This week in New Zealand

GULED MIRE continues to foul the nest that New Zealand provided for him and his family after they fled a country torn apart by warfare and crippled by corruption.

In a characteristically noxious opinion piece published on Newsroom this week, Mire waded into the furore over the proposed film They Are Us – which, if reports are to be believed, will take Jacinda Ardern another step closer to secular canonisation for her role in the days following the March 15 mosque massacres.

I entirely understand and sympathise with reported misgivings expressed by some Christchurch Muslims  about the proposed movie, which they say comes too soon after the atrocity and promises to focus attention on Ardern (to her discomfort, I would guess) rather than on the victims and the bereaved.

Against that, we must weigh the right to freedom of speech. In an open society, the film’s backers should be free to pursue the project. It’s an uncomfortable clash of values that would be neatly and definitively resolved if the film was completed and no one went to see it.

In the meantime it seems we must put up with more poisonous mischief from Mire, who has spewed up a bucketload of verbal vomitus in which he attacks the film using incendiary terms such as “white saviourism”.

Mire says the movie seeks to “whitewash” the murder of 51 Muslims (Really? How would he know? Has he seen the script?) and says: “It’s clear the film has gone too far and needs to shut down immediately.” Well, there you go. We can plainly see what a richly diverse marketplace of ideas New Zealand would become if zealots like Mire had their way.

“What we do not need,” he declaims, “is for Hollywood to appropriate, rewrite and shove another white saviour narrative down our throats. At the very worst, the film represents torture porn.”

“White saviour narrative”? Mire apparently thinks, then, that Ardern’s demonstration of empathy and support for the massacre victims (and by extension, that of the whole country) was just a marginally less malevolent flip-side of white supremacy.

You can’t win against that sort of deranged thinking. It’s the product of a mind warped by neo-Marxist critical race theory and locked into a sense of victimism.

It’s worth contrasting Mire’s overheated rhetoric with the typically more restrained reaction of other Christchurch Muslims when they heard about the film, but it would be too much to expect that he might note their more nuanced response and take his cue from it. I suspect his ego gets a buzz out of being a provocateur.

Here’s what I think about Mire. It’s my opinion that he has arguably done more than any other individual in the public eye to ramp up racial tension in New Zealand and undermine social cohesion. Under the pretext of speaking up for New Zealand Muslims, he’s magnifying ethnic and religious differences. Worse than that, he’s pushing a message that Muslims have no hope of equality in an irredeemably racist country.

It shouldn’t need to be spelled out that if anything is going to give oxygen to the tiny minority of pathetic white extremists in New Zealand, it’s the polarising rhetoric of activists like Mire. They enable white supremacists to say to the feeble-minded and impressionable among us: see what happens when we let these outsiders in? They turn against us!

And it’s worth noting one crucial difference between Mire and the white supremacists. While they skulk in the dark shadows of the Internet, he’s given a platform by sympathetic mainstream news organisations.

His relentless promotion of a sense of “otherness” strikes a jarringly discordant note, playing directly against the obvious desire of most New Zealand Muslims to live quietly and peaceably in a tolerant society where their right to practise their religion is honoured and respected. I’ll go further and say he’s the worst possible advertisement for Islam in New Zealand, and a liability to his co-religionists.

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ON A related note, I heard Andrew Little describe a remark made by Juliet Moses at an anti-terrorism hui in Christchurch (sorry, Otautahi) as “provocative”.

Moses, who was representing the NZ Jewish Council in a panel discussion, was quoted as saying: “We need to hear leaders condemn all support of terrorism and all terrorism equally, whatever the source, target and circumstances, and even when it is not politically expedient to do so.  

“Hezbollah and Hamas … their military wings are proscribed terror organisations in New Zealand, but we saw a rally in support of Hezbollah on Queen Street in 2018.”

Moses was stating a bald fact, but it prompted some members of the audience to walk out and others to shout “Free Palestine”.

Well, that’s okay. Moses was asserting her right to free speech and the dissenting audience members responded by exercising their right to walk out in protest. No problem.

But it’s odd that Little thought Moses’s statement “provocative” when she was simply highlighting an obvious, if rather inconvenient, anomaly in politically fashionable thinking.

Many countries, including New Zealand’s closest allies, designate Hezbollah and the military wing of Hamas as terrorist organisations – even, in the former case, most member countries in the Arab League. Both organisations are implacably hostile to Israel. Why does a senior cabinet minister think it provocative to draw attention to that fact?

All terrorism against racial or religious groups is despicable, but how easily we forget that Jews have been the victims of the most vile and relentless persecution in human history. Moses was right to remind us of that.

And how odd, too, that Little and other government politicians don’t seem to find the inflammatory invective of stirrers like Mire similarly “provocative”. It would be nice to see him called out, but I’m not holding my breath.

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DRIVING home from Martinborough the other day, I turned on the car radio to hear Jesse Mulligan introduce RNZ National’s resident TV critic, Guy Williams.

That’s right, the same irritatingly self-satisfied Guy Williams who pops up endlessly in ratepayer-funded television shows.  I presume he’s a mate of Mulligan’s, given that they’re frequently together on Newshub’s The Project.

This is jobs for the boys, 21^st century style. There’s a distinct odour of incestuousness in the way members of the same chummy circle constantly recycle themselves. We can only conclude that NZ on Air smiles on them. 

Needless to say, there’s a certain sameness in their political stances. Here’s a tiny clue to the nature of that happy homogeneity: Williams is the partner of Golriz Ghahraman.

Even Jane Bowron of Stuff, who’s not one to frown on vogueish leftishness, was moved several years ago to protest at the overwhelming aura of chatty clubbishness on The Project, with only Mark Richardson being called in occasionally to give the illusion of balance (and be mocked as if he were some sort of Neanderthal curiosity, brought on for comic relief).

The common factor among these people is that they all seem exceptionally pleased with themselves. They laugh gaily at each other’s jokes and generally bathe in each other’s admiration. Moreover, they stick to forums where they can be confident their smug certainties won’t be challenged – such as The Project, obviously, but also RNZ, which is a cosy nest of like-thinking lefties (some of whom are old friends of mine and won’t be surprised in the slightest by my description).

I’m not sure what Williams’ talents are supposed to be. He’s described as a comedian, but the most striking thing about him in his role as a TV critic is the speed at which the words tumble out of his mouth, like water gushing from a fire hydrant. He talks as if he’s terrified that if he pauses even for a moment, people might realise he has nothing to say.  

Another characteristic of such people is that they suffer from the delusion that they’re daringly edgy and radical, constantly pushing the boundaries. Actually, they’re not. They are the new Establishment.

If the term “the Establishment” means those who hold power in society and whose ideas dominate the public conversation, then what we thought of as the conservative Establishment in the latter part of the 20^th century has long been extinct. We’ve done a 180-degree flip, to the point where what was then considered radical has become mainstream. But just like the old Establishment, the new one is oppressively conformist, authoritarian and intolerant of different ideas and different ways of doing things. That’s the nature of Establishments.

This idea was explored a couple of years ago in an insightful Stuff column by Damien Grant, who now appears to be that company’s sole surviving unapologetic voice of the Right. In that column, Grant explored what it meant to wear the “radical” tag these days (basically, nothing) and concluded: “Being part of a baying mob … isn’t brave and nor is it radical. Standing up to them is.”

Milkshakes and mud: weapons of choice for the militant, inarticulate Left

(First published in Stuff regional papers and on Stuff.co.nz, May 29.)

Who are the real haters? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself as the debate over so-called “hate speech” escalates to almost hysterical levels.

It popped into my head as I watched a TV news report about the British protester who splattered Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage with a banana and salted caramel milkshake.

Milkshakes are the current weapon of choice for angry left-wing activists who are apparently too inarticulate or too consumed with rage to express themselves by legitimate means.

In the case of Farage, he’s seen as fair game because he represents a political position that’s labelled alt-Right, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Attacks on him are therefore seen as acceptable - indeed, even honourable in the eyes of many on the Left.

It makes no difference to these people that Farage’s party has wide popular support, as has just been emphatically demonstrated in the EU elections, or that it was founded for the legitimate purpose of insisting that the British government do what the majority of voters told it do in the 2016 EU referendum. Popular support and democratic legitimacy count for nothing to militant zealots. 

Of course we have our own righteous activists here in New Zealand – people so convinced of the correctness of their cause that they feel entitled to resort to oafish acts of thuggery against anyone who sees things differently.

John Key was monstered by two activists at Waitangi in 2009 – although in fairness, it should be acknowledged that they later had the decency to apologise – and the mild-mannered ACT parliamentary leader John Boscawen was humiliated by having a lamington rubbed into his hair while speaking during a by-election debate later the same year in Auckland.

Several years prior, also at Waitangi, then National Party leader Don Brash had mud hurled in his face. And of course there was the celebrated incident in which a dildo was flung in the face of cabinet minister Steven Joyce in 2016.

More recently, in Australia, a teenager was virtually hailed as a hero for breaking an egg on the head of Senator Fraser Anning. People excused it because Anning is an unusually odious politician, but make no mistake – the attack on him was an attack on the right of politicians in a democracy to take unpopular positions. It therefore became an attack on freedom of expression, which is the cornerstone of liberal democracy.

The purpose of such attacks is to intimidate and humiliate, and by implication to send a signal to others that they risk the same treatment if they dare to express ideas that the Left wishes to suppress.

It is, in other words, a form of bullying, and we should be just as intolerant of it as we are of bullying in school or the workplace.

The striking thing about these acts is that they were perpetrated by people on the Left, which is a reversal of the historical pattern.  We tend to associate political violence with right-wing thugs such as the Nazi Brownshirts, but increasingly it’s the Left that indulges in disruption and displays of intimidation.

Overseas, activists on the Left have developed a sophisticated repertoire of strategies for shutting down opposing opinions. These include threatening violent demonstrations on such a scale that police either can’t guarantee public safety or demand payment of outrageous fees from meeting organisers to cover the costs of maintaining order.

Another effective technique is to blockade events that the protesters object to – a tactic employed at a mining conference in Dunedin this week. It’s a denial of other people’s rights and therefore fundamentally anti-democratic. 

Oddly enough, we never see conservatives trying to prevent others from going about their lawful business. They accept that a liberal democracy accepts differences of opinion. 

To return to my opening question, who are the real haters? Who are the people whose actions and statements reveal them as hard-core bigots, rigidly intolerant of different views?

I was fascinated to learn last week that two years ago, the “comedian” Guy Williams (I put that word in inverted commas because it has become a synonym for tiresome prig) took a photo of Don Brash crossing a street in Ponsonby and posted it on Twitter with a comment indicating a desire to run him over.

Obviously there was no real intent to carry out the threat, and Williams later apologised. But the mere fact that he expressed the thought, even flippantly, is telling.

It becomes even more intriguing when you learn that Williams is the boyfriend of Green MP Golriz Ghahraman, who made a melodramatic pitch for public sympathy last week – supported by Williams – after ACT leader David Seymour upset her by calling her a menace to freedom because of her demands for tougher controls on what New Zealanders are permitted to say.

It’s interesting to speculate on what might have happened if the names were re-arranged here, and it was Seymour who had jokingly threatened to run Ghahraman down on Ponsonby Rd.  I think we can safely say the Left would have been up on its hind legs demanding that he be strung up.