Anti-Semite Afrikaner refugee, Chari Kleinhaus's posts show up on social media

Charl Kleinhaus, one of 59 Afrikaners granted refugee status under President Trump’s administration, has found himself at the epicenter of a storm, entirely of his own making. His arrival at Washington Dulles International Airport on May 12, alongside fellow White South Africans, was meant to signal a new chapter. Instead, it has been eclipsed by a series of vile X posts, unearthed this week, that lay bare his apparent anti-Semitism and a troubling affinity for inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants.

The Guardian reported that in 2023, Kleinhaus, a 46-year-old farmer from South Africa’s Mpumalanga Province, declared on X that Jewish people were “untrustworthy and a dangerous group.” One has to wonder if this cretin actually ever met a Jew.

Not content with this, he later re-posted a white nationalist YouTube video in the fall of 2024—since scrubbed from the platform—titled: “‘We’ll shoot ILLEGAL Immigrants!’ – Poland’s Illegal Islamic Immigrant Solution,” adorned with clapping emojis. 

Other posts peddled the conspiracy that white South Africans face systematic persecution, a narrative eagerly amplified by Trump and his far-right acolytes.

When pressed by the BBC on Thursday, Kleinhaus admitted ownership of the account spewing this crap. He denied anti-Semitism, claiming one post was cribbed from another user and written under the fog of morphine for medical treatment, This is hardly an exculpatory defense. 

Attempting to justify his 2023 screed against Jews, he pointed to an unverified video [likely staged because Jews don't normally act this way] allegedly showing Jewish individuals spitting at Christians in Israel, insisting his words were not aimed at Jews as a whole. “Even now, if I see any person going against my religion, I will speak up against it,” he declared, as though this somehow absolves the venom about the entire group.

The broader context of Kleinhaus’s flight to America is no less contentious. He and his fellow Afrikaners were admitted under a Trump executive order, citing “unjust racial discrimination” in South Africa, a claim Pretoria roundly rejects. This followed the January signing of the Expropriation Act by President Cyril Ramaphosa, which permits the state to seize unused or privately owned land without compensation when deemed “equitable and in the public interest.” 

The law, South Africa insists, has yet to be enforced, but its intent is clear: to redress the grotesque land disparities rooted in apartheid’s legacy. As NBC News noted, white South Africans, a mere 7.3% of the population, own 72% of farms and agricultural holdings, while Black South Africans, over 81%, hold just 4%.

Kleinhaus claims personal victimhood, alleging anti-Afrikaner sentiment manifested in damaged farm equipment, unresponsive police, and death threats via WhatsApp—one chillingly stating, “’We’ll get rid of you, you’re on my land.’” 

Yet the historical weight cannot be ignored. Afrikaners, who enforced apartheid’s brutal regime until 1994, still command a disproportionate share of South Africa’s prime farmland. Kleinhaus, while acknowledging the injustices Black South Africans endured, pleads innocence: he had “nothing to do with apartheid.” 

But history is not so easily shrugged off.

Kleinhaus’s defenders might argue he is a man caught in a crucible, driven to extremes by fear and loss. Yet his words betray a darker impulse that aligns not with victimhood but with the rancid ideologies that thrive in the shadows of grievance. 

To spew anti-Semitic tropes and cheer xenophobic violence is not the act of a beleaguered farmer but of a man who has chosen to embrace division over reason. South Africa’s land question is fraught, its wounds raw. 

But Kleinhaus’s response—lashing out at Jews, immigrants, and imagined conspiracies—does nothing to heal. It merely poisons the well further.

Did we make a mistake accepting this person?

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