Hain slams Madiba ‘hatchet job’
London correspondent NOTED anti-apartheid activist and UK MP Peter Hain expressed alarm at “attempts to rewrite history” after being contacted by an “extreme rightwing” documentary filmmaker who compared Nelson Mandela to convicted terrorist Abu Hamza.
This week Hain sent an e-mail to South African officials alerting them to Northampton resident Peter Jordan’s plans.
“It is very dangerous because, whatever is going wrong at the moment, South Africa remains a fantastic country compared with where we were 25 years or more ago under apartheid. It is liberated from that oppression and tyranny and I feel very strongly that these attempts to rewrite history have got to be exposed,” Hain told the Sunday Times.
Hain believes Jordan contacted him “to give [the documentary] credibility, which it clearly does not have”.
He added: “I obviously refused as it is clearly being filmed and projected with a view to adopting a white supremacist hatchet job on the new South Africa. I’m a great fan of the new South Africa, but I have many criticisms of corruption, lack of service delivery and failures of leadership at the top. [But] none of it warrants a rewrite of history from that angle.” ALARMED: UK MP and antiapartheid activist Peter Hain
Jordan, who described himself as “ex-South African” when contacted, said he “could not care” whether people found his views racist and said he would continue to look for international broadcasters to pick up his “well-balanced documentary”.
He also slammed Hain, in an e-mail trail seen by the Sunday Times, for ignoring “black-onwhite racism, the violent slaughter of more than 2 000 white farmers in the past 10 years (one every other day), yet you concern yourself with the small number of black miners who got massacred when repeating Sharpeville tactics”.
Jordan was referring to Hain’s participation in a BBC documentary on the Marikana massacre. Jordan is a director of Mediawiz in the UK, a company which, among other things, develops software solutions for retail radio and background music for public venues. He admits he has never made a documentary before, but he claims to have “inspired others”.
In one e-mail sent to Hain, Jordan said: “Mandela was a violent terrorist who sought to overthrow the white government to replace capitalism with communism, no different to UK terrorists Abu Hamsa [sic] and Abu Kathada [sic].”
Hamza was convicted in both the UK and US on terror charges. He was, like Abu Qatada, a radical Muslim cleric.
Hain believes South Africa’s current challenges have emboldened some to express hither-to suppressed racism.
“The problems, for which the government leadership is primarily responsible, are giving an excuse for racist stereotypes to come out from beneath the stones and state openly what they have always believed: that they would have preferred the status quo to have been maintained and that apartheid never should have been overthrown.”
These attempts to rewrite history have got to be exposed