EXCLUSIVE: Buzzfeed Buys into Fake News Story on South Africa, German MP Targeted in Their Hit Piece is Considering a Lawsuit

Buzzfeed has published fake news attempting to smear popular German MP Petr Bystron of the Alternative for Germany party for visiting South Africa and meeting with white farmers who are under attack.

In the wake of the affair about fake reporting by leading German newsweekly Der Spiegel, Buzzfeed has also picked up a discredited story by public broadcaster ARD’s show Report Mainz. The German pubweb has a budget of 8 billion Euros, which it uses for left-wing reporting.

Petr Byston and Baleka Mpete, Speaker of the South African Parliament

The report was targeted at Bystron, the AfD foreign policy spokesman, who visited South Africa in August (as TGP previously reported), meeting with leading politicians, think tanks, business and cultural institutions, farm attack victims and also the leading Boer civil defense group, the Suidlanders (portrayed in Lauren Southern’s doc Farmlands). Instead for showing these meetings, the report cobbled together old footage of Suidlanders civil defense exercises that had nothing to do with Bystron’s trip.

Echoing the German hit piece, Buzzfeed called the Suidlanders “a white nationalist group with a leader who marched in the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.” The Suidlanders insist their purpose is civil defense only, and they register all civil defense activities with the South African police.

Report Mainz quotes Gareth Newham of the Institute for Strategic Studies, calling the Suidlanders “extremist” and “white supremacist”. The Institute for Strategic Studies was founded in 1990 as the Insitute for Defence Policy by Chris Hani, head of the South African Communist Party and commander of the ANC terrorist arm MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe). It is considered close to the SSA secret police (State Security Agency), which was trained by the East German Stasi. Gareth Newham has denied the epidemic of farm murders in South Africa, much as the ANC government does, despite horrific evidence to the contrary. There have been an average of 1.1 farm attacks per day in South Africa 2018

Buzzfeed and Report Mainz made no mention of the farm attacks. Instead, they seek to tie Suidlanders spokesman Simon Roche to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, which Roche says he attended as an observer. “In 2017, I spent several months touring the United States, making contacts to all sorts of conservative organizations, including meeting Lauren Southern, for example”, Roche explains. Buzzfeed tries to associate Roche with the killing of activist Heather Heyer by a mentally deranged man at Charlottesville.

“Of course we condemn the killing of Heather Heyer in the strongest possible terms. It’s shocking that anyone would try to portray us as endorsing the killing of an innocent young woman”, Roche told Gateway Pundit. “This just shows how low these leftist journalists will sink in their attempt to smear us.”

Buzzfeed claims they attempted to contact AfD politician Petr Bystron before publishing their hit piece, but his office has no record of any such attempt.

“We were definitely not contacted by anybody at Buzzfeed,” Bystron told Gateway Pundit. “My phone number is on the homepage of the German Bundestag.”

At the time the story broke, Bystron was in Iraq with a delegation led by German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. “I was answering text messages from the press under the table during a dinner with the Kurdish regional government. If Buzzfeed had wanted to contact me, they could have.”

The Report Mainz story has since been falling apart. Der Spiegel magazine reported in December that the visit Bystron paid to the Suidlanders was not, in fact, financed by taxpayer money as claimed by Report Mainz, but privately organized. Also, despite Buzzfeed claims the visit was “not disclosed on his application to make the trip to South Africa”, the trip was indeed reported to the Bundestag and the German Foreign Ministry, as Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Adebahr acknowledged in the Federal Press Conference, saying “This was a completely routine process.”

Buzzfeed also claims that Bystron “participated in firearms training” with the Suidlanders, a claim which has since been debunked.

“I am a licensed hunter”, Bystron told Gateway Pundit, “so I really don’t need any more ‘firearms training’. We toured a farm in Vanderkloof, South Africa, and stopped at a firing range as well. That’s all.”

Bystron received the Gateway Pundit Eagle Award in Fall 2018 and is one of the leading foreign policy experts of the AfD. He has made headlines 2018 by offering asylum in Germany to British activist Tommy Robinson and pressing criminal charges against migrant NGOs in the Mediterranean. Now, he is trying to raise awareness of the situation in South Africa, with demands for “expropriation without compensation” and horrific violence against white farmers.

Bystron says he is “considering pressing charges” against the false claims made by Buzzfeed and Report Mainz.

“Unfortunately, this kind of biased reporting is typical of what we have come to expect from leftist German and US media. However, it also has an upside: Finally, it has made the suffering of the Boers and farmers in South Africa an issue in Germany. There have been 412 farm attacks in South Africa this year till November, a new record. However, neither ARD nor Buzzfeed felt the need to mention this fact.”

In December, Andile Mngxitama, president of Black First Land First (BLF), demanded:  ‘For every one black person we will kill five white people…. We’ll kill their children, we’ll kill their women, we’ll kill their dogs, we’ll kill their cats, we’ll kill anything.”

In the most recent attack, farmer Chris van Wyk was shot on his farm near Cullinan on Friday, 12/21, and the bullet struck his right femur bone, South Africa Today reports.

Simon Roche was invited to speak at the European Parliament 12/5/2018 by the conservative ECR faction:

 

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