Insight’s programme
broadcast on 7 December 2014 titled NZ
Muslims & Shadow of ISIS again shows Insight’s poor grasp of matters
Islamic. The result was an obsequious,
heavily biased and uninformative tract promoting Islam as ‘just a religion like
any other’ even as the programme’s guests demonstrated it was anything but.
A programme dedicated
to ‘insight’ should have been picked up on the many discrepancies, but it did
not.
Take Professor Edwina
Pio’s comment about the heterogeneity of Muslims. This contrasts sharply with Umarji Mohammed’s
comment about “our people,” meaning the ummah
or the global Muslim community. Pio and
Mohammed can’t both be right and Insight should have queried the paradox.
Pio also commented
that “Islam’s emphasis on peace is not well understood.” It’s hard not to raise a cynical laugh, but
Insight could have asked where this could be seen in practice in a manner
understood in Western terms.
In regard to jihad, Pio
struggled in describing it as “an effort to cleanse oneself of impurities that
one has within oneself.” Her reference
to the lesser jihad, “Later on this
became … against other people,” is part of an 11th Century
contrivance referring to ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’ jihads and used for dissembling. The unqualified term jihad is almost always used in a military sense as part of Islamic
conquest. This negates her contention
that “Muslims do not believe in killing others.”1
In her book, Work and Worship, Pio finds that
Muslim’s employment difficulties means that acceptance of Muslims and their way
of living still needs work. Why doesn’t
Insight question Pio on the need for Muslims to integrate here in the same way
Europeans need to behave in Islamic states?
Why should New Zealand bend its culture to suit an alien import which
has manifestly failed in every country in which it forms a significant
proportion, as many national standards surveys can attest to?2
The Federation of
Islamic Associations’ president Anwar Ghani condemns IS with some heavy-hitting
ambivalence. Well, he would, wouldn’t
he, since supporting it risks some serious scrutiny from the SIS. But why didn’t Insight question him on his statement
that “Their method or their action have nothing to do with Islam”? All Islamist terrorist groups operate
according to their interpretations of the same Islamic scriptures that members
of the FIANZ use, along with Islam’s robust prescriptive nature with its rules
of halal and haram, that which is permitted and that which is forbidden. Islamic State’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
is reputed to have a PhD in Islamic studies – would Ghani care to debate the
issue with him?
Ghani conflates the
behaviour of veterans returning with post-traumatic stress disorder with the
potential threat that IS returnees pose.
No vets ever came back inculcated with a murderous ideology, though, and
Insight should have queried this.
The major logical and
factual conflict occurs with comments by Umarji Mohammed.
He says that Australia, the United Kingdom, the
United States and France have intervened in Middle Eastern conflicts “and they
all have had problems” meaning, one assumes, domestic terrorism courtesy of
radical Muslims. He says Japan and
[South] Korea have “sizeable communities” and “In Brazil there are millions of
Muslims” which have not intervened and have not had such trouble. According to Wikipedia the communities are,
respectively and approximately, 100,000 or 0.08 % of the total population;
35,000 or 0.07%; and 30,000 (2010 census) or 0.015%. Insight did not query this aggrandisement. Isolationism has not protected Japan from
attacks by Islamists, with the 2010 strike on its super tanker M Star in the Straits of Hormuz, UAE. The Abdullah Azzam Brigades, linked to al
Qaeda and based in the Sinai Peninsula, claimed responsibility “to avenge the
plunder of Muslim wealth.” And 44-year-old
Hitoshi Igarashi, Tsukuba University assistant professor of literature and translator
of the novel The Satanic Verses by
Salman Rushdie, was murdered in 1991 with Muslims in Japan applauding the
murder.
He goes on to say, “If New Zealand does get
involved then obviously there will be people who [inaudible, contextually meaning
‘say’] ‘You’re killing our people so let’s do something to you.’” Why did Insight not query his personal
attitude to this threat, and whether he would assist the Police in reporting
it? His use of the phrase “our people,” should
have been challenged on the basis of identity.
How can any New Zealand Muslim be trusted if their primary allegiance is
to the ummah, much of which is
involved in violent turmoil? Mohammed
opens a window onto the thinking of local Muslims which makes Pio’s views look
disingenuous to the point of dissembling.
Teacher Aliya Denzeisen, an American Muslim
émigré, collects reports of anti-Muslim acts, funding Muslims’ grievance
industry. She gets calls every day
regarding assaults or insults from women wearing Islamic dress, yet the answer
lies with these women – adapt to New Zealand modes of behaviour and the
problems stop.
Finally to the
comments of Musa Taukuri who says, “I’m just like everyone else.” This obviously doesn’t apply to his daughters
who he sends to school wearing Islamic dress, resulting in negative
comments. Is Insight aware that Islam
does not require any of the costumes characteristic of the Middle Eastern
states to be worn by its women? All it
requires is modest dress, which his girls could wear and attract no
comment. He could be accused of hypocrisy,
child cruelty, religious obsessiveness and bigotry, but not by Insight. Why not?
There are several
comments that need to be made in conclusion.
Firstly, Insight needs to consider the perspective it projects to its
listeners when discussing Islam. It
demonstrates ignorance of the subject but the listener does not know whether
this is genuine or is driven by ideological motives. Such motives may be deliberate or
unconscious, or a projection of Radio New Zealand (and by extension,
government) intent, implicit or explicit.
Secondly,
balance. Listeners can assume that
Insight strives for balance but the example here and with an earlier programme,
Culturally Motivate Crime, leaves too
much room for doubt about some subjects it covers. For example, none of the people interviewed
had any academic knowledge of Islam or its extremists, or the New Zealand
terror threat and the governmental response with respect to the Muslim
community. There were no disinterested
social commentators. There was no
critique of any sort on the views presented.
The inflexibility, demands for societal compliance, and the absolutist
views of the Muslim community were not challenged. Yet Insight could have interviewed Dr Mark
Durie3 or Dr Paul Buchanan4 for example and achieved
balance and expertise in pertinent aspects of the subject under discussion.
Finally, the implied
criticism of New Zealand society in its failure to change, appease, and accept
Muslims, notwithstanding the incompatibility of their religion with the Western
world’s democratic and conciliatory norms.
Insight, along with many if not all media representations (I am not aware
of any exceptions) promotes what I call ‘mandated heterophily’. This is not the place to expand on the
concept, suffice to say that this is an ethical reinterpretation of
‘multiculturalism’. The obverse of this
is socio-cultural homophily, that is, the tendency for humans to associate with
others with whom they share characteristics of one sort or another. We are all familiar with the slight kick we
get from shared first or last names, birthdays, age, school, religion, country
or city of birth, cultural background and so on. Predominantly, people will associate with,
live near, and marry, those of similar background. This is the natural state of every person on
earth; it is an essential part of the human condition. In contrast, heterophily is not a natural
state. It has to be imposed and
supported to avoid reversion to normative behaviour, and it does this by ad
hominem epithets such as ‘xenophobic’, ‘racist’, 'bigoted', and ‘Islamophobic’.
Why is Insight inclined
to take a didactic and unthinking approach to the imposition of Islamic culture
and the consequent erosion of Kiwi identity, instead of a deep, robust, independent
and intellectual analysis of this issue? Or even of defending New Zealand values.
“Jihad
is a foreign policy to expand the Islamic authority all over the world.” Omar
Bakri Muhammad, former leader, Al-Muhajitoun
"Violent Islamic Jihad
is the most ambitious imperial project that the world has seen for many, many
years – an attempt to re-establish a caliphate which brings the sharia law
across large parts of the world. And the
sharia law, let's not forget what it does. It tortures people, it executes
people, it cuts people's hands off, it subordinates women, it deprives women of
rights. It deprives women of education."
Colonel Richard Kemp, Former
commander of British forces in Afghanistan.
Shortly after he
founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, Hassan al-Banna made very clear what jihad was about: "It is the
nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all
nations and to extend its power to the entire world."
What
distinguishes a jihadi
terrorist from a more peaceful Muslim, therefore, may not be any fundamental
difference in belief, but, as in the West, merely in a given instance, how the
religious legal principles of his faith should be applied. Mark Durie
“Those who study
jihad will understand why
Islam wants to conquer the whole world. . . . Islam says: Kill all the
unbelievers just as they would kill you all! . . . Islam says: Whatever good
there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People
cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to
paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors!" Ayatollah Khomeini
2 International surveys covering social
progress, peacefulness, slavery, ‘good country’, life satisfaction, Christian
persecution, competitiveness, corruption, democracy, stability, female genital
mutilation, gender inequality, press freedom, happiness, life expectancy,
women’s progress, and well-being show consistently that the greater Muslim
population a country has, the more likely it is to score poorly. Two things save these countries from total
failure – oil money and failed African states.
And a significant reason that African states fail is because of Islam.
3 http://www.markdurie.com/
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