The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW Five Shots to Save 1,000 Lives - St James Church Massacre

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Charl van Wyk, ShootingBackBook.com, was in the church when terrorists threw GRENADES and sprayed the congregation with FULLY AUTOMATIC gunfire. God used him to defend survivors with a 5 shot .38 revolver. But prior to that, he had to come to a realization of the RIGHT and DUTY of a Christian to DEFEND innocent life. The terror has continued as Marxists continue to extend anarchy and violence. But Charl sees the hope for South Africa in the gospel of Christ.Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here:SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation through Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

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Visit Innovate today. Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate, the IT solutions people. Men walked in with their automatic rifles. They also had hand grenades with them. And they had put nails on the outside of the grenades. Wow. And they opened up fire with their automatic rifles, and they lobbed grenades into the congregation. Right, and joining us now, our guest is, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, Charles van Vick. Is that correct? Did I say your name correctly? That's very close, David. Thank you very much. Charles van Wyk. Thank you.

Okay. That's as close as I'm going to get. I'll spell it out for people because your website is C-H-A-R-L-V-A-N-W-Y-K.info. That's correct. It might be easier for people to find you if they look at the title of your books, because that's pretty easy to remember. Shooting Back was your first book. You've now got a new book, Reloaded. Is it Reloaded, Shooting Back?

Yes, Reloaded, and the subtitle is Shooting Back Again. Okay, so Shooting Back and then Reloaded, and then the subtitle Shooting Back Again. And let's talk about this because the subtitle to your first book, Shooting Back, was about the right and duty of self-defense. Spoiler alert, after he went through this struggle, as I mentioned before, he played a key role in the St. James Massacre in terms of protecting about a thousand lives. So let's talk a little bit about your concern about it as a Christian missionary. Tell people, because you wrote this book long before we had any church shootings in the U.S., and now we've had several, I'm afraid.

And so you were trying to warn Americans about what was coming. Take us back to before the St. James Massacre and what you were thinking as a Christian, what you went through in the process. Yes, David, it was quite strange because I'd been in the military in South Africa. All white men at the time during the apartheid days needed to do national service, and that included two years in the military. And I could understand theologically and biblically how a man could defend his homeland and defend his family from that sort of perspective. But I really questioned the idea of carrying a gun in civilian street and supporting yourself

if somebody was trying to attack your family. Strange enough as it is, that was an issue for me. And let's talk about that because, you know, that really is the point of attack on the Second Amendment here in the United States. It's like, well, you know, the military can do it to defend the country and defend innocent lives because they've got the imprimatur of the government. But you as an individual shouldn't be allowed to do that. We see that all the time, even about the teachers in the schools.

So you were there where we are right now in this debate, and what did you decide about that? Yes, so I really struggled with this issue, and then I read an article by Larry Pratt, who was the executive director at the time of Gun Owners of America, and he basically laid on a biblical foundation for Christian men arming themselves to protect their families. And as I said, in Civilian Street. So I thought it was an excellent article, really changed my mind on these issues. And then very soon after that, I was driving my car near a town called Wellington, near Cape Town, South Africa. And all of a sudden I saw burning tires in the street.

And as I slowed down, the people started pelting me with rocks and bricks at the car. And I managed to do a U-turn and get away there as quickly as possible. Drove to a police station to tell them what had happened, to report the issue. But then I decided straight after that incident that I was unmarried at the time, but I thought I'm going to get a firearm now. And if anybody threatens to kill myself, all my friends and my family in the future, I'm going to defend ourselves, defend us with lethal force. so that's very much how panned out did the police say uh well they were mostly peaceful right

that's right yeah yeah i understand there's this argument that you know i in fact i had somebody on a previously on an interview in America saying to me, we can trust our politicians so we can give firepower to the state. But, you know, in Africa, you can't. So I don't know how that's panning out. I don't know how that's panning out for you. Yeah, I don't really trust the politicians to protect us. Of course, even people who are well-intentioned and who would risk their life to save other people, you know, they're heroes, but there's not always a hero around, right?

So you have to act in self-defense. Talk a little bit about the challenges that you had as a Christian and what Larry Pratt was saying in terms of convincing people, because I've had a lot of Christians who have pushed back and say, no, you know, I can't do anything, even in self-defense, to harm somebody else. What was it that Larry Pratt said that convinced you? Larry Pratt quoted quite a lot of scripture. I'll quote that too. Exodus 22, verses 2 to 3, if a thief is found breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there shall be no blood guilt for him.

But if the sun has risen on him, there shall be blood guilt for him. In other words, talking about a life-threatening situation, if you take a person's life when they're threatening your life, it's dark, you can't see them, you don't know what they're doing in your house, then there's no blood on your hands for that. But if it's broad daylight, you can see somebody's just stealing a loaf of bread, then you don't take their life for that. And then he also quoted Jesus Christ in Luke 22, saying, But now let the one who has a money bag take it, and likewise a knapsack. And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one. So Jesus Christ speaking to his disciples, telling them to purchase

the greatest military weapon at their time. And, you know, some people argue that, you know, the apostle Peter pulled out his sword and he took off Malchus's ear, one of the soldiers of the high priest. And if we look at that scripture, we see that Jesus actually tells him to put it back in its place. He doesn't tell him to get rid of the sword because he had told him to buy swords. So Larry did a really good job of taking one through these ideas in scripture. There are many more,

obviously, but, you know, it would just be a very basic one. You shall not murder. You know, we are not allowed to take a judicially innocent life. But straight after God gave that command, he sent out his people to go wipe out other nations.

And so the whole idea is that there are times when a Christian might need to kill, but you don't take a judicially innocent life. In other words, we don't murder people. Right. And so, these are ideas that Larry was talking about, which I felt very refreshing, very encouraging, and it really changed my mind on this whole issue. I agree. Yeah, I've often wondered if Peter had an open or concealed carry permit from the Roman government for his sword. What do you think? Well, some theologians that have written about this, you know, saying that the disciples were young people. They were teenagers carrying the finest weapon of their time. And apparently, from what I could gather, it was actually legal for them to be doing it under Roman supervision or Roman control. They weren't allowed to just have swords.

So it seems like Jesus was doing something very disruptive at the time. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the Roman Empire was in many ways a lot freer than the American Empire. They certainly didn't have biometric surveillance at the very least. It's interesting to see how things have evolved and centralized but uh yeah i think that you know even beyond those my opinion even beyond those um excellent examples that you gave i think it runs throughout the bible both old and new testament that we are to defend innocent life all right god is defined as the defender of widows and um you know, father to the fatherless and all the rest of the stuff.

And that doesn't mean just helping them financially. That means literally defending people when you need to do that. And, you know, it speaks out constantly about injustice. And, of course, you know, people who are swift to shed blood. But, you know, we have a right and a duty, I believe. That's the subtitle of your book, Shooting Back, a right and a duty of self-defense. What year did that book come out? Oh, that's a difficult question. I think it's a good 15 years ago already, so it's quite a while back. So it's pretty old already. But David, I have to agree with you. In 1 Timothy 5 verse 8,

we can read but if anyone does not provide for his relatives and especially for members of his household he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever and provision is obviously also the security it's not just food it's not just clothing you also need to provide for the security of your family so yes the book's quite old already, and the second book has come out, and Lord willing, I'm hoping to have a third book out for the commemoration, the 30-year commemoration, which is happening on the 25th of July this year. So we'll see how that pans out.

That's good. Yeah. As we're talking about this, I also think about Jesus. He says if a thief is not going to enter in a home and start stealing stuff unless he ties up a strong man first. In other words, you're going to defend your family. Certainly, he's just talking about theft. We're talking about a physical, violent threat to people. And when you did this, and this is the key thing, we had not had any shootings, I believe, in the U.S.

Maybe there had been one. I don't know. But it wasn't a thing when your book came out. You were warning people. I remember the first time I saw the book was on WND's website. And you were talking about this is coming to America. And it now has come to America. We've seen, unfortunately, several incidences of this.

And we've seen that these incidents only stop. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting, and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters, growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate, the IT solutions people.

When there is somebody who shoots back. So let's talk about, after you work through some of these things and you convince yourself that you had both a right and a duty to protect innocent life from violence and aggression uh talk about what happened in the events of the saint james massacre when did that happen sure david that was on the 25th of july 1993 so it's just almost 30 years ago that that happened do you want me to give some detail about that right now yes yes let's go into it okay so as much about it as you want. Kind of set it up, what was happening and everything.

Great. So we were sitting in a church service in Cape Town, South Africa, when all of a sudden there was a noise at the front door of the church, and a terrorist stepped into the church. And as soon as I saw them come in and I saw their rifles, I thought that a play was taking place in the church. I had a young girl that was that a play was taking place in the church. I had a young girl that was working for me at the time in the insurance industry, and she was a youth leader at the church, and she told me they were going to do a play for the youth, and they were going to have people dressed up as soldiers or as policemen, and they would take away the church youth leaders and accuse them of spreading the gospel

when they weren't allowed to be doing that. So I had that on my mind, and these men walked in with their automatic rifles. They also had hand grenades with them, and they had put nails on the outside of the grenades. Wow. And they opened up fire with their automatic rifles, and they lob grenades into the congregation.

So you can just imagine everybody got down as low as they possibly could onto the floor, trying to hide behind the benches, and they were strangely enough very, very quiet. And I realized only when the grenades were blowing up and the rounds were hitting the wooden benches and splinters were flying up into the air, I realized this is not a show. It's not an act.

It's not a play. This is the real thing. And so I had a.38 special revolver, five-shot revolver with me. I was sitting fourth row from the back of the church. The church is a very large auditorium, could sit about one seat, about one and a half thousand people. There weren't that many that night. It was a cold winter's night in Cape Town in the middle of July, which is our wintertime in the Southern Hemisphere. And I just took my 38 special, took it out of the holster, which was on my ankle, and I knelt behind the benches. It was very much like a cinema, the church.

It was very high at the back and low to a stage in the front. And I could kneel behind the bench and take two shots at the attackers at the front door of the church i then realized that i was far too far away from them anybody that's listening or watching might know that a 38 special snap nose revolver is not for shooting across a thousand people when you're in the fourth row from the back of an auditorium so so so david i had to get out on my hands and knees and i i leopard crawl we call it leopard crawl i don't know what you call it in america but you're on all fours and you get down as low as possible and i i leopard crawl to the side to the aisle and I ran out the back door of the church and the idea was to come in behind the attackers and shoot them in the back at close range to stop the the carnage and as I ran down

the back stairs and I was about to round the corner I realized then that they'd already left the church so what I didn't know then was that one of my rounds had hit one of the attackers inside the church and so they ran back to their getaway car so I came around the corner I saw them and I jumped back behind the corner because one of them was standing at the back door of the getaway car, and he had his rifle on his hip looking at the door they had come out from. So one of them had been hit. They ran out. They thought that maybe I'd become running after them through that door, and he would have lowered his rifle and just blown me away.

But I was behind him. So I took another three shots from stepping out from behind the wall and they jumped in the vehicle and drove off. And what came out afterwards at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was a government commission to look into terrorism and what have you around South Africa, somebody came and parked them in. Apparently, a random person came and parked in front of them, and they couldn't get out of the parking lot in their getaway car. So they took a couple of shots at this random person and threw what we call a petrol bomb at them, which is petrol or gas inside a bottle which you light with a rag in it,

and you throw it. And this thing exploded, and this car drove off as quick as possible. So, you know, all these strange stories start coming out later. Wow. Somebody's just driving around in their car with what we call a Molotov cocktail. They threw that at them. Yes, that's right. Yeah, that's it.

Imagine that. You park outside a church. The next thing, somebody starts shooting at you and throws a Molotov cocktail at your car. Anyway, so they drove off very quickly now that happened in these let's say that happened in 1993 and then five years later you know the communists take over and um in order to because there's a lot of atrocities going back and forth on both sides and so to to try to shut everything down i guess or whatever i how were you want to interpret these committees.

They had these Truth and Reconciliation Commission where they would offer people amnesty for any crimes that they had done if they would talk about it from their perspective. And that's when you found out a lot of the stuff that was happening, some of it that you mentioned. I mean, what all did they say in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission? What was their motive in doing this? Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network

security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting, and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters growing your business whether it's communications or security Innovate has you covered visit Innovate today Innovate the IT solutions people they had various motives they argued mostly that they were under command and they were just obeying orders. But one of the young men argued that the white people that came to Africa stole the land. And so he didn't have a problem with killing them in churches because they came with their Bible. And that's one of the stories that we hear in Africa. You know, the white man arrived with his Bible, and he gave Bibles

to the local Africans, and he stole their land while he gave them the Bible. So this is an old story that's been going around in South Africa and probably other parts of Africa as well. So he was justified in his own mind. Reparations. They admitted… Well, we mind. Reparations. They admitted. What we would call here reparations. That's why they're trying to build up now with the 1619 Project

and all the rest of the stuff is a sense of entitlement, a sense that you are okay to take vengeance on people because of this injustice that happened centuries ago. And so now you can take it out on people today. That's really what they're trying to build up here. So that's another element of this that we really haven't seen that much we've seen a little bit of this we just had a lady decide that she was going to steal something like a thousand dollars worth of food and uh she defiantly said this is my reparation uh it didn't go down too well for her but today imagine yeah the day is coming when

there's going to be violence and they're going to feel completely justified in doing it because the government and the schools have been telling them this line for a very long time and so that's what one of them said what did some of the others say uh they uh well they were arguing that they were under they didn't even know it was going to be a church, that they were under commanders who commanded them, and they just carried out and did what they were told. So some of them argued right up to the point of until they arrived at the church, they didn't even know it was a church that they were going to attack, never mind the fact that the church was multiracial.

So there were these sorts of arguments. They admitted to the fact that they murdered the people which they did. There were 11 murdered and over 50 that were injured. And some struggled with it. I know the one chap that I actually hit with one of my rounds, he told me that he apologized to some of the survivors afterwards. And that took place behind closed doors. And as he said to me, you know, he said, this is politics. So, you know, you play one game in front of people or the cameras

and then something else happens behind closed doors. So I wasn't involved in that, but that's apparently what happened. But one of the other or a couple of the other interesting things that happened in the church was there was one young man by the name of Gerard Harker. He was 21 at the time, and he fell on top of a hand grenade and took a full body blow to himself to protect the people around him. And unfortunately, his younger brother, 13-year-old younger brother, also died in the attack. Wow.

And then there was another youngster, 17-year-old boy, Richard O'Kill, who had two young girls, Lisa and Bonnie. I'm actually friends with Lisa. And they all went down onto the ground. And Bonnie, who was so surprised, she sat up or stood up to see what was going on with the whole attack. And she was so shocked, she didn't know what to do with herself. So Richard went up on his haunches and he pulled her down. And as he pulled young Bonnie down onto the ground, a bullet hit him in the back of the head while he was trying to save her life.

And we also had a ministry to Russian sailors at the time. And one of them with the name of Dmitry Makagon was 23. He was traveling around the Cape on a large ocean liner ship, for want of a better word. And the ministry leaders at our church would fetch these russian soldiers and bring them through to come and hear the gospel being preached and so a bunch of them went our church that evening and one of them dimitri had a hand grenade land on his lap and blew off both his legs and one arm wow um and so but he survived the He survived. He survived that, and the church brought his fiancée over from Russia, and they actually ended with a fairy tale story by getting married in that church later.

So there's some really interesting things that happened under those circumstances. Now, were you a member of that church, or were you just kind of visiting that church? Did you know these people, or were you just kind of visiting that church did you know these people or you or are you just visiting that church no i was uh i wasn't a member as in signed up member but i went to all the sunday evening services so uh i was a an attendee a regular attendee let's say that i only joined as a member later the the denomination they said at the time i believe that um they that there were multiple people shooting at them. And didn't they pick that church because they thought that it would be a soft target? That's correct. In fact, the leader, the commander of the attackers, said on a television interview with me,

or no, sorry, it was a newspaper interview and he said this was a terrorist attack in the true sense of what terrorism is about it was to instill fear in the whites in south africa and so he was very clear about it and then he went further he introduced me to a friend of his at Parliament, and he said, this is Charles van Beek who defended the people at the St. James Church massacre, and there we thought the church was a gun-free zone, but boy, did he have a surprise for us. So I mean, to say it straight from the horse's mouth, he didn't mince his words, he didn't try to pretend it was something that it wasn't. He was very open about it.

Wow. Wow. When I look at this, it makes me think of David and Goliath. He didn't have a sword. He had a slingshot with some stones. He had five of them. I think Goliath had some brothers there. God can do amazing things. And certainly

when we look at this and the way that God used you, you can see God's providence and care for a lot of people. I know a lot of people died. It was 11 people who were killed, 58 who were wounded, but it could have been many, many more. And God used you and confounded them with just the things that you were ordinarily doing. You know, well, I can't hit them from here, even though you had. And you crawl around the side and take some more shots. They think they're under fire from multiple people. It truly is amazing to see how God used you to protect those people. Yeah, it was actually a real honor because, you know, under the circumstances, you know,

I had one interviewer once ask me, were you scared? I said, of course I was scared. So he said, well, he said, well, I would have piddled in the pew. But, you know, the idea is that when you have these circumstances, I had been trained in the defense force for the two years that i spoke about earlier so we've been trained how to deal with chaos around us grenades going off lots of gun noise and so i didn't i don't want to say you know once trained to keep your cool to be able to think clearly under those circumstances and to react appropriately. So by God's grace,

I'd forced to be trained in that, in that manner. Um, and so, you know, you just did what you are, your muscle memory and, uh, was trained to do. Well, you know, it was, uh, John Wayne who said, uh, you know, courage is being scared, but saddling up anyway, you know, and that's, and that's basically what you know that's right you know if you don't if you're not scared you don't really have good situational awareness about what's going on uh so scared is one thing but you know having the courage to take it on is another thing instead of just hiding and we've seen that i was just going to say we've seen that even with some police who have shown up unfortunately some of these school shootings like uvalde texas they showed up there's massive number

of police and they all were there with their stuff they refused to go in and do anything about it finally uh some officers from um i can't remember what it was is it border patrol or something like that as SWAT team guys showed up but i mean they were there for so long doing nothing uh that you had parents who heard about it who went to the school and went into the school and got their kids out while this shooter hostage situation was still there. And so there was plenty of time for them to do something about it, but they didn't do it. So it's not just sometimes a response time for people to get there, but it's whether or not they're going to put their life at risk to try to protect other people. And that is a courageous thing to do. And that is something that you did. So what was your message in general? Tell us a little bit about that, your first book, and then we'll talk about Reloaded. Shooting Back, what did you want

to get across to people? Was it really about the fact they had a right and a duty or, you know, how to do it, the necessity to do it? What was your core reason for writing that book? The book was written, David, to Christian men. So the idea was to give them the biblical theological basis to own a firearm. And a firearm is just an instrument so the idea is actually to defend the family whether you're going to use a baseball bat or a firearm is really irrelevant the issue is are you going to protect your family or not so i want you to give christian men a biblical basis to protect their families and to take it further and say to them this is not just

a right you know a god-given right but this is something you have to do you you have to protect your family you actually don't have a choice as a godly man so it's the right but you also have a duty um a god-given duty to provide for your family and that includes the security of your family and we've seen all over Africa, gun-free zones are the most horrendous places. We've seen 700,000 people murdered in Rwanda that was a gun-free zone. I've done mission work or I do mission work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which wasn't democratic or republic, although things are getting much better now. But I've had my colleagues colleagues over there they've had

colleagues pastors that have been buried alive by rebel soldiers and and i said to them why didn't you why didn't the deacons pull out their firearms and say to the rebels go ahead make our day and he said well we were completely disarmed. I said, well, who disarmed you? Was there a law passed in Parliament? He said, no, it doesn't work like that in the Congo. The president just sends the army in, and they just go door to door, and they just disarm everybody. That's the way it's done. Wow.

And I said to him, you know, I showed him that if there were godly Christian men around with firearms, they could have stopped the pastor from being buried alive by their soldiers. And the accusation against the pastor by the rebel soldiers was that the prayers of the saints, the prayers of the church, were so powerful that it was changing the war in a negative direction against them. Now, I don't know about you, but I've never been accused of changing a war by my prayers. But, you know, these guys are really hardcore prayer warriors, and the way the soldiers want to deal with them was to kill them and bury them alive. That's a pretty good commendation. I've heard some really amazing stories in third world countries like

that of things that have happened when people are praying but that is a pretty good commendation horrible way to die certainly but um uh it is and of course this is in 1993 earlier today i was talking about waco and you know it was three months after waco had happened and everybody was still kicking that stuff around so the saint St. James Church Massacre really didn't get that much attention here in America at the time, because we were looking at the aftermath of what happened with Waco just a couple of months earlier. Tell us a little bit, where are you now? Are you still in South Africa? Are you in the U.S.?

Where do you live now? Yes, I'm in Cape Town, South Africa. So I still live here. My family's been here since the late 1600s, so we born and bred Africans, and probably going to stay here for a very long time till the Lord takes me home, as they say. Yeah. Tell us what it's like now. What has it been like? Because I know there's a lot of issues with taking the farmers, land the white farmers, and a lot of concern about that i've talked to some people uh several times in the past who are living there uh incredible amount

of violence being done to white farmers so what is it now that they've had the truth and reconciliation and everything is just all uh you know flowers and roses for everybody right yep no well that that is uh not as it is it's absolutely chaotic here david there's pandemonium pandemonium things are falling to pieces uh but i just want to add quickly about not being in america not visiting unfortunately your government is protecting you still in america not allowing us who are unvaccinated to to visit yet so even although no international guests are allowed to visit america so you've been very well you're very well protected from the rest of us in that in africa it's amazing i talked about this uh last week when you know they theoretically took

off this emergency order it's like okay so then can uh the people in the uk were saying so now can we uh people those of us who are unvaccinated, can we now go to America? It's like, no, there's no other developed country that is doing this. It's a lot of third world tin pot dictators who are doing this. But again, many of us who look at Biden see him as fitting into that mold. well i often say to people um in the rest of africa you know uh we in south africa following you we will look like you very soon so maybe in america you're going to be looking like south africa soon but let me give you just a bit of background to your question um we've we've been plagued with just loads and loads of crises suddenly Nelson Mandela's communist cadres have taken over the

country. We have the murder of the pre-born, which Nelson Mandela introduced into South Africa. We have massive, massive unemployment, up to 50 and 60 percent in certain age groups. The poverty is devastating. We have insufficient electricity capacity in our country. In fact, in the next 30 minutes, our electricity will be going off in the area we're in at the moment in this church building. We have contaminated water supplies. Sewer failures are happening. Disastrous public hospitals. We have rampant crime, as you've just mentioned. So there's literally, the society is literally crumbling around us. And the Mandela government that took over, they didn't just fail to maintain what they inherited. They actually caused major regression.

And so we're going backwards in South Africa. Our real GDP has been shrinking since 2014. And we're about 10% poorer than we were in 2014 right now. 18 million people, one third of our population is living below the poverty line. Malnutrition is common. We're plagued with the crime, looting, with vandalism. And it's chaotic out there. In fact, two of my children have just flown off to Europe to go work there, and we're ecstatic about it. Praise the Lord, they've got jobs, and second of all, they're living in a society where they don't

have to be concerned about leaving their home. And even at our home, my one son went running on a field one day and he was attacked there. We've had a grocery store that's been attacked down the road. I've had an elderly neighbor who saw burglars in a house and they tried to run over with their getaway car. Another neighbor was murdered. I can carry on and on. Another one was stabbed in the head. These are right in my area. I'm talking about in my small little suburb that I live in of about 300 houses. So there's pandemonium. The farmers, you know, they have a campaign of terrorism to try to drive them off of the farms. And they're even more isolated than you are in the suburbs.

I've just heard horrific stories about what is happening to the farms. Yeah, you're 100%, Dave. Let me tell you a little bit about the farmers. The main challenge for the farm murders is the severity of the torture that takes place that accompanies these attacks. And it is horrendous. I'm talking about burning their victims with blow torches, using clothing irons and putting it on their bodies and burning women's breasts with clothing irons, pouring boiling kettle water onto people, onto their bodies, slitting their throats, drilling a hole through their skulls

with an electric drill, raping wives, and the men have to sit and they're forced to watch while the wives get raped. It is pandemonium what's going on here. It is absolutely criminal. I mean, and then many of these people get off scot-free because the police system is in such shambles and such chaos that most of the people walk free. They don't even get caught and no justice is meted out., of course, even though apartheid was covered from front cover to back cover by the press all the time, before Nelson Mandela got in, after this beloved Marxist took over and these things started happening, complete silence here in America about all of this stuff that is happening.

I'm absolutely amazed and appalled whenever I talk to somebody from South Africa and we talk about how society has been deliberately destroyed there. And we see a little bit of, you know, kind of the leading edge of this in a lot of the big democratically controlled cities with Soros-appointed district attorneys where there is no punishment for people. They're encouraged in a sense to get violent, but that's just the very, very beginning of this. You are living through what if we don't stop this and the big cities will become commonplace here in the U.S. And what I think that they really want to do in terms of reparations,

I think that's where they want to take all this stuff you said uh abortion uh as we call it the you know the murder of children uh that was made legal it was illegal uh before the marxists took over well they had in the special cases but it's not just the marxists this nelson mandela uh personally forced this through parliament so we don't have a democratic system in the sense of western democracy the way you think about it we elect a party and on the percentage of the vote that they get that party gets that percentage of seats in parliament and the party leaders appoint people to sit in those seats so if any of their um any of the people that they've appointed as members of parliament in their seat disagree with a party or cause any trouble, they get thrown out of their seat and they get replaced by somebody else. So what Mandela did was he called all these parliamentarians to a meeting and said to them, you will all vote for abortion. And try not to do it and we'll see what happens

because he controlled the seats. And so apparently the Catholics in the party didn't go to parliament on that day and they were fined for not being there, but they didn't lose their seats. And the rest followed. They towed the line. They did what they were told. They didn't want to lose all the money they were making.

I mean, the country's poor. everything's going down the drain and they're getting fat salaries and living it up and uh driving nice cars and got government housing with electricity that works so yeah very um difficult circumstances uh for us for that kind of parliamentary system but that's the way it stands at the moment. You know, it is, to give you an idea of just how ignorant America is about what is happening there, when you had the indictment of Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a big Trump supporter and Republican, goes to New York and in an interview, she says she compares him to Nelson Mandela. I thought this is, this is a conservative Republican who is absolutely clueless about what she's

talking about. She might as well compare him to Che Guevara or something, right? Or perhaps Che Guevara might've been able to do the things that Nelson Mandela did, but he is celebrated as a hero by people outside of South Africa on both the left and the right. And it is profoundly ignorant for these people to be held up that way.

You also created a civilian gun rights group as well, didn't you? Yes, I was involved with the group that we established called Gun Owners of South Africa, and they are running full steam ahead. I've spent much more time in my ministry, traveling to different countries, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Congo, Cameroon, doing mission work. So I was part of the instigators to get the organization up and running, and we've got some really, really good people that are running it at the moment, and they're doing an absolutely wonderful job to, let's call it, to preserve our privilege in South Africa to own a firearm. It's not a right according to our Constitution. So even although it's a God-given right, our Constitution seems

to think they, or the Constitution creators think they could override God on this matter. Well, even though ours is recognized in the Declaration of Independence as a God-given right, and also in the Second Amendment, we have politicians who believe that it is a privilege that should be taken away on every occasion, and those are people in both parties who believe that. Tell us a little bit about the second book, Reloaded, and didn't that just come out recently? Yes, it's actually a few years old already, but I'll give you a bit of a background to that. I was at a course that we were running, a Christian mission course, and I had to go into town away from the place we were staying at to go and prepare a radio show. And I had a former terrorist.

In fact, he was a former unit commander of the group that attacked our church in 1993 at the St. James Massacre. And he had come to faith in Christ. And he said to me, please, can you drop me off in Kyalitsha, which is a very large, we call it a black township at the time, a very large area of grouping of people there's probably one and a half million to two million people staying in the area and he asked me if I could drop him off there and I said sure jump in the car I'll I'll go drop you off no problem

and as I dropped him off in Kailitsha I got out of the vehicle as a pickup and we have like a canopy a fiberglass canopy that you build over the back of a pickup and we have like a canopy, a fiberglass canopy that you build over the back of your pickup. And so he was sitting in the flat bed of that with a canopy over and he was shouting to me as I did a U-turn telling me where I need to park. So I parked the car to drop him off and I got out of the car to open up the canopy so that he could get out and grab his bags. And the next thing, there were two people standing behind me. I could sense them. And as I turned around, I saw these two characters. They both had guns. The one wasn't, I couldn't see his firearm at the time. And the other one had his gun in his hand,

and he wasn't pointing it directly at me. It was just off to the slightly to the side of me. And he said, I want your gun. I want your cell phone and I want your wallet. Very specific about what he wanted. And could he see your gun? No, no, no. He assumed that you had it, right? He assumed. So it looked like I'd been taken into a difficult situation there by the person in the back of the vehicle. And these people seem to have been waiting there for me. So it appeared to be an ambush. So I lied to him. I said I had no gun.

And I handed over my wallet and my cell phone. And they body searched me. I kid you not, David, they body searched me. And they didn't go down low enough to see my firearm in my ankle holster. And so they were convinced that either I or my passenger was armed. And so after body searching me multiple times, they left me and they went to harass my elderly person that was with me in the car. He was sitting alone in the car at the time while I was out in the front of the single cab, Bucky, we call it a pickup. And they started bothering him

and their body searching him. And they asked for his phone. He said, I don't have one. They asked for cash. He said, I don't have any. I'm going to do a radio show now. I'm not carrying cash and money and things with me. They said, give us your us your gun he said i don't have a gun and so these two attackers both with their guns in their hands now were looking in the car opening up the the cabinets in the car searching everywhere body searching him and this gave me time to then pull out my uh my uh gun and i went below the car window so that he couldn't see me. And I went to the front of the car and I shouted at them to distract them from bothering my, my old lead passenger and I opened up fire at them and they,

they were really good. They were running in a zigzag fashion to get away from me. So they were well-trained. They knew exactly what they were doing. But to my surprise, this is a shanty town where I dropped them off. And the next thing, they had had a sentry standing around amongst the metal housing there, and he opened a fire at me. So they had a sentry protecting them.

So this was a fully organized crime that was taking place right over there. So I had to duck and avoid bullets that were coming straight from me from a distance between the housing, the little metal housing there, and jumped in the vehicle and we drove off and went to a police station to report the incident. So that's why the second book is called Reloaded, and then Shooting Back Again. It's not the first time this has happened again. So that's the background to the writing of the second book.

Wow. And you said you thought that maybe it was an ambush. The elderly passengers you had there, who is now a Christian, he wasn't a part of that, was he? Or do you think perhaps? No, not at all. Not the elderly passenger that was with me that they're body searching, not him. Only the person in the flatbed at the back. So, yeah.

So the person who asked me to please drop him off in the area, he's the one that did that. Oh, I got you. There were two passengers. I didn't catch that. So there's your passenger with you and one in the back. The guy in the back was the one that was. That's right. He's the one shouting, telling me where to park and that sort of thing.

So that's what happened there. But one of the interesting stories, if you don't mind, I'd just like to tell you one of the quick stories about a farm attack that I mentioned in my book. It's actually a lady in South Africa called Silke Kaiser. She mentions this in her book about farm murder. She's a polygraphist. And so she goes to the farms and interviews the farm laborers and that after a farm murder or a farm attack has taken place. But she tells the story of a man with the name of John, a farmer, him and his wife living on a farm alone. He gets up three o'clock in the morning to attend his chickens every morning. And he takes two staff members with him in to go deal with the chickens in the morning.

He doesn't carry his gun in the morning. He thought if anybody wants to steal chickens or eggs, they can take it. He's not going to kill somebody over a chicken or an egg so off they go into the chicken coops and the next thing him and his two staff members are costed by four gunmen they take the two farm workers and they tie them up and two of the attackers remain there with the two victims and the other two take John into the farmhouse into the kitchen and they tell John to call his wife Elise so he shouts her name she's still busy sleeping in bed and he wakes up and they're an Afrikaans speaking farming couple but he used an English word he

called her lovey and what people the everybody didn't know was that lovey was a pre-agreed password for alerting their spouse to there being trouble on the farm so here the two bad guys are with a farmer in the middle they're both on his side they're both standing with guns and they step into the passage and stand by what we call in South Africa, the rape gate. So many of us have security gates inside our homes, not just outside, inside our homes that closes off our bedrooms from the rest of the house. In other words, if people break into our lounge and they steal our TV, they can take it at night, but we don't want them to come into our bedrooms and accost our family.

So he and these criminals were standing by the rape gate, and Lavi, Elise, comes out of the bedroom. She's armed, and they were expecting her to give in straight away when she would see the guns being pointed at her husband. But what they didn't know that Elise was an expert shot. She had grown up with guns. She had grown up with guns. And not just that, she'd worked for a shooting range for 15 years.

She trained other people how to shoot. Wow. So she emerges from the bedroom with this carrying a loaded firearm. She takes a shot at the first perpetrator and hits him twice in the chest. Both bullets just narrowly miss his heart. Then she moved the gun slightly to the right and she shot the second thug in the head

and killed him instantly. Wow. So the first thug tried to run out, trying to breathe. His lungs were damaged by the bullets. He got out of the door, and they found his corpse later under a bush outside. So the one attacker had already committed two other farm attacks. He hadn't murdered anybody yet, but his speciality was torturing his victims.

And so they obviously cleaned up that evening and the other two accomplices that had held the farm workers down, they fled the scene very cleverly. So this is one of the attacks that didn't work out for the bad guys. And praise God that these were not pacifist Christian farmers who believed that they, you know, that they would make the environment safer for the bad guys to operate. And praise God that Elise was, was ready and armed and that she could shoot straight.

Well, that is an amazing story. What is the, you're there in South Africa. You said you're always, you're going to be there the rest of your life. What is, I understand. Cause I've talked to other people who said nope we're staying we're not leaving and uh but what what is the hope that you have how how do you see this happening i

mean are you in a mutual community of self-defense and you know that you're under siege by this large majority is there ever you know is there a hope or a plan that you're somehow going to restore some kind of an ordered republic there and a rational government that's going to keep peace and order? What is it that you see in the future there? Yes, I believe strongly in that the gospel of the kingdom of God is what changes hearts and minds of people. And if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be a Christian missionary.

So I've seen that happen in nations. I've seen people that have come to faith in Christ. They've submitted not just their personal lives, it's affected their family lives, it's affected their churches, it's affected their businesses, and it's affected their countries. And we've seen nations changing because of people turning to God and obeying his word and his law. And I believe that that will happen in the future. Maybe not. Maybe in the next generation. Maybe I won't see it. But there's a scripture in the Bible that says that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

So I think we're fighting a winning battle. We're not going to give up. We're going to carry on. And if the only thing I do is be a splinter in the fingers of the bad guys, then I'm happy to carry on doing that as we preach the gospel and disciple the nations. That's a great witness. And, you know, it is great to hear that you have such confidence and it is well-placed confidence in the power of the gospel to not just change individual lives, but to completely

reward our society. And we have seen that throughout history. And so it is so good to hear somebody who is living their faith and knows that they have the only power that is going to be there to transform society. That's great to hear. I interviewed someone who was now doing the work here in America, and it was in Zimbabwe where there was a farmer who came up with, he said, you know, there was three different

ways that people would do it. They could run away. They could fight. And he said the people who fought died for the most part, trying to resist the takeover of the Marxists in Zimbabwe. He said, though he lost his farm, he taught them how to farm. And as part of that, he used that as an opportunity to give them the gospel and to change lives in the community.

And what you're doing is exactly the same thing. And it is— Are we busy— Sorry? Yeah, we're busy building a mission base in Zimbabwe right now in an area called Guay River. It is very difficult. The people are really poor. They're struggling for their lives. And Zimbabwe is moving towards an election this year, And so things get really dangerous now. So if American listeners can please pray for Zimbabwe,

we'd really appreciate that. Sure, absolutely. Do you have a missionary site that you'd like to tell people about? Yes, my website, or should I say my blog you can get to, is shootingbackbook.com. Shootingbackbook.com. You'll get to my blog there, and you can purchase the books from there and that sort of thing.

And then as you spelt out my name earlier, it's a bit complicated, but you're able to find your way around if you get my name at the blog. Okay, good. So it is shootingbackbook.com. Is that correct? That's correct.

That's correct, David. Thank you. All right. And I'll put that in the interview there. I'll have a link to that. That's a lot easier than Thank you. All right. And I'll put that in the interview there. I'll have a link to that. That's a lot easier than your name is for people. I was somehow able to find you on that website. It had been years since we had talked.

And of course, I guess people can find your book on Amazon, but it'd be better to go directly to you because Amazon takes a big kick and we don't like the things that Amazon does with all the money that they do is a good thing about that so i think i think they're going to be taken to amazon anyway through my site okay all right so shootingbackbook.com will take you there and uh again uh the missionary group is there a website that you want to tell people about with that yeah they'll they'll get to my mission work also from the same site so charles van wlesvanwick.info, not pronounced that way, but the way it's spelled, charlesvanwick.info, and then shootingback.com, and they'll be able to find my ministry and about my books on those sites.

Well, it is always a pleasure to talk to you. It truly is amazing where God has put you and the way that he is using you. And you are an example to so many people. And also a warning, a harbinger to what may be coming to this country if we're going to allow the radical Marxists to use race as a weapon. We know that in America, this has been the tactic that they have found more effective. It was Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground who said at the very beginning when they were trying to create a Marxist-Communist revolution here in America

and they were bombing buildings and doing other things like that, they realized that it wasn't going to happen by dividing people economically into different economic classes in America, but they could do it by dividing people racially. And so they stopped bombing buildings and they went into education. And now the white skin privilege that they were setting there has now become one of the fundamental things. But it is also everything that we see happening throughout the educational system.

It is a plan to take everything down. It is great always again to talk to you, Charl, and thank you so much for coming on and telling us about that. Again, the book is shoot. You'll find the website with the book links to the book as well as to the missions there.

If you want to help them in Zimbabwe, shooting back book.com. And I know that you're going to have a big, we've already had a big impact on a lot of people's lives. Thank you very much. And eternal things are going to have a big impact. You've already had a big impact on a lot of people's lives. David, thank you very much. And eternal things are going to happen as well. Thank you so much, Cheryl. David, it's been a privilege being on your show.

Keep up the good work, and thank you very much for having me. Thank you. Thank you. All right, folks, that is the show for today. That is quite a testimony, quite a life that Cheryl has had, and it is an inspiration to us as well as a warning to us that we have both a right and a duty to protect ourselves and innocent people. Thank you for listening. The David Knight Show is a critical thinking super spreader.

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