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  • 2015-12-28 (xsd:date)
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  • Hope Farm Owners Threatened by Refugees (en)
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  • On 27 December 2015, the disreputable web site Mad World News published a sensational article about an incident at Hope Farm in South Africa. The story centered around a South African couple, who had taken in 143 people following a wave of xenophobic attacks which swept the country in April 2015. While Mad World News repeatedly states that the incident involved Muslim refugees, less sensationalized reports from local sources such as News 24 and eNCA made no mention of the group's religions, referring to them instead as foreign nationals -- among the many who had initially fled other parts of Africa because of political persecution and extreme poverty. As the people staying at Hope Farm came from a wide variety of countries and backgrounds, it is unclear how Mad World News concluded that they were all Muslim. Nor were they all from the Central African Republic, as the article reported. According to farm owner Andrew Wartnaby's personal blog, their guests originally came from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and all were legally in the country as refugees or asylum seekers. The Mad World News article also cherry-picked and exaggerated facts in order to chastise this bleeding heart liberal couple for taking in refugees. For instance, while it's true that Andrew and Rae Wartnaby were threatened by the refugees, the threats came from a breakaway group and not the entire community: Mad World News also claimed that the Wartnaby's were threatened with slaughter, but this, too, seems to be an exaggeration. The article published by News 24, which was the same piece quoted in the Mad World News article, reported that while Wartnaby did feel unnerved by the threats, he did not believe that the group had any intention to follow through on it: Wartnaby told reporters that while he does not regret taking in the refugees, he does want the breakaway group to leave his farm: The Wartnabys also had to contend with pressure from the local municipality, which in September 2015 ordered them to either evict the people living on their farm, or rezone the property for residential use, a costly and time-consuming endeavor. Wartnaby wrote in a blog entry dated 3 December 2015 that the other group of people staying on their farm are an entirely different story. (en)
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