Speaking Truth to Media

The Dominion Post recently published an opinion piece Free speech pairs with fairness by its former editor, Tim Pankhurst (26 May 2015).  It filled in a few interesting details about local events at the time of the Danish Muhammad cartoons, but otherwise was an anodyne piece offering guarded support for freedom of speech balanced by the fear of disturbing the fragile sensibilities of Muslims.  There were a few indiscretions – he thinks “God” and “Allah” are the same notwithstanding their major theologically different identities, he has no idea about the substance of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, and he says “Islam in its purest form is a peaceful religion . . . ”  In terms of moving the debate forward it achieved nothing, indeed, retarding it by minimising the dangers faced by the West.

Given that Pankhurst trotted out the familiar “do not disturb” colloquy, I chose just one feature of his commentary in a letter I wrote to the Dominion Post:

Tim Pankhurst (Free speech pairs with fairness, May 26) is quite wrong when he alleges “Islam in its purest form is a peaceful religion.”  Islam is a religion that demands submission.  Peace will only be achieved when the entire world submits to the will of Allah and is ruled by sharia law.  Anything other than that occupies dar al-Harb, the territory of war, which permits precisely what has occurred in the Islamic caliphate and the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

I’ve noticed that if I mention Islamic doctrine in a letter, the Dominion Post declines to print it.  But the Dominion Post did print two letters from other correspondents, one simply supporting free speech and quoting Voltaire, and another from a Muslim suggesting “freedom of expression is not absolute” and that Muslims are more against “slander and abuse” in a statement of incipient grievance-mongering.

All three missed the point about Muslims’ antagonism to the West’s concept of freedom of expression.

On that basis I wrote another letter:

Tim Pankhurst (Opinion May 26) and his corresponding acolyte Michael Poole (Letters May 28), and eristic, Fawzan Hafiz (Letters May 29), need to realise that attacks on cartoonists aren’t a simple matter of attacks on freedom of speech.  Their primary purpose is to prevent any criticism of Islam, under threat of death.  This is what has stopped Islam’s reform for 1,400 years and why it has not progressed morally since.

Of my letters to the Dominion Post, only those showing minor personal opinion are printed.  Those that used accurate and verifiable concepts such as terror and lure (tarhib wal targhib), dissembling or concealment (tawriya), or the ‘oneness’ of Allah and its sole representation through fundamentalist Islam (tawhid), were not printed.

The Dominion Post publishes news of the most horrendous acts of Islamic violence, but fails to print anything which states clearly the reasons behind them. 

Islamic Appeasement by Papal Proxy

Can Pope Francis prevent a holy war? asks Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Garry Wills in an opinion piece in the March 10 Dominion Post.  Wills’ exercise in Islamic appeasement by papal proxy neglects to point out that Pope Francis’ outreach to the Muslim world was met with increasing rates of Christian slaughter, rape, forced conversion, slavery, discrimination and expulsion. The pope should take a lesson from Egypt's President el-Sisi. His heroic call for Islam’s reformation at Al-Azhar University could be a lot more effective than the pope’s, for the simple reason that he has, to paraphrase Stalin, more divisions.

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.

Interment and Eternity

James Takamore, a Tuhoe Maori from the eastern Bay of Plenty, began a relationship with pakeha Denise Clarke.  They moved to Christchurch where they lived for 20 years, had two children and he died in 2007.  His partner had him buried near their home, as he wished.  His Tuhoe relatives had different ideas, and in a distasteful act exhumed his body at night without permission and took it back to Kutarere, near Opotiki, and reburied him there.  Ms Clarke won a court judgment to have his body officially exhumed and returned to the original burial plot on 9^th August 2014.  Kutarere Maoris refused to permit the official exhumation under threat of violence so the issue was sent back to the sheriff of the High Court in Christchurch to decide the next step.

There are two topics of interest here.  The first thing to consider is the arrogance of this particular tribe of Maoris, which may well be shared by other Maoris and other tribes.  It is quite proper to consider that a tribal member should be buried in the tribe’s location, but this cannot exist as an inviolable decree that overrides the subject’s wishes or those of his nearest family.  Nor should a tribe’s demands be enforced by threats of violence, a resort to barbarism.   There is no reason to consider that one culture has greater rights over its mores over another’s.  The failure to reach an agreement with Mr Takamore’s family demonstrates the tribe’s contemptuous disrespect for other cultures and their action of body-snatching a cavalier disregard for the dignity of the deceased.

The second item concerns the capitulation of the police in enforcing the law.  This dishonourable back-down will be seen as a victory by the tribe, notwithstanding their criminal and morally repugnant actions.  Even worse, the police accepted defeat with no actions taken against the tribe for their refusal to cooperate with New Zealand’s legal system.  It will be seen by Maoris that the threat of violence is a viable and successful form of enforcing illegal activity. 

It has to be noted, however, that the legal case may have some distance to go before a permanent resolution is reached.

I suppressed my moral outrage and wrote the following letter to the Dominion Post on the 10^th of August 2014:

“A more agreeable resolution than the Judgment of Solomon on the late James Takamore would be to assign the body to his partner and children for the duration of their lives, or less if volunteered. It can then be re-interred beside his father for eternity. 

“This will allow Maoritanga to demonstrate the enduring nature of whakapapa over genealogy, and both sides will gain moral stature from a willingness to negotiate on cultural difference.  Failure to co-operate would demonstrate ethnic arrogance and crush the magnanimity of compromise.

“It need not come to that.”

It does the Dominion Post no credit that they did not publish this, and no other suggestions on a resolution have come to my attention.