Letters to the Editor: I live in South Africa and there’s no white ‘genocide’ here

To the editor: I am a white American living in South Africa. There is no white “genocide” here (“Trump confronts South African leader with claims of systematic killing of white farmers,” May 21). That is a figment of President Trump’s fevered imagination. My white Afrikaner friends are appalled at the absolutely untrue portrayal of their society and the shameful bullying of their president by ours.

I have lived in seven countries and visited 30. Nowhere else have I experienced the high degree of white privilege, the automatic deference shown to white people in everyday encounters and the huge disparities of income and opportunity enjoyed by white people that exist in South Africa. Shame on President Trump.

Paul Spickard, Stellenbosch, South Africa
This writer is a distinguished professor of history at UC Santa Barbara and currently a fellow for the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.

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To the editor: Most world leaders, when other heads of state are visiting their country, will go out of their way to make the foreign leader feel right at home by exchanging pleasantries and discussing similarities between the two countries. Our defiant president, on the other hand, went out of his way to try to embarrass South African leadership by showing videos that falsely declared that descendants of the predominantly Dutch colonizers who came to South Africa in the 17th century and ruled the land’s politics for many years are now the victims of genocide.

This preposterous claim is false. It once again showed that our lying leader will do anything to try and fool the world into believing his erroneous version of events. You would hope that, at some point, Trump would recognize that his falsities harm all who read or hear his lack of understanding of how the world actually works.

Donald L. Singer, Cardiff, Calif.

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To the editor: Once again, Trump’s hypocrisy shows itself by his falsely claiming that South Africa is perpetrating genocide on white farmers while ignoring what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza. Despite there being little evidence to support such a claim against the government of South Africa, Trump cut off assistance to that country while continuing to provide material support to Israel as that country indiscriminately kills many women and children in its pursuit of Hamas. There is something terribly wrong with Trump.

Roger Taylor, Brea