WHY THIS SILENCE OVER SOUTH AFRICA'S LETHAL RACISM?

With just one change, this racist murder would become a cause of the Left: "The couple ... were tied up, stabbed, and tortured with a blowtorch for several hours. The masked men stuffed a plastic bag down [the woman]’s throat...  [She] had multiple skull fractures, gunshot wounds and “horrific” burns to her breasts." So why no fuss?

Susan Howarth

With just one change, this racist murder would become a cause of the Left: 

 So why no fuss?

The couple, who had lived in the area for 20 years, were tied up, stabbed, and tortured with a blowtorch for several hours. The masked men stuffed a plastic bag down [the woman's] throat, and attempted to strangle her husband with a bag around his neck.

The couple were bundled into their own truck, still in their pyjamas, and driven to a roadside where they were shot... [The woman],who police said was “unrecognisable” from her injuries, had multiple skull fractures, gunshot wounds and “horrific” burns to her breasts...

“Her head was covered with a towel. Her eyes were swollen shut. She was partially clothed with just scraps of her shirt remaining. Her breasts and upper body was bloody. The plastic bag, shoved down her throat, took some effort to remove because her jaw was clamped down tightly.

“How she managed to breathe with the bag in her throat remains a mystery. One of her rescuers later recalled how Sue was unresponsive except for the constant groaning...”

She was rushed to hospital and placed on life support, but died two days later.

But the fact that doesn't qualify this murder for the Left's outrage?

Last month, British woman Sue Howarth and her husband Robert Lynn were woken at 2am by three men breaking into a window of their remote farm in Dullstroom, a small town in the northeast of South Africa, about 240km from the nearest capital city.

Yet this attack on white farmers in South Africa is not isolated:

Earlier this month, for example, 64-year-old Nicci Simpson was tortured with a power drill during an attack involving three men at her home on a farm in the Vaal area, about two hours drive from Johannesburg...

The most reliable numbers [on attacks] are released by the Transvaal Agricultural Union, which represents commercial farmers, and civil rights group AfriForum.

According to the TAU, last year there were 345 attacks resulting in 70 deaths — the highest death toll since 2008....

In a 2014 report, “The Reality of Farm Tortures in South Africa”, AfriForum wrote that “the horror experienced during farm tortures is almost incomprehensible”...

While sometimes farmers and their families are tortured to obtain information, such as the whereabouts of keys to the safe, human rights groups say the excessive brutality may be intended to send a message to the general farming community — get out of our country.

Victims are often restrained, harmed with weapons such as machetes and pitchforks, burned with boiling water or hot irons, dragged behind vehicles and shot. Female victims are often raped during attacks...

Since 2007, at the direction of the government, South African police have stopped releasing statistics about the race of the victims. Monitoring group Genocide Watch says the cover-up has been exacerbated by American and European governments, which have “remained silent about the problem, reinforcing the campaign of denial”.

The rise in farm attacks has been blamed on increasingly anti-white hate speech, particularly from the ruling African National Congress...

[President] Zuma earlier this month called for the confiscation of white-owned land without compensation. Zuma urged the “black parties” in the parliament to unite to form the two-thirds majority that would be needed to make the necessary change to the country’s constitution.

Last week, during a debate in parliament about the farm attacks, an ANC MP shouted “Bury them alive!” while MP Pieter Groenewald was speaking about the plight of white farmers.

If a white government incited this kind of horror on black farmers, the Left would join conservatives in denouncing it.

But here we see again that with so many of the Left in these days of identity politics that it's not the principle that counts but the side.