I am tired of people sugar-coating the brutal racist attacks on foreign nationals with the term ‘xenophobia.’

Let us not for one second deny that the attacks are based on race. It’s easy to say that all those of African descent are the same, but that would be like saying all Europeans and Asians are the same. They are not!

Xenophobia is a modern word for an age-old disease, just like apartheid was a modern word for colonialism in its time.

I am sure those of Jewish descent considered themselves equally German before Hitler turned on them and made it socially acceptable for ordinary Germans to loot their shops, attack them in the streets, and kill them.

Do we look back and accuse them of xenophobia or do we call them what they were: monsters guilty of racist hate crimes. Let us make no mistake, a person who attacks someone because of what they look like and how they talk is scum, a racist pig who deserves no mercy in our courts, our society or our country.

They are not South Africans, they are the lowest of all people whose only home should be a prison! So let’s dump the word “xenophobia” for once and for all – beating someone to death with an iron bar just because he is a foreigner is murder, pure and simple.

The definition of xenophobia

Dictionary definitions of xenophobia include: “deep-rooted, irrational hatred towards foreigners” (Oxford English Dictionary; OED), and “unreasonable fear or hatred of the unfamiliar” (Webster’s). The word comes from the Greek words ξένος (xenos), meaning “strange”, “foreigner”, and φόβος (phobos), meaning “fear.”

The definition of racism

Dictionaries define the word as follows:

The Oxford English Dictionary defines racism as the “belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races” and the expression of such prejudice.
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines it as a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority or inferiority of a particular racial group, and alternatively that it is also the prejudice based on such a belief.

UN Legal definition

The UN does not define “racism”; however, it does define “racial discrimination”: According to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the term “racial discrimination” shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.
This definition does not make any difference between discrimination based on ethnicity and race, in part because the distinction between the two remains debatable among anthropologists.

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