How real is the terrorist threat to NZ?

Recently Radio New Zealand’s National Programme’s Insight ran an episode considering the terrorist threat to New Zealand following the departure of troops to train the Iraqi Army in April 2015. Contributors included the head of the SIS Rebecca Kitteridge, former foreign minister of Afghanistan and senior politics lecturer at Otago University Najibullah Lafraie, Professor Ramesh Thakur from the Australian National University, and attorney general Chris Findlayson.  The tenor of the programme was detached from the reality not just of the inroads Islamic extremism has made across the world, but also of the major Western adjustments necessary to accommodate it.  All contributors made comments that showed a poor grasp of Islam’s basic tenets. 

In order understand the effects of Islamic terrorism on New Zealand it is important to realise the multiple ways in which Islam has developed and refined terrorism over centuries.  Insight’s interviewees tended to obfuscate the situation for diverse reasons, so Islamic terrorism’s strategy, trajectory and goal would be lost on many listeners.  I hope this necessarily brief analysis clarifies the reality which lies behind the interviewees’ inept responses.

Mitigation

It is a frequent strategy to render Islamic terrorism insignificant by comparing its consequences to other acts of terrorism.  Freeing factory-farmed pigs and chickens, digging up genetically-modified crops, or bombing an abortion clinic qualify as terrorism under certain classifications.  It is false moral equivalence, however, to equate the destruction of property for strongly held convictions with the dispassionate and deliberate targeting of non-combatants on the basis of their religion, for ethnic cleansing, enslavement or slaughter.

Professor Ramesh Thakur diminishes terrorism’s threat, which he considers should be seen as small compared with, say, road deaths.  I doubt that Middle East and North African (MENA) states will be comforted by this.  Terrorism destroys territory.  By comparing deaths due to terrorism with car crashes Thakur trivialises its cause and conflates intent and accident.

Rebecca Kitteridge acknowledges the threat and its increase over time, and the watch-list figure she uses, 30 to 40, sounds barely significant.  But this figure correlates with a rule of thumb that one percent of Muslims consider terrorism justified and one percent of that cohort will carry out such acts.  She then wrecked her credibility by saying, “When I talk of the Islamic State I always kind of do it in inverted commas because I don’t think they are a state and I don’t think they are Islamic either.” 

It’s only demographics that gives New Zealanders a sense of detachment from Islamic terrorism. Europe’s recent history shows how vulnerable a nation can be to Islam’s destabilising influences as its adherents’ proportion of the population increases. 

The Lesser Evil Principle

Both Kitteridge and Tayyaba Khan repudiate Islamic State’s Islamic credentials with the solipsistic view that, since it does not concur with their personal views of what constitutes Islam, it cannot be Islamic.  This is contrary to reality.  IS (also as a proxy for most if not all Islamic fundamentalist groups) operates firmly on the Islamic principle of the immutability of Islam’s holy works, and the exemplary actions of its prophet.  Interpretations may vary, but it is incontestable that every action IS takes is permissible under sharia law.  Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has a doctorate in Islamic studies, and it is safe to assume he can justify any action in IS’ name in Islamic terms.

The result of this is the attempt to decouple terrorist acts from the ‘vast number of Muslims who don’t have extremist views’.  In a variation on New Zealand exceptionalism, the Muslim community is presented as integrated, peaceful, and law-abiding.  There is an implication that these people put New Zealand values above those of Islam, notwithstanding that a Muslim’s identity is primarily, wholly and inviolably bound to Islam under threat of death from those of greater purity.

Despite Khan’s exhortation to change Islam from within, overseas experience shows that any such action will be met with threats and intimidation from inside this ‘vast number’.  Worldwide, the arc of post-war history shows that the Islamic agenda has been driven by extremists and not by moderates. 

Even as Muslims demand and are given concessions (which no other minority religion expects), they are granted immunity from the sins of the Islamists.  Yet the role of moderate Muslims in the West is in fact passive support of extremist groups by means of demographic expansion, a voting bloc favouring sympathetic political parties, a resource for influential positions in education and governance, and a wellspring of manpower for both local and global terrorism. 

Defensive Jihad

The Security Intelligence Service’s monitoring of extremists is practically the only defence New Zealand has against them, yet it comes under intense scrutiny from the far Left and strong criticism from the Muslim community.  The creation of implied rights exempting Muslims from criticism is a reflection of a greater principle mentioned above, Islam’s immutability, and its consequent exemption from investigation of any kind.  Human rights have been progressively constrained as an inevitable consequence of Muslim violence and the vociferous complaints from the Western Muslim community on ressentiment, that is, the perceived slights and grievances causing hostility.  Since human rights as Westerners perceive the term do not exist in Islam (they were granted by Allah in the 7^th century and cannot be changed) Muslims themselves have nothing to lose as long as Islamic principles are not curtailed. 

The extreme reluctance to permit analysis of Islam is having devastating effects on free speech in Europe and the U.S., with increasing instances of the ‘hecklers’ veto’, ‘smear and jeer’ responses, disinvitations, and the ultimate dissuader, the assassin’s veto. 

Hijrah

This concept of migration is modelled on Islam’s prophet Mohammad’s flight to Medina from Mecca in 622 AD.  There, he gathered manpower and armaments until he was able to conquer Mecca eight years later.  In modern terms, migration on an unprecedented scale is a consequence of the appalling disruption of the MENA states by terrorism and civil war as millions try to escape.  The illegal migration industry which is sending many hundreds of thousands of people to either Europe or death thus has a religious mandate to continue.

That many people die in the process of war and migration is of limited concern to Muslims because Islamic doctrine guarantees eternal life in paradise to those who live the good life by pleasing God in all they do. Secular Western precepts no longer carry the promise of life after death, thus giving human lives a value that simply doesn’t exist in the Islamic world. In what could be termed a ‘dominant meme’, in that it supplants and suppresses Islam’s doctrine in the Western world-view, Westerners fail to take account of it. This moral disparity is wilfully exploited in Islam’s dealings with the West.

The resultant population shift is causing Europe immense and accelerating problems.  New Zealand already has issues with its Muslim community, to which many Radio New Zealand programmes can attest, while forming just 1% of its population. 

Tawhid

This is Islam’s single and absolute truth that transcends the world, from which Muslims gain authority to act in the way they do.  From this is derived Islam’s essentialism and supremacism, and its adherents’ unique intensity of belief, yaqeen. 

Terror and lure

“Strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah.”  The Koran’s directive has many beneficial results for Islam.  The gruesome deaths of its transgressors act as far more than punishment.  It is principally a warning to others.  Do not criticise Islam, do not leave the religion, do not blaspheme, for Jews and Christians – live under the prescribed conditions or forfeit their “contract of protection” and their heads, and for others, convert or die.  This has raised a generation of Islamophobes, whose fear of violent repercussions as a result of criticism renders them mute. 

Preaching between terror and lure is an established doctrine.  It means preaching between the eternal horrors of hell and the carnal pleasures of paradise, and their earthly proxies of Islamist terrorists, and Islam, the Religion of Peace.

Najibullah Lafraie makes it quite clear that we toe the terrorists’ line or face the consequences.  Whose side are we to take?  IS and its cohort by non-interference, with their 7^th century morality as they attack every facet of modern life?  Or the Western world’s defence of democratic modernity and its ability to cope with moral change, Westphalian sovereignty, and the Judeo-Christian Greco-Roman heritage that has manifestly served its world better than Islam has theirs? 

Any level of support for IS and Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, from Lafraie’s advocacy of non-involvement, through the refusal to denounce Muslim activism, to the thousands of Muslims joining IS, is support for the ummah, the global Muslim community and its resurrected caliphate. 

It is this which defines the threat to the Western world and must be actively rejected by Muslim New Zealanders. Insight should examine the motives of Muslims who choose the ummah over New Zealand values, because they cannot have it both ways.

In conclusion, New Zealanders need to grasp the meaning of Islam’s world-view, and how it fundamentally and incompatibly differs from the Western world’s.  Insight has a major role to play here.