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A letter writer called my May 5 “Island Voices” column, commenting that apartheid was an Afrikaner word used to describe a racist regime in South Africa, “rubbish” (“There was no ‘Afrikaner regime’ in South Africa,” Star-Advertiser, May 10). In no way did I intend to convey that all people of Afrikaner descent under the National Party regime headed by Hendrik Verwoerd — the architect of the apartheid system in 1950 — were partisans of this governing regime. As in Israel and Gaza, not all people would defend the Netanyahu or the Sinwar regimes.
However, a regime refers to those who govern. Note that the three Nationalist Party prime ministers during the time of apartheid were Afrikaner. Both the author and I would agree that racism in any form is “rubbish.”
I would also like to point out that a pogrom is a massacre based on ethnicity. Saying Hamas committed a pogrom on Oct. 7 is an accurate use of the word, not an epithet.
Jean E. Rosenfeld
Queen Emma
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