FARM GRABS RIFE IN SA

They are conservative, Christian Caucasians, a fact that might help explain why the fashionable left in the West doesn't much care that they're being exterminated.

The Boers – or farmers – of South Africa have tilled the land for generations on small holdings or on large commercial farms. But orgiastic killing sprees by The People, combined with a Stalinesque land grab by their representatives is threatening this minority's survival.

Not to mention making life an inferno for farmers across the country.

Journalists for "Carte Blanche," the South African equivalent of "20/20," conducted a six-month investigation into what has become known as farm murders, or plaasmoorde in Afrikaans. The short documentary opens with a funeral, Elsie Swart's. Elsie was one of three farmers killed in the span of only seven days. She died after being "severely tortured, burned with an electric iron, beaten and strangled to death."

The victims of this ongoing onslaught, we are told, are invariably elderly, law-abiding, God-fearing whites, murdered in cold blood, in ways that beggar belief. For the edification of racism spotters in the West, "Carte Blanche" ought to have pointed out that their assailants are always black.

Typically, the heathens will attack on Sundays. On returning from church, the farmer is ambushed. Those too feeble to attend Sunday service are frequently tortured and killed when the rest are worshiping. In one crime scene, Bibles belonging to the slain had been splayed across their mangled bodies. In another, an "old man's hand rests on the arm of his wife of many years." She raped; he, in all likelihood, made to watch. Finally, with their throats slit, they died side by side.

Beatrice Freitas has survived two farm attacks. Her equanimity belies the brutality she has endured. She and her husband immigrated to South Africa from Madeira 40 years ago. They built a thriving nursery near the Mozambiquean border. It supplied the entire region with beautiful plants. Some people build; others destroy. Beatrice tells her story as she drifts through the stately cycads surrounding the deserted homestead. There's an ephemeral quality about her.

When the four men attacked her, Beatrice says her mind "disappeared." She and her permanently disabled husband, Jos?, were tied up while the home was ransacked. When the brutes were through, they wanted to know where she kept the iron. They then took her to the laundry room, where two of them raped her, coated her in oil, and applied the iron. They alternated iron with boot. When they were through, 25 percent of Beatrice's body was covered in third-degree burns. They suffocated her with a towel, and left her for dead, but she survived. She says the Lord saved her.

No one was ever arrested – not then, and not after the couple was attacked three years later. This time Jos? died "in a hail of bullets." Arrests and convictions are rare. "Carte Blanche" tells of Dan Lansberg, shot dead in broad daylight. Members of his courageous farming community caught the culprits, but they "escaped" from the local police cells. As I've explained before, the newly configured South African police is a corrupt, illiterate and ill-trained force, "riven by feuds, fetishes and factional loyalties." The South African justice system has collapsed, confirms professor Neels Moolman, a criminologist. In democratic South Africa, a person has over a 90 percent chance of getting away with murder. Or as Moolman puts it, pursuing "a criminal career without fearing the consequences."

Sky News sent its correspondent to the northern province of South Africa, where the viewers are introduced to Herman Dejager. (CNN's Anderson Vanderbilt Cooper and his pal Angelina Jolie were nowhere in sight.) Before retiring every night, Herman prepares to fight to the death to protect what's his. He checks his bulletproof vest, loads the shotgun and drapes ammunition rounds on the nightstand.

Herman's father died in his arms, shot in the face by intruders. Kaalie Botha's parents were not so lucky: "You can't kill an animal like they killed my mom and father. You can't believe it." Kaalie's 71-year-old father's Achilles tendons had been severed so he couldn't flee. He was then hacked in the back until he died, his body dumped in the bush. His wife, Joey, had her head bashed in by a brick wielded with such force, the skull "cracked like an egg."

Dr. Gregory H. Stanton heads Genocide Watch. He says the slaughter of 2,000 Boers is genocide. (One wonders why "Carte Blanche" drastically underreported the number of murdered Boers, pegging it at 1,400 all told, when in January of 2006, Genocide Watch reported a total of 1,820 murders.) The rates at which the farmers are being eliminated, the torture and dehumanization involved – all point to systematic extermination.

"Genocide is always organized, usually by the state," Stanton has written on Genocide Watch's website. Indeed, according to Sky News, the farmers believe "these attacks are an orchestrated, government-sanctioned attempt to purge South Africa of white land owners, as has already happened in Zimbabwe." Consequently, Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, is now its dust bowl. Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's Marxist president, is greatly admired by Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's strongman and head of the African National Congress.

That certainly would explain why the ANC plans to dismantle the Commando System, a private Afrikaner militia that has existed since the 1770s and is the only defense at the farmers' disposal. More damning, and contrary to the pro-forma denials issued by the ANC's oleaginous officials, the Daily Mail reported, in February 2006, that the government is dead-set-on forcibly seizing the land of thousands of farmers. By the year 2014, a third of the Boers' property will have been given to blacks.

In democratic South Africa, dispossession is nine-tenths of the law.