Magnifying_GlassLast Sunday night, TV3 a.k.a. Newshub began its 6 pm TV news bulletin with a 7-minute piece by reporter Patrick Gower on the alleged threat from those who promote people from white/European/Caucasian bloodlines and don’t have a liking for certain other races.

The next two nights continued in similar fashion.

The total seems to run to 20 min 30 seconds, but you need to watch the segments separately:

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

With all the melodrama that rival TV One News manages to muster, and then some, the essence of parts 1 and 3 is that these racists — which they are by definition — are a huge threat to those they don’t like: from what is presented, primarily Muslims, then Jews.

It needs to be mentioned here that Islam is a religion only, not a race, while Judaism is both a religion and a race, but not all ethnic Jews are religious Jews, in fact quite a few are not and are either atheists, agnostics or adhere to some other religion.  Patrick Gower does not clarify that. Most of the predominately Muslim countries are in North Africa, some of sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia.

It also should be mentioned, as Mr Gower doesn’t, that among today’s crop of right wing groups there is plenty of support for Jews and Israel.  Anti-Jewish sentiment is rife among left wing groups on the other hand and the British Labour Party, for example, is full of anti-Semites — including the present leader, Jeremy Corbyn, an extremely unpleasant individual (but no doubt is adored by PM Jacinda.)

We need to ignore the melodrama of Gower’s presentation, and examine the facts (or alleged facts).

He looks exclusively in segment 1 at Phil Arps of Christchurch, an unabashed admirer of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis, but unlike the Nazis, does not like Muslims.  During World War II the Nazis actually recruited Muslims in the Balkans after they invaded in 1941 and formed them into an SS Division named Handschar. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was an open Nazi and met with Adolf Hitler.  Mr Gower doesn’t mention that, either.

In 2016, Arps and a buddy, who isn’t identified, delivered a box containing a severed pig’s head to the main Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch.  A third person obviously filmed them with a camera phone.

“White power,” Arps can be heard saying in the video. “Don’t go to a mosque often. Like I said, it should be molotovs.”  Says Mr Gower: “in Islam, pork is considered unclean and eating it is prohibited.”  In fact not only pork, but bacon and ham.  In that, Muslims have a commonality with Jews.

In another video, after his failed appeal against an offensive behaviour conviction for the above, Arps refers to Muslims and says: “Bring on the cull! Get the f***ers out. The rules are changing. White power. White f***in’ power. White power. F***in’ oi.”

But, “there is no direct link with the alleged gunman.”  So although Mr Arps and his buddies have held these attitudes for quite some time, and have made statements about what they would like to see done to Muslims — deportation in the video and, in his comments on a chatroom apparently in January 2018, shooting — they don’t appear to have done anything else, and crucially they have not directly threatened the Muslims with violence.

It’s very easy to find on the web records of equivalent statements made by Muslim extremists about those who insult their religion, where they call for beheading, ISIS-Saudi style.  Mr Gower says nothing about that; neither do hard left wingers like Jacinda and Andrew Little.

So has it been all bluster on the part of Mr Arps and his (two?) buddies? It seems so. And that’s not particularly surprising — they knew where the line is and clearly didn’t want to be convicted of anything more serious — until immediately after the March 2019 massacre when Arps distributed (presumably two or more) copies of the Facebook-streamed live video of the gunman in action and, it’s claimed, asked someone to add crosshairs and a progressive kill count.  It’s not stated if that was actually done.  In this Mr Arps was putting emotion before logic, just like Jacinda.

Mr Arps has been in custody since his arrest and the judge has ruled out home detention, he will have a jail sentence on top of what he has served so far.

Police have revealed that Arps is one of 13 people nationwide who have been arrested for sharing the video.  Only 13?  Yes.

And we’re told that there are 200+ more in NZ who allegedly have or are linked to “extreme pro-white views…and from what we’ve seen that is just a fraction”  It’s not stated what makes these views “extreme”, nor how big that “fraction” is of the total.

That’s the end of segment 1.

Segment 2 is about three “suspicious European visitors” to the Al Noor mosque, and the imam suggests that Tarrant “had help with planning.”  However, Tarrant himself said in his manifesto that he was not part of a group and even the Police agree that he acted alone.  Says Gower: “The mosque was full of worshippers when the gunman stormed in.” Actually it wasn’t: an estimate from those who have seen the video say that it appeared it had only 100-120 attendees and was far from full.

In late 2017 two “Europeans” visited the mosque and were so rude to worshippers that they were told to go. The imam says they said, “we are Muslims too and you are not Muslims and why do you come to our country?”  But the imam feared that they were pakehas radicalised by Islamic State and were reported to the Police.  The latter didn’t think it was serious.

Then we are told that there was a young radicalised Muslim who was planning an attack in Christchurch, but the imam worked with Police to “re-educate him” and during that raised concerns about mosque security. “They assured us everything is safe.”

Finally there was “another concerning visitor” not Tarrant, 3 weeks before the massacre.  “The man said he wanted to learn about Islam,” but the imam could tell he wasn’t really interested as he was looking around with his eyes. “When I asked him for his name he said ‘you can call me any name you want’. I said yes I can call you any name I want but I want your real name. He said ‘you can call me David.'”

Gower says the imam believes the man had bad intentions.  Well, possibly, but it’s also possible that he was a government spy wanting to see if there were pictures of Osama bin Laden or Al Bagdadi on the walls.

That is pretty much the end of anything notable that Gower has to say in segment 2.

Segment 3 begins with comments in an online chatroom made about Green MP Golriz Ghahraman.

“What a smart mouthed Hua [abbreviation of upokokōhua —Eds].”

“I know. It’s just nice to put them in one basket. Plus I don’t have a rayciss (sic) word for Iranians anyway lol.”

Then they start joking about hanging her like a lynch mob:

“Get the rope lol.”

“She’ll make a fantastic chandelier.”

“I need a new lamp.”

It ends with:

“I can’t wait to see her on the streets.”

Well, there are plenty of political protests in the world that show effigies of politicians being hanged or burned, Mr Gower — is this such a big deal?  Gower then says: “there is much worse than this that we have decided not to use.”  Ah, how do we know that “it was much worse” if we’re not told what it is?  One would expect that to support your stance in all this that you would report it, Mr Gower.

Then the piece turns to American users of the website 8chan :-

“Newshub saw content posted by an American user boasting about getting a visit from the FBI.

“The reason for the visit: he posted to social media about the Christchurch attacks.

“[Tarrant] has already inspired a copycat. The shooting of Jews at a synagogue in San Diego in April that left one dead was allegedly carried out by an 8Chan user, 19-year-old John Earnest.” One?  Bad in itself, of course, but hardly comparable to what Tarrant did.

Next, Gower introduces Ben Elley, “an expert on the far right online; he says many people find it exciting to be radicalised.

“It’s an exciting world view to take on, it’s a bit scary but it’s heroic from their perspective,” he told Newshub.

‘Much of the messaging on 8Chan is based around memes or internet jokes with a sinister edge.’

‘Newshub found New Zealand-based content that showed a fake ‘tourist map’ of the Christchurch shooting. It called the alleged gunman a “saint” and signed off as being from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It even had the “100% Pure” tourism logo. ‘

OK, not nice, tasteless, but hardly seditious.

Finally, we get a little bit of real insight:

Elley says plenty of Kiwis indulge in hate speech online, and teenagers are particularly attracted to the far right.

But 8Chan users are difficult to trace and banning such sites won’t work. Firstly, users are tech-savvy and will access them anyway.

But more importantly, we run the risk of making it a lot more exciting.

“It’s already a place where people go for transgressive humour, and by banning it we’re only making it more appealing in a lot of ways,” Elley says.

The thing that matters, though, is this a precursor to them actually doing anything?  From the evidence that is available, in nearly all cases, no.  Nearly all terrorist attacks are carried out by Muslims, who think by dying in a suicide bombing their god will reward them with 72 virgins in paradise.  These racists, on the other hand, don’t have such notions and probably don’t want to end up being killed, or serving long jail sentences.

The end of anything notable in segment 3.

Comment from right wing politics specialist Kerry Bolton PhD (who says he is pro-Arab, pro-Muslim):

The tragedy of the Christchurch mosque shootings has been cynically used to advance political agendas and aggrandise egos. The most apparent agenda is to introduce legislation banning so-called ‘hate speech’ as a means of suppressing opinions contrary to liberal and globalist aims. We have already seen for 50 years how the race relations and human rights legislation has been implemented in a thoroughly biased manner. The other major agenda is to suppress illiberal opinions on social media, under the guise of suppressing ‘extremism’.

In fact, social media has long suppressed opinions that do not coincide with what is commonly referred to as political correctness, and it simply requires a complaint from some supposedly offended good citizen to have material suppressed without explanation or appeal. Facebook accounts have been closed, PayPal accounts terminated, books purged from retailer Amazon.

The TV series by Patrick Gower supposedly exposing ‘white supremacy’ on social media in New Zealand was presumably intended to assist in laying the groundwork for suppressing debate on such issues as the U.N. Global Compact on Migration, and other policies based around liberal and globalist dogma. Another aim would have been to reinforce the collective guilt complex imposed on those of European descent.

One might also ask whether Mr. Gower is trying to mitigate the fool he made of himself, due to his arrogance, in attempting to ‘expose’ Lauren Southern and Stephen Molyneux. Indeed Mr. Gower, has alluded to his humiliating performance.

Mr. Gower has failed to present the existence of any threat posed by ‘white supremacists’ in New Zealand. In this he is joined by Stuff and other media outlets who have sought out and failed to find such a threat, despite the efforts of several supposed ‘academic experts’, at least one of whom has made a career out of such scaremongering.  

The only tangible example has been the Dominion Movement, a youth group that undertook hiking, camping, tramping, boxing, and posted well-researched articles on New Zealand history. Police have sought them out on the basis of nothing at all, because police have been given a blacklist in a pointless exercise in attempting to find local connections with Tarrant. It is possibly this same police list, leaked to the media, which might have found its way into the possession of an Extreme Left group, obligingly promoted on The Project, as though it is a laudable community organisation.  If this is the case, the police should be held accountable, especially given the highly emotive atmosphere that has been maintained by the media.

In this media generated witch-hunt the words ‘white supremacist’, ‘Identitarianism’, ‘neo-Nazism’, ‘Fascism’, ‘alt-Right’, ‘far Right’, ‘extreme Right’ and ‘New Right’, have all been conflated into a vast and violent conspiracy. At no time has there been any effort to define the terms; and New Zealand academics are no less useless at any such chore as any hack journalist.

‘Right-wing’ is carelessly used to describe Don Brash, the National Party, ACT, skinheads, the National Front, Winston Peters,  libertarians, the KKK. Could it also be used to describe the Dalai Lama when he said ‘Europe is for the Europeans’? Perhaps he is a skinhead? The association of the ‘Right’ with Nazism and white supremacy is as tenuous as associating the Labour Party with the Khmer Rouge. Where academics are confounded, one might, however, readily define the ‘Right’ by reading the poems of W. B. Yeats, rather than the treatises of either Hitler, Tarrant, or Adam Smith.

That Tarrant did not have associations with any New Zealand groups or individuals is indicated by the banality of Mr Gower’s efforts. Moreover, if he had, it is quite certain that someone would have ‘spilled the beans’ on him by trying to big-name himself on social media. But Mr. Gower found nothing tangible, and nor have the police.  

Some posturing fool delivering a pig’s head to a mosque amounts to zilch, and there were already laws to deal with him, without redefining ‘free speech’ Orwellian style. That Islamophobia exists owes more to the well-funded and influential network of mostly U.S.-based neocons, who have no ideological or historical association with the ‘Right’. One might ask whether Mr. Gower and the police will expand their inquiries to include those in the NZ First Party, or Ian Wishart, editor of Investigate, who have been referring to ‘jihadists in the neighbourhood’ type scenarios with far more influence and for far longer than any handful of ‘white power’ miscreants.  But then, easy scapegoats are required.