Reuters Uses Bogus ‘Congo’ Fact Check Against Trump on South Africa

Reuters attempted to fact-check President Donald Trump on Thursday with an article stating that an image he had held up was in fact from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), not an image of white farmers being murdered in South Africa.

However, the article Trump held up was an opinion piece about Africa in general, which referred to the situation in the DRC — where South African troops have been engaged — as part of a broader problem of tribalism in Africa, and focused specifically on South Africa’s racial policies in the article.

Reuters claimed:

U.S. President Donald Trump showed a screenshot of Reuters video taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of what he falsely presented on Wednesday as evidence of mass killings of white South Africans.

“These are all white farmers that are being buried,” said Trump, holding up a print-out of an article accompanied by the picture during a contentious Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

…

In fact, the video, published by Reuters on February 3 and subsequently verified by the news agency’s fact check team, showed humanitarian workers lifting body bags in the Congolese city of Goma. The image was pulled from Reuters footage shot following deadly battles with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.

The blog post showed to Ramaphosa by Trump during the White House meeting was published by American Thinker, a conservative online magazine, about conflict and racial tensions in South Africa and Congo.

The American Thinker article, titled “Let’s talk about Africa, which is where tribalism takes you,” made the following relevant point about left-wing politics in the U.S., invoking South Africa to the DRC (original emphasis):

[F]or decades, leftists have steadily been balkanizing us. Now, our loyalties lie not with nation and values, but with people who share our skin color, our nation of origin, being a conservative or a leftist, or being hetero- or homosexual.
…

And if you don’t believe me, look at what’s going on in Africa, a continent that has never been able to break free from ancient tribal values or racial obsessions. Here are just three stories of what happens when those values are ascendant especially when, as in South Africa, they have a Marxist gloss:

One. The South African government, which has abandoned Nelson Mandela’s efforts to create racial harmony after generations of apartheid, isn’t even pretending anymore that its goal is anything other than destroying whites …

Two. Also in South Africa, because the dysfunctional, race-obsessed Marxist government is focused on land appropriation, it embarked upon a savage attack on artisanal miners trying to work old diamond mines. These people have created a community within the mines and pay for permission to mine them. However, in August, the government decided to go after the miners. What happened next was a disaster …

Third, in Goma, the Democratic Republic of Congo (“DRC”), when a Rwanda-backed rebel group entered the city, “Hundreds of women were raped and burned alive during the chaos after a Rwandan-backed rebel group entered the Congolese city of Goma last week.” The DRC, of course, has been the site of non-stop war for decades, as battling groups (i.e., tribes) are engaged in non-stop war—something that precisely mimics the tribal battles that have been the norm in Stone Age communities going back tens of thousands of years.

While the image was not from South Africa, the article discussed South Africa in depth, and was therefore relevant — especially as farm murders were the topic of discussion in the Oval Office meeting on Wednesday.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.