March 29, 2019
Kiwi Carnage
The Christchurch terror attack put a remote, isolated country on the global center stage. The Kiwi carnage (“Kiwi” being a nickname for New Zealanders, after its indigenous flightless bird) carries widespread reverberations.
During the mid-1980’s, my wife and I were in New Zealand, driving and exploring it from Dunedin, at the tip of its South Island, to the Bay of Islands, at the tip of its North Island. New Zealand was scenic, serene, uncrowded and, to cite Thomas Hardy, “far from the madding crowd.” But not anymore. Unimaginable now to think that the killer resided in the quiet Scottish-aura university town of Dunedin – the world’s southernmost cricket ground.
Then, we found just one mosque in Auckland. Muslims in New Zealand were nowhere to be seen. Now, New Zealand has its own Muslim Test cricketer, in Ajaz Patel – the hero of its improbable win over Pakistan in the Emirates four months back.
New Zealand’s economy is organically tied with the Mideast, in that much of its lamb and dairy are exported there. Its abattoirs have halal facilities.
Daydreaming Americans often fantasize shifting to New Zealand as an ultimate escape from the worries of the world. But the transnational contagiousness of hate has encroached New Zealand soil via the viral reach of social media and satellite TV.
New Zealand has been an unusually progressive country, often punching above its weight. During the time I was there, its then Prime Minister David Lange, took a firm stance against US nuclear posture in the South Pacific, despite New Zealand’s military alliance with US and Australia, fraying the 1951 ANZUS security treaty among the three nations.
The Kiwis’ first massive exposure to Muslims came through its catastrophic involvement 100 years ago in the battle of Gallipoli against Mustapha Kamal Pasha-led Turkish troops. April 25 is commemorated and mourned all over New Zealand and Australia as ANZAC Day.
It was striking to see in Auckland a main thoroughfare named Khyber Pass Road. Then, too, almost 30 years before Stanley Wolpert’s 1982 acclaimed biography “Jinnah of Pakistan,” New Zealand author Hector Bolitho wrote the first biography of the Quaid, “Jinnah, Creator of Pakistan.”
Already, the viral force of hate has infected Australia, which is a fertile ground for Islamophobia. That the attacker was Australian, incited by actions and utterances in the US, was no accident.
It has been distasteful to see how media and legislators on Capitol Hill pounced upon two freshly inducted Muslim congresswomen with refugee roots in Somalia and Palestine, merely for speaking their minds. In welcome contrast has been the exemplary leadership of New Zealand Prime Minister JacindaArdern in the aftermath of the Christchurch atrocity.
In his hate manifesto, the Aussie killer approvingly cited Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity.” Complicit too are those who create a climate of hatred. It also puts social media under renewed scrutiny, with its instantaneous spread of incendiary information.
This Western generation, with no memory of the scourge of fascism that devastated Europe, can deny neo-fascism only at its own peril. “Towards a New Society” was the caption given by the Christchurch killer in his hate manifesto. Hate eats its own creators. Beware of the boomerang.
---------------------------------------------------------------
