by Christopher Ruthe

This was written as a riposte to an article in The NZ Listener — but it refused to publish it.

The Jew-hating Mr Foon

The Latest Myth[1] The Race Relations Commissioner decreed in your magazine, twice, that the British colonialisation of New Zealand was a holocaust[2]. Meng Foon categorically stated that he was comfortable with equating the NZ Maori experience with the holocaust. Asked “are you comfortable with that?” he said, “Yeah.” He went on to double down on that. (Listener 12-12-2020 p.34)

I write on behalf of my Jewish ancestors. Why does NZ’s leading race relations/human rights ‘expert’ dismiss the Holocaust as nothing worse than British colonialization? By denigrating the Holocaust as nothing more than British colonialism ‘writ large’ Commissioner Foon simply resonates with implicit anti Semitism: “Those fucking Jews, they were treated no worse than Maori!”

The word Holocaust describes the specific Nazi policy — the extermination of a race. This happened in NZ?  According to Mr Foon it did. He has created a new anti-semitic myth, “Jews as exaggerators”. His reinterpretation of history will now be on the record for future generations of New Zealanders.  The holocaust is merely British colonization.

So, I dare speak on behalf of relatives and the 6 million Jews (along with homosexuals, Roma, the mentally disabled, etc.) who were exterminated in the greatest outrage in human history. Their memory is excoriated[3] by the NZ Race Relations Commissioner.

Why did the Race Relations Commissioner, a supposed expert in what words are inappropriate and amount to being hate speech and being racially biased write something totally offensive to Jews?  And those who had their families exterminated? Too insignificant, it would appear, compared to the political demands. He agrees with a rewriting of history. He is obviously of the view there was ethnic cleansing in NZ, without a shred of evidence to support such a disturbing claim. And your magazine was happy to broadcast this perception without any chance to try and clarify what really happened in the Holocaust.

[1] “The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive and repeated.” John F. Kennedy

[2] Holocaust has a specific meaning. It does not refer to ‘progroms’ or other types of “ethnic cleansing”, all of which are reprehensible.

This is a short synopsis of the origin and derivation of the word. “Holocaust”. If your magazine wants further elucidation on this matter please get back to me.

“Human history has few tragedies that rival the magnitude and moral bankruptcy of the Holocaust, the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. 

 In Berlin on January 20, 1942, Hitler held a conference, noting no country wanted to accept Jews. The  mass murder was the “final solution” to the so-called Jewish question. The deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race was given a name, “genocide,”. 

 How did this most infamous of genocides become known as the Holocaust?

The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. This word was chosen because in the ultimate manifestation of the Nazi killing program—the extermination  camps—the bodies of the victims were consumed whole in crematoria and open fires.”

[3] If you excoriate someone, you let that person know that you really, really disagree with them. This verb goes beyond mere criticism; it implies anger, a harsh and insulting tone, and even a scathing attack.

It would be ironic if Mr Foon, appointed by Andrew Little in July 2019, is the first person charged under his and Jacinda’s intended hate speech laws. —Eds