The Renew Party’s Racist Star Crashes to Earth in an Entirely Predictable Explosion
You can take a horse to the water but
you can’t make it drink. You can take
Yonatan Scoffman to a Party but you can’t expect him to remain house trained.
You will be forgiven if you haven’t
heard of the Renew Party. They are yet another ‘centrist’ party, anti-Brexit,
full of middle class professionals and budding careerists. The type of people
who can be characterised as the muddled middle or as we used to say of the SDP,
the fuddled fiddle!
They describe their politics as
economically dry or freemarket and socially liberal. In other words another variant of the free
market Blairite/Clintonite economics that have left the poor poorer, the NHS half privatised, demonised claimants and refugees whilst their
international solidarity begins and ends in Europe.
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| Perhaps not quite the kind of renewal that most people want! |
Renew is a
party of unashamed capitalism in political crisis.
These people abound with business
degrees and marketing skills. They are the kind of people who if they can’t
find a fence to sit on will go out and build one. They stand for a system in crisis and harken
back to a gold age. In the absence of anything to say they proclaim that they
are ‘new’ or in the case of these
people ‘renew’.
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| Annabel Mullin |
Richard Breen - property developer who funds Renew
Their leader is Annabel Mullin, a
member of the identikit middle class and their main funder is Richard Breen, a
property developer.
It is no surprise that Jonathan
Hoffman felt in his element. He took to Renew
much like a leech to its host. Just as support for Israel and Zionism was a
precondition of support for and membership of New Labour, so this is the case with Renew.
One thing that marks out political ‘centrism’
is unquestioning support for British foreign policy, which means the ‘special
relationship’ with the US, NATO and imperialism. And that means unquestioning support for
Israel’s role in the Middle East as the United States’s gendarme.
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| Hoffman appears in a training video |
Renew advertise
themselves as a ‘new party with a new
vision for fixing the problems of 21st century Britain.’ Sometimes one wishes that these people also possessed a political memory because there was another New Party. It was formed in 1931 by one Oswald Moseley. By the following year it had metamorphosed into the British Union of Fascists.
It is therefore no
surprise that they have formed up with Chuka Ummuna’s TIG group and
apparently the Greens and Lib Dems too to field a joint Renew-TIG candidate at the
forthcoming Peterborough by-election.
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| Hoffman with Kevin Caroll of the EDL |
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| In the background are members of the EDL in army fatigues - picket of the Ahava shop - Hoffman originally called this photo shopped until the photographer (David Hoffman) threatened libel |
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| Here we see Hoffman with Besser of Britain First (top left) Ambrosine Shitrit and Sharon Klaff (far-right Islamaphobes). Hoffman's normal excuse is to blame being seen with fascists on the camera! |
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| Hoffman with Britain First's Paul Besser - in front Amanda Shitrit, Pegida alongside 'Mad' Mel Gharia both of whom are Tommy Robinson supporters |
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| Hoffman being ejected by the police yet again |
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| Hoffman with 2 members of the Jewish Defence League, Roberta Moor and Robert de Jonge. The JDL is a Jewish-Nazi group outlawed as a terrorist group in the USA |
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| Hoffman with far-Right Tory activist Thor Halland (left) and looking glum with the Police (yet again) |
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Hoffman with a variety of fascists including Hitler supporter Neil Horan top left |
It is on one level not surprising
that Hoffman, a man who is at home with an ecumenical list of fascists, from
Britain First to the EDL, fits in so easily with Renew. Parties such as these consist of wannabee members of the
political establishment. Not only are they mainly White but racism and
assumptions of Britain’s imperial role courses through their veins. Anti-racism
consists of tokenism and a few Black faces. It stops at anything questioning the state.
Renew’s big
brother, Change UK, is led by Chuka Ummuna.
Although Black by birth he is as politically White as his fellow TIG MP,
Angela Smith. She of the 'funny tinge.’ Chuka is very exercised by ‘anti-Semitism’ but has
nothing to say about the Windrush scandal or the ‘hostile environment’ policy
that led up to it. Unsurprisingly since he supported it.
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| Googling would have saved Renew a lot of heart ache |
However in the age of the Internet,
it was rather remiss of Renew to
admit Hoffman to its candidate list without having done basic due
diligence. Like Googling his name for
example! A quick search turns up such
gems as his recent arrest on charges of harassment and assault. You’d even learn that Hoffman was shot by his
grandmother! However I suspect this was unfortunately
a different Jonathan Hoffman though on second’s though it could be true!
I have been passed a fascinating Facebook
conversation involving a James Mendelsohn, who is some kind of liberal Zionist
and his exchanges with both Renew and
Hoffman. Clearly Mendelssohn is a dying breed.
In essence the conversation revolved
around a disgusting cartoon that Hoffman was distributing, allegedly of Jackie
Walker from a fake parody Twitter account. The cartoon was virulently racist, emphasising thick lips, dreadlocks and green slime emanating from her
head. It contains just about everything
you could possibly want from a racist cartoon about Black people.
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| Candidate Hoffman explains all |
If a similar cartoon of a Jewish
person, with a long and crooked nose, grasping hands and fingers, an evil eye
etc. had been drawn one suspects that Hoffman would have had no difficulty recognising its anti-Semitism.
As Mendelsohn made clear, a cartoon
exaggerates peoples’ features, this was simply a racist caricature. There was
nothing amusing in it nor was it in any way a likeness of Jackie's features.
Hoffman defended it on the ground
that well, Jackie has dreadlocks and she is Black. He argued that as the person
who drew the cartoon has no racist intent (how could he possibly know leaving
aside whether he is the best judge in such matters) the cartoon
itself can’t be racist.
The logic is baffling. An act of
discrimination in law isn’t negated because the discriminator didn’t intend to
discriminate. It stands or falls on its
own merits. If you pay someone less because they are Black or older then you are presumed to have intended to discriminate. It is inherent in the act.
It used to be the case that a
person was presumed to intend the consequences of his own action in capital murder
cases. Today this is interpreted as assuming that if you engage in certain
actions then you must be taken to foresee the consequences and hence possess the
essential mens rea (guilty intent).
What the person intended when she
drew the racist cartoon is irrelevant to the question of whether the cartoon is
or is not racist. That is an objective fact. What she intended is subjective.
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| Letter to Annabel Mullin about Hoffman |
When Mendelsohn brought Hoffman's cartoon to the
attention of Renew Annabel Mullin
responded by saying ‘We do not believe it
has passed the threshold for racism.’ Presumably Mullin was referring to
the cartoon itself and not just Hoffman’s distribution of it. Regardless the explanation did not give a
clue as to why an obviously racist cartoon, was not deemed to pass the threshold
for racism. The only conclusions to be
drawn is that Renew’s threshold is
very high or Ms Mullin’s toleration for it is high.
Mendelsohn therefore concluded that ‘@RenewParty has failed badly in failing to take meaningful action against Mr Hoffman
for his defence of the image.’ And that ‘@RenewParty certainly won't be getting my vote, any time soon.’
Where I part company with James
Mendelsohn is in his final conclusions that Hoffman is ‘a long-time pro-Israel and anti-antisemitism campaigner’ and that
in his opinion ‘his defence of the above
image makes him unfit to be involved in any such campaign.’
On the contrary someone
like Hoffman is extremely well qualified to defend the world’s only Apartheid
state! There is nothing incompatible in Hoffman being a virulent anti-Black racist and being a Zionist. They go hand in hand.
Many of the comments of Mendelsohn
and his friends, in their attacks on Jackie Walker and their unfounded
assertions that she is racist, are themselves racist. Hoffman, with his crude
golliwog style cartoons is being honest whereas his liberal Zionist critics are being
disingenuous.
If you support the State of Israel in
all its racist glory then it is inevitable that you will end up as a thorough
going racist. That however is something
that Mendelsohn and his fellows are going to have to work out for themselves.
Asking themselves questions such as why is it that Zionism is politically
supported by the far-Right and people like Tommy Robinson and Richard Spencer?
However it seems, after denying that
Hoffman had crossed their invisible threshold for racism, that he has nonetheless been
quietly excluded from the Renew
candidates list.
I also have a confession to
make. Finding out that Scoffman is such
a dedicated opponent of Brexit has been the only thing that caused honest soul
searching on my part about my stance on Brexit!
Tony Greenstein
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