Editorials of The Times

Trump’s Vile Ploy on South Africa

Trust President Donald Trump, following his familiar tactic of deflecting attention from yet another scandal by issuing some outrageous tweet, to come down hard on the wrong side of an issue he knows nothing about, based on no more than a slanted Fox News program. In a late-Wednesday tweet, Trump said he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to look into land seizures and the “large-scale killing of farmers” in South Africa. It was the first time he had mentioned Africa by name in a tweet as president.

His source was a grossly one-sided report by the Fox host Tucker Carlson asserting that the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was seizing land from his citizens because they are the wrong “skin color.” There have been no large-scale killings of white farmers, and Ramaphosa’s proposal to change the constitution to allow expropriation of land without compensation has not yet passed. That said, the issue does deserve a close look.

There can be no question that South Africa’s black people were long denied fair access to land. The Natives Land Act of 1913 essentially reserved most of the land to the white minority, and the restrictions became more onerous in the apartheid era. When that system was finally dismantled almost 25 years ago, a new constitution did provide for land reform, but the process has moved slowly. Statistics vary, but what is clear is that whites, who are less than 10 percent of the population, continue to own more than two-thirds of the land, while black South Africans, the overwhelming majority, own a much smaller share.

That “highly skewed” distribution of land and productive assets, according to the World Bank, contributes heavily to making South Africa “the world’s most unequal country.” This does not mean that expropriation without compensation is a wise remedy, especially in light of the disastrous consequences such action had in undermining the economy in neighboring Zimbabwe. Nor does it absolve the African National Congress for the corruption that has infected the governing party after more than two decades of virtually unchallenged rule, most egregiously under Jacob Zuma, who was ousted as president in February and is on trial on charges of fraud and racketeering.

Ramaphosa argued in an op-ed article in the Financial Times that his proposal was “no land grab” and that the ANC’s land reform program would not undermine investment in the economy or damage agricultural production. The constitutional amendment he is seeking, he said, would strengthen the existing rules by making explicit the conditions under which land could be expropriated without compensation.

All that is subject to debate and study, which is now underway.

Yet Trump’s tweet, and the Fox show on which it was based, were bereft of any context, sympathy or understanding. They pounced, instead, on the false narratives of right-wing white South African groups claiming widespread seizures of white-owned land and a continuing “white genocide.”

In fact, the number of killings of farmers and farmworkers is at a 20-year low, with 47 in the 2017-18 fiscal year, according to AgriSA, a farmers’ organization in South Africa. The numbers have been declining steadily since peaking in 1998, when 153 were killed.

Not surprisingly, South Africa reacted angrily to Trump’s tweet, saying it reflected a “narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past.” Sadly, it probably reflects even less than that — a clueless grasp at a racially tinged political diversion. As Patrick Gaspard, a former U.S. ambassador to South Africa and now president of the Open Society Foundations, tweeted, “This man has never visited the continent and has no discernible Africa policy.”

The White House announced this week that Melania Trump would be traveling to several African countries in October. Without her husband.

New York’s Yeshiva Students Deserve Better

In 2015, concerned parents, teachers and former students filed a complaint to New York City’s Department of Education charging that 39 ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools in the city failed to give children a basic education, violating state law that requires instruction to be “substantially equivalent” to that in public schools.

Three years later, virtually nothing has been done to hold the schools to legal standards, as politicians have ducked their responsibility rather than challenge leaders of one of the city’s most powerful voting blocs. In a city with low turnout, candidates often covet the support of these communities, which reliably tend to vote based on the guidance of religious leaders.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration says it has visited only 15 of those schools, called yeshivas, and been denied access to 15 others. It said nine others that were subjects of the complaint were either closed or didn’t offer K-12 education. A lawyer for a group representing the schools denies that investigators were barred and said the accusations were unfounded in the first place.

In the schools that investigators did manage to visit, they essentially confirmed the critics’ complaints. Many of these schools receive public funding.

The only discernible action the administration has taken based on its desultory investigation has been to pass the buck. It wrote to the state Education Department last week, asking for guidance — something it could have done years ago.

Yeshiva students receive little secular instruction in primary school, and some former students have said boys in particular receive even less, or virtually none, after age 13. Administrators at the schools that investigators visited said the yeshivas had adopted a broader curriculum but provided the city with only an outline of the material.

In an op-ed in The New York Times earlier this year, Shulem Deen, who was raised in a Hasidic family but left the community, wrote that his yeshiva education left him bereft of even basic knowledge. He recalled students learning to sign their names in English for the first time at the age of 18, to prepare for their marriage licenses.

De Blasio told reporters last week, “Clearly there was room for improvement but I have to be straightforward and say there’s room for improvement in a lot of our traditional public schools, too.” Failing to make enough headway in one area is a peculiar excuse for failing to make headway in another.

De Blasio, who like many New York mayors has benefited from the backing of powerful Orthodox Jewish groups over the years, says he is balancing religious rights with the need for government oversight. “It has nothing to do with political support,” he said in an interview. In retrospect, he said, the city should have moved faster to inspect the yeshivas to which it was denied access: “We’re willing to be as aggressive as the state Education Department would allow us to be.” That’s an oddly passive response from a mayor who has fought aggressively to win control of the city’s schools from the state. And this is not the first time that city officials, against their better judgment, have acquiesced to demands from these groups, such as easing guidelines around a circumcision practice that health officials felt was dangerous.

The state has hardly done better. Earlier this year, state Sen. Simcha Felder, who represents a largely Orthodox district in Brooklyn, held up the state’s nearly $170 billion budget until lawmakers agreed to loosen oversight of the yeshivas. Young Advocates for Fair Education, the group that filed the 2015 complaint, has sued to block the measure.

The failure of politicians to challenge Orthodox leaders denies some of the most vulnerable members of Orthodox communities government’s full protection. Officials have an obligation to ensure that every child in New York receives a sound education.