Saturday, November 2

I want to amplify their hate

A recent tweet asked:

What sort of murderous savages parade the body of a dead woman through the streets?

The answer is Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and current client of fellow-butchers in Tehran – a Third Reich admiring theocratic fascist army that after coming to power in Gaza instantly turned it into a 41-kilometre rocket launch pad.

Last weekend brought with it the horrifying spectacle of Hamas militants, emboldened by their missile arsenal, infiltrating Israeli towns from the strip, and carrying out the worst pogrom post WW2. This incursion, striking in its audacity, left Israel reeling and at the time of writing 700+ Israelis are dead, and possibly as many as 300 have been taken hostage. The Israeli Prime Minister minced no words in declaring war on Hamas, a promise of severe retaliation.

The brazenness of these assaults, encompassing as many as 22 locations, paints a chilling picture. These militants traversed significant distances, unleashing chaos on civilians and soldiers alike. Social media accounts around the world are drenched in Jewish blood and unbelievable images of thugs parading dead, naked females through the streets to frenzied crowds.

The attacks were most certainly engineered by Iran and motivated by a potential peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. In the region, the Palestinian cause has increasingly taken a backseat to the threat of Iranian imperialism, easily the most destablising force in the region, and a threat that has pushed an increasingly modernising Arab world into an awkward-cousins relationship with Israel.

The level of barbarity is likely to recast the conflict in many people’s eyes. World leaders were swift in their condemnations, the planet’s pesthouses aside. Our own government’s response was initially extremely weak, likely written by MFAT staff, our minister of foreign affairs Nanaia Mahuta offering up the crumbs of a both-sides tweet. For context, our government refuses to outright call Hamas a terrorist organisation, splitting its military from political wings in order to work around this. Thankfully PM Chris Hipkins clearly saw the error and made a stronger statement later – the strongest made by a New Zealand leader since Helen Clark.  

But the initial tweet does say worlds about the knee-jerk tendency among the upper-middle, allegedly progressive class to play down violence against Jews and antisemitism generally. Our far Left, perfectly comfortable with labeling others racist, has a thoroughly immoral stance regarding Israel. Just this past week there was excitement about Labour potentially declaring Palestine a state – a symbolic gesture which serves no purpose other whatsoever beyond reinforcing the mendacious pillar of the anti-Israel movement that only Israel is to blame for the conflict. Max Harris, the man who destroyed Efeso Collin’s tilt at the Auckland mayoralty by skewing his candidate to the alienating fringe, predictably gushed over the policy. But, of course, he would: Max worked for John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, within Corbyn’s antisemitic transfiguration of U.K. Labour.

Our Green party has an antisemitism problem, and a committed antisemitic base to pander to. This is no longer the party of nuanced, moral thinkers like Nandor Tanczos, who could articulate support for the Palestinian cause without quickly tumbling into medieval, poisoning-of-the-well-level tropes, but is stocked now with intolerant, anti-modernist ideologues. A case can be made that the swing to the Right of the NZ Greens, necessary for reductive identity politics and censorship they are now synonymous with – required a strident antisemitic element seeing this ancient hatred is the go-to for any group seeking an authoritarian mandate.

To play down Hamas’ atrocity, to ignore their role as provocateurs firing rockets on civilian centres in Israel, and to suggest walls are the barriers to peace when this latest tragedy shows they are the difference between living and dead Jews, is to actively support Hamas. Your average tweet by Green MP Golriz Ghahraman – whenever tensions are high – will feature all of the above. And yet, our media is seldom if ever interested, and won’t pressure this party on their open racism and racist associations. For example, why was it not a story that Efeso was working so closely with a committed Corbynite? Why no scandal that our current Human Rights Chief Commissioner ran for office under Corbyn? Why, when Chloe Swarbrick, Golriz Ghahraman, and Riccardo Menendez March publicly chanted ‘from the river to the sea’ they weren’t disciplined by their party, or even made to resign considering the pogrom we just witnessed is literally this chant in action?

In the world of academia, Massey University’s Dean Chair in Communication, Mohan Dutta wrote in an unhinged blog piece that the pogrom was a ‘powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance’. So the house-to-house slaughter of families, including children, and mass rapes that were committed are exemplar in Dutta’s eyes? Isn’t it amazing what one can get away with under the pretext of ‘decolonisation’ today.

John Minto, who has long defended Hamas’ murder of civilians, was interviewed by the media on the pogrom. His early contribution was that the pogrom was understandable. It beggars belief a professional media would call on a man whose social media accounts for his Palestinian Solidarity Network Aotearoa are an open sewer. It can’t be for his knowledge of the region, seeing that in a piece written for ‘The Daily Blog’ he revealed he didn’t realise Arabs and Turks were distinct from each other. A bonehead.

The fact is, none of these reactionary, and at times outright depraved views will earn any consequence, because our media has no appetite to brand the Greens as the deeply racist party they are, or to risk undermining any bourgeois enthusiasms. Journalists would rather accuse Jews who try to highlight their shortcomings, or who name racists, of being partisan, or, my personal favourite, as having beef with certain politicians or academics.

What they’ve forgotten is an ethical media is as beholden to a public as a democratically elected politician is. They owe to us to amplify all of this stuff, so that the public can understand, consider, and then (the most likely outcome) outright reject it. But we’re currently being deprived of that. Our media is social engineering essentially – exposing some bigots, but undoubtedly protecting others along party lines.

And as a result, we are sick. But the barbarity we saw a few days ago, which is ongoing, may signal a turning point. It will be harder now for the general public to excuse the excesses of the Greens, and the bigotry and thinly veiled hatred of the far Left more generally. Rivers of ink need to be spilled calling this behaviour out and making their parties accountable. As Jews, we simply have no choice, but wider New Zealand too can only suffer under the toxic cloud of such parties, academics, and activists. As the great Christopher Hitchens said, you can measure the moral health of a society by the levels of antisemitism within it. We must collectively stand against the pro-fascist Left, and return our society to full health again.

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