OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Wednesday
THE Freedom Front has lodged a complaint with the Press Ombudsman against an article published in the Mail and Guardian newspaper recently.
The article, under the headline ”Arts festival or Boerfest”, was written by Zebulon Dread and dealt with Afrikaners and the Klein Karoo Arts Festival.
FF leader Dr Pieter Mulder said the party did not want to contribute to limiting Press freedom in South Africa, and had therefore given much consideration to the matter before lodging the complaint.
”Articles like these abuse press freedom to such an extent that the public later encourages government to take limiting steps against the media.”
Mulder said he believed the Mail and Guardian article transgressed several sections of the Press code of conduct.
”The article is bent on offending Afrikaners openly in a vulgar manner,” the FF leader charged.
People were so fed up with political correctness that ”nobody even dares to think how this article would look if the parts of Afrikaners and blacks” were reversed.
”The test simply is: would the Mail and Guardian publish a similar article if black people were portrayed in such a vulgar manner?” Mulder said.
In the article Dread refers to the ”enemy” as ”thick-skinned, cellulite-ridden and varicose-veined tannies… [and] double-thighed, double-chinned and double-stomached males” who were ”the fokken volk, eating, drinking and talking kak [shit]…”
He goes on to describe how he told them at the festival ”they were naaiers [fuckers], vark-vretende [pig-eating] honkies and a bunch of deluded idiots…”
ZA*NOW:
Read the article: Arts festival or Boerfest? April 20, 2001