, you CAN pretty much still tell WHO, by their last names, were the Huguenots who were living in The Netherlands and went to what is RSA on the very first voyages.
And your timeline is waaaaaaaaaay too long; 5 years? It's almost gone NOW; shan't take much longer for it to be worse than Zimbabwe.
About a year or a wee bit more, the black run newspapers ( all newspapers and T.V. is controlled by the government and the blacks were running them under Mandela) had front page, 2/3s of that page, in HUGE letters that read "BRING BACK APARTHEID!".
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