Ernst Roets receiving death threats after Tucker Carlson interview

Former AfriForum Deputy CEO Ernst Roets says his life has been threatened after his controversial interview with US conservative commentator Tucker Carlson.

The outspoken political critic, as well as several others from the Afrikaner rights organisation, are accused of spreading misinformation about the country to the US and the rest of the world.

This includes claims of race-based laws and increased crime targeted at the community.

Last month, Roets announced his departure from the Solidarity Movement, the umbrella organisation of AfriForum.

ERNST ROETS REVEALS DEATH THREATS

On his X account, Ernst Roets responded to the backlash of his Tucker Carlson interview.

Like Roets, Carlson is a conservative right-wing political commentator with strong opinions.

Roets revealed that some unhappy South Africans had issued death threats to him. He posted a screenshot of a tweep who posted: “@ernstroets must be given a beautiful necklace for saying that Winnie [Mandela] was a terrorist”:

He captioned it: “Some people threatening to murder me because of my interview with @TuckerCarlson. In South Africa, a “necklace” is a brutal method of murdering someone.”

During the interview, Ernst Roets was asked if he believed Nelson Mandela’s former wife, Winnie, was a cold-blooded murderer. He responded: “Yes, and she famously said at a political rally – with our necklaces and our matches, we will liberate this country. Which, of course, is a reference to the necklace murders, which were very popular in South Africa and still happen in South Africa.

Explaining what a necklace is, Roets continued: “That is when you take a rubber tyre, you fill it with petrol or gasoline, you put it around someone’s neck so that it is bound around their arms, and you set it on fire. 

“You stone that person while he is burning to death”.

“That happened; there were, I think, five or 700 people killed like that during political violence in South Africa. She encouraged this. “Initially, she denied this, then it came out that it was recorded.”

CONTEMPT OF COURT?

In 2019, Ernst Roets courted controversy when he tweeted a picture of the old South African flag after the Equality Court ruled that the display of the Apartheid regime was tantamount to hate speech.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation demanded that the High Court take action against Roets over his tweet. The foundation stated that Roets’s actions “were in bad faith and in contempt of court.”

It also claimed it had reached out to AfriForum – which Roets was the CEO at the time – in the act of “healing the wounds of the past and building the country described in the constitution.”

Roets was found not guilty of contempt but labelled the actions against him as a “witch hunt’.

He argued that his tweet was about “the protection of civil liberties and freedom of speech.”

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF ERNST ROETS’S INTERVIEW AND COMMENTS ABOUT SOUTH AFRICA?

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