Insight - Is Islamophobia still thriving in NZ?

Insight, Radio New Zealand’s premier documentary programme, covers a wide range of topics, the majority of which I wouldn’t dare to criticise.  Not so when it comes to its coverage of Muslims in New Zealand.  On that subject, its objective competency is abysmal, with reports that could have been produced by the Muslim Brotherhood’s press relations team.  I’ve written before about Insight’s support for Islamising New Zealand[1], describing its understanding of Islam as obsequious, unctuous, biased, uninformative, unconvincing, unthinking, shallow, detached from reality and inept.  And it’s getting worse.

The latest example is on the subject of ‘Islamophobia’, a topic of increasing global interest but very little understanding.  It is thus that Insight presents not a New Zealand perspective, but a Muslim one. 

“Fight those who believe not in Allah and the Last Day…until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled.”

Insight unwittingly transmits the Koran’s ‘demanding with menace’ message when its interviewee Dame Susan Devoy says “what we need to do is address the changing demographics in our country and see if we’re still fit for purpose.” For just one per cent of the population?  She talks of violent extremism “whether it’s ‘Islamophobia’ or it’s the rise of the alt-Right and white supremacist groups”, but does not mention the world’s biggest terrorism executor, Muslims.

“After years of being told that as migrants they need to integrate into the community, and a lot of volunteer work to try to make that happen, Rana Nasa says her thinking has now flipped.  It’s time for others to shift.  “It’s not about us, it’s about the people who are accepting us.””  Rana Nasa, by the way, helms the Manawatu Multicultural Council, and one of an increasing number of Muslims gaining positions in local government, quangos, interfaith organisations, media and other influential positions.  This would be fine if we could trust them to be impartial, but we can’t.  In the words of the Islamic scholar Sir William Muir, for Islam, “Toleration is unknown, and the possibility of free and liberal institutions foreclosed.”

Islamic Women’s Council’s spokeswoman Anjum Rahman denies a major principle of her own religion when talking about Kiwi interaction with Muslims. “It’s about letting go of a mindset that ‘the way I do things is the right way and the only way’.” 

“Many of the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) long to make you disbelievers after your belief, through envy on their own account, after the truth hath become manifest unto them. Forgive and be indulgent [toward them] until Allah give command. (Koran 2:109.)  And give his command he did – “Fight those who believe not in Allah…”

Insight has reached the status of NZ’s fourth estate’s fifth column, indiscreetly shilling on behalf of Islam.  It would be fair to call it traitorous, in that it is actively supporting an agency which explicitly wants to subvert our Western values.  However, one has to assume that a traitor acts from a conviction which is antagonistic to the dominant hegemony, and I for one am not convinced that anyone on the Insight team has the faintest understanding of what Islam truly represents.  They co-operate with Muslims for the sake of peace, as useful innocents.

LETTER TO INSIGHT

Dear Insight

It seems remiss of RNZ Insight to discuss the problem of ‘Islamophobia’ without giving any indication of the cause behind it. 

There are people with limited means of expression who make a public and personal issue of their distaste towards Muslims and their religion, and this is unfortunate.  They fail to comply with New Zealanders’ self-perception as “…such a diverse country, we’re so accepting, we’re so kind, we’re so loving…” 

Insight stigmatises negative reaction to Muslims by using terms like racism, xenophobia, prejudice, white supremacism, nastiness and bias.  There is an implicit assumption that these descriptors are the cause of Islamophobia in themselves.  This is similar to the USSR’s attitude to criticism, that in a perfect state any disparagement of it is a sign of the critic’s mental or moral infirmity and should be treated as such. 

Yet it should be obvious that the problem is Islam itself and not one based on race, since Hindus are never discussed in such a manner despite having twice the population.  Nor is it based arbitrarily on appearance, given Sikh males’ distinctive millinery.  And it’s not Islam on its own.  Insight reinforces the imposition of rapid cultural change occurring in New Zealand as in the rest of the Western world, but fails to acknowledge that it negatively impacts many people, indeed a majority if the truth were known, in terms of trust and social cohesion.

The programme gives no hint that its journalists and researchers are aware that Islam causes problems globally, that there are issues of its violence and moral incompatibility, and that it avoids assimilation. Without a hint of irony, it iterates Muslim demands for New Zealand to make changes to accommodate Islam as the solution to ‘Islamophobia’.  Insight appears to represent an elite which has created its own moral high-ground and applied it with arrogance of the intellect and demonstrative rectitude.  Insight has become a mouthpiece for Islam, in a state of unconscious cognitive bias.

It seems to me that this is a dereliction of journalistic responsibility, in keeping a distance from its subject and covering all sides of an issue.  I am aware that there are factors affecting the way the programme has to present its subject matter, but to ignore an aspect of such incomparable moral, cultural, political and religious importance is reprehensible.

I look forward to Insight covering precisely why New Zealanders object so strongly to Islam.  And perhaps another programme on why it won’t.

Yours sincerely

Chris Slater

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[1] https://dyspeptic-lucubrations.blogspot.com/2014/12/nz-muslims-shadow-of-isis.html

https://dyspeptic-lucubrations.blogspot.com/2015/05/how-real-is-terrorist-threat-to-nz.html

https://dyspeptic-lucubrations.blogspot.com/2014/11/culturally-motivated-crime.html

Roots of Racism - A Hypothesis

Much is made of the ‘fear of migrants’, this Guardian article being typical, in maligning those who oppose immigration.

I have yet to see commentators refer to any cause for this except for the usual epithets of ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobe’, as if that says it all.  I would suggest that the cause is instinctive and can be tracked through evolutionary behaviour.  

One of the most important factors in small societies is a father’s certainty of raising his own child, and efforts to guarantee marital fidelity and paternity result in many of their rules.   Such rules are responsible for women’s dress codes, marital rules, widows’ confinement, monitoring of menstruation and FGM.  Paternal investment has importance in our own society with a reluctance of men to pay maintenance for children proved not to be their own.  Polyandry is very rare in comparison with polygyny, and where it is socially sanctioned, the men in the relationship are often brothers thus sharing a genetic interest in paternity. 

This desire for certainty goes deeper than societies’ rules and likely forms the same instinct that lions have for killing a mate’s cubs which aren't its own.  In our societies, this takes the form of the danger that stepfathers present to a mate’s child, where there is a much higher likelihood of murder than if the child is his own.  

Operating at both animal and human levels, the threat to the protection of paternity takes two forms, internal – from members of one’s tribe, the in-group, and external – from invading tribes, the out-group.  The out-group threat often takes the form of kidnapping of females for procreation, slavery and ransom, limiting a tribe’s fecundity and survival.  For out-group protection, evolution has provided us with the instinct for homophily, the universal preference for living with people of our own kind, a herd instinct of a sort.  Islam takes this to absurd levels, with very high cousin marriage rates leading to genetic faults and high costs of treatment.  

This threat aversion also takes the form of distrust of strangers.  Identifying out-group members is important to a tribe.  In closely-related groups this might take the form of knowing the enemy at a personal level.  The films Apocalypto, Tanna and Warriors of the Rainbow - Seediq Bale give realistic accounts of tribal relationships and are worth seeing.  For unrelated tribes, cultural factors and race increase in importance as an identifying process, and I think this is the misunderstood cause for much of what passes for racism today.  Cultural factors can include dress, language, accent, behaviour, religion, child-raising praxis, etc, while race will include obvious factors that separate Caucasoid, Slavic, Indian, Negroid, and Mongoloid features for example.  Deriving from both these factors is an identity which individuals will seek to protect.  Where this interferes with assimilation into a host or alien culture is a choice that has to be made.  Failure in this regard places the individual into the category of an out-group member, thus threat perception and discrimination will occur.  For a host society’s survival as a civilisation, assimilation is essential.

The word ‘racism’ has changed its meaning over recent years, ironically as actual racism has declined dramatically.  What was once short for ‘racial prejudice’ has now taken flight as an all-purpose slur emanating from the far Left.  Its purpose is more than just to shut down criticism, just or unjust, of those with out-group status.  What the far Left is enforcing on Western nations is what I’ve termed ‘mandated heterophily’, that is, enforced multiculturalism, more recently termed ‘diversity’, the purpose of which is to reduce levels of social trust, increase the fragmentation of identity, and contribute to the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions, as the Communist Manifesto wishes.  The word has had its meaning extended to include religion, specifically Islam, in a facile and deliberate attempt to render Islam part of Western culture by denying its unquestionable and irreversible out-group identity.

Changes to immigration policy have increased diversity without consideration of consequence.  It is a social experiment without a plan.  Instead of bringing in groups which in large numbers are known to assimilate, and in smaller numbers those who are known to have difficulty assimilating and to have them distributed broadly across the country, we now have a situation where large numbers of the latter group can aggregate and alienate local populations.  The policy of cluster limits, nominally 1:200, is a concern of the United Kingdom government in support of community cohesion, but New Zealand seems to have ignored the concept.  Failings in this regard can be seen in Hamtramck, The United States’ first Muslim majority city, and in the many hundreds of ‘sensitive zones’ in Europe.

Given that the natural status of all humans is conservative, and resistant to rapid change which can inhibit child-raising, stable employment and planning, such disruption has negative results which can be seen in the meteoric rise of populism.