A New Zealand Labour MP is actively promoting the discriminatory BDS campaign against Israel. Dr Duncan Webb has recently tweeted that “[BDS]… is a concrete way to express a political view…”
NZ MP promoting BDS | J-Wire
New Zealand needs to learn from Israel’s MMP disaster | NZ Herald
It’s always good to look at others and potentially learn.
What I have learned out of the Israeli election is their threshold is too low. They run a system like ours. We are looking to adjust our threshold down. This is a mistake.
I thought it was a mistake before I looked at Israel. Having looked at Israel, I am even more convinced it’s a mistake. Israel’s threshold is 3.25 per cent.
They have 10 parties that cross it. The two main parties barely get half of what they need by way of seats to win government.
Compare that to our last result: the Nats got 56, just short of the 61. Labour got 46. Short (you could argue too short) given they needed two parties to prop them up.
But nowhere near as short as say the Likud party with about 33. Being that short requires a lot of deals with a lot of small parties to get you across the line. The more parties, the more deals, the more reasons to have it fall apart.
Our example, our current government, has held together well. Whatever differences there have been, have been kept behind closed doors.
There has been the odd sense that things might be tense, and Lord knows what has been hashed out with the capital gain tax, but at some point New Zealand First, for example, are going to have to distance themselves from Labour. Otherwise, they’re going to get swallowed up.
But imagine if this lot was made up of six parties? And they weren’t all compliant and they weren’t all mates? And that’s what you get in Israel.
And it’s what you get with low thresholds – the sort of thresholds Labour want to implement here. They want 4 per cent.
Now back to Israel: what do we learn from them? Well not just that 3.25 per cent is too low and it produces too many parties and too many multi-party deals. But, and this is the critical part, the 3.25 per cent is the latest move up. They’re increasing the threshold.
From 1949-1992 it was 1 per cent. From 1992-2003 it was 1.5 per cent. From 2003-2014 it was 2 per cent. From 2014: 3.25 per cent.
Now why do you think they’ve done that? And why have they done it with increasing regularity? Because a low threshold is dangerous, the lower it is, the more nutters get to cross the line.
Even at 5 per cent, all we require of a party is to find five people out of 100 to back an idea or a concept – 95 people can think you’re mad, and still you can get to run the country.
Quality is critical in any government, in terms of experience and discipline and professionalism and some form of representation of the wider populace. If you’re allowing any form of radicalism or craziness or minority extremism in through a low bar, you will pay the price.
Israel clearly did, and they’re fixing it. How can we look at that example and still want to lower the bar and move towards what they’re busy rejecting?
Anne Frank’s Diary translated into te reo Māori | Stuff
ROBERT KITCHIN/STUFF
Boyd Klap has led the project to have Anne Frank’s diary translated into te reo Māori. Te Rātaka a Tētahi Kōhine will be published in June 2019.
Parihaka felt like the right place to speak about discrimination.
That’s what Dutch businessman Boyd Klap reckoned.
His visit in 2017 to the settlement that symbolises peaceful resistance was to talk about Māori involvement in the Anne Frank travelling exhibition, to show the parallels between discrimination during the war and what Māori faced in colonisation.
At question time during that Parihaka visit after his talk at a marae there one woman asked if Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl had ever been translated into te reo Māori.
The story of Anne and her family, who were hidden in an annexed apartment in Amsterdam by non-Jewish friends for three years during the Nazi occupation of Holland during World War II, has been translated into more than 70 languages and published in 60 countries.
So began his next project for the diary which has been the subject of two exhibitions, both accompanied by a focus on discrimination in the modern world.
Max Christoffersen’s widow shocked to find Stuff columnist’s words twisted into Nazi rant | Stuff
The grieving widow of a Stuff columnist whose work was stolen by a blogger and twisted into a Nazi-themed rant under his name is shocked its web host fobbed off her requests to remove it in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque shootings.
The mens rights blogger had copied an entire column Max Christoffersen wrote in December on male violence against women, but replaced the words ‘men’ with ‘jew’ and ‘woman’ with ‘aryan’.
The column was one of dozens of legitimate news stories and opinion pieces from reputable sources altered in an apparently twisted attempt at irony by switching out the portrayal of gender issues with Nazi-themed anti-semitic language. Stuff has chosen not to name the blog.
Otago dealer to continue to sell Nazi memorabilia | NZ Herald
An Otago second-hand dealer is defending his range of Nazi memorabilia and says he has sold several swastika badges since the Christchurch attacks.
The New Zealand Jewish Council said while it recognises the legal right of people to profit from Nazi memorabilia, it hopes they appreciate the suffering seeing such items causes vulnerable communities.
Trash Converters owner and manager Barry White sells a wide range of Nazi memorabilia at his Palmerston store.
He said it was mostly imitation, including swastika badges and armbands, plus Waffen SS insignia.
He also offers military memorabilia from a host of other countries, including Allied forces, though toys are his biggest seller.
Among his most popular Nazi items were lapel badges bearing a swastika.
Three of the badges had been sold since the Christchurch terror attacks, he said.
In the same cabinet as the badges was a large red coffin sash, again bearing a swastika.
Also available for purchase was the Skull and Crossbones insignia of the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf, or the “Death’s Head” division.
It was responsible for several war crimes, including the mass execution of Jews in Poland, and the Le Paradis massacre, where they machine-gunned 97 British troops captured during a retreat.
Jews outraged after mosque leader blames Mossad for Christchurch attack | Newshub
New Zealand’s Jewish community is outraged and revolted after a prominent mosque leader blamed Mossad for being behind the Christchurch terror attack.
On Saturday, a group called Love Aotearoa Hate Racism organised a rally for the victims in Auckland’s Aotea Square.
Ahmed Bhamji, chairman of the Mt Roskill Masjid E Umar, gave a speech questioning where the gunman got his funding from. He said he suspected it came from “Mossad” and “Zionist business”.
Former mayor of Wellington Ian Lawrence dies | Stuff
Former Mayor of Wellington Ian Lawrence has died at the age of 82.
Lawrence died on Friday in Jerusalem, where he has been living for about five years since being diagnosed with bowel cancer.
Lawrence won the Wellington mayoralty in 1983 and served a single term before losing on the back of Sir James Belich’s campaign to end the practice of discharging raw sewage into the sea along the south coast.
Prior to becoming mayor, he served as a Wellington City Councillor for 12 years, working as Michael Fowler’s deputy from 1974 to 1983. He worked closely with mayor Sir Michael Fowler, and was considered by many as a ‘driving force’ behind building what would become the Michael Fowler Centre.
My father, the Kiwi fascist: How one son’s childhood was ruined | Stuff
Since his death, the physical remnants of my father’s mania have been kept in several plastic storage boxes marked “Family”.
The boxes are cracked and crazed, and some of the documents inside are so old they fall apart when touched. But I know what’s in there pretty well by heart. It was ingrained into my brother and me from childhood, like a slow-release poison, until we were old enough to run away.
For decades after that, I thought running away was the same as escaping. In recent years, though, there have been times – triggered by some memory or association – when the poison wells up anew and I imagine my father’s commanding tones delivering snatches of the terrible stuff he tried to make us believe in.
The most intense of these experiences occurred just a few months ago, while I was looking at photographs of Nazi war atrocities in a Berlin museum.
In one picture, a Jewish woman and her son are being dragged from their home by Gestapo thugs. The son, about 10, is straining against the meaty hand gripping his arm, his thin face captured in the moment when defiance succumbs to fear. It’s far from the worst scene on display, yet something about the frightened boy – perhaps a passing resemblance to my brother at that age – won’t let me move on.
Morally bankrupt | J-Wire
A definition of this malady states: “moral bankruptcy is the stage a country or organization reaches when it trades away or violates too many of its core values and commitments.”
When I read this explanation I knew instinctively that here was a perfect description of exactly where the United Nations and many of its members now find themselves. As far as those countries for which democratic values and protection of human rights are unknown concepts, we can forget about any sort of moral conscience when it comes to voting against Israel.
However, in the case of New Zealand which voted in 1947 for the re-establishment of a Jewish State in British mandated Palestine it has been all downhill since then.
The last few weeks have witnessed yet another example of the moral decline of what was once intended to be a beacon of peace and freedom. Reconstituted from the ashes of a world war and failure of the League of Nations in preventing terror states from bullying their neighbours the post-war UN was intended to be everything its predecessor had not been. For a few short years, hope flickered and then gradually the slide into moral bankruptcy began. If democracies had acted at the beginning we would not now be faced with a body which has been taken over by political opportunists and morally degenerate members. Just as the democratic nations pre-war refused to stand up to their obligations and thus helped plunge the world into a catastrophic Holocaust so today’s supposed torchbearers of human rights have shamefacedly surrendered to the purveyors of slanders, lies and hate.
One would have thought that New Zealand might have been in the vanguard of those standing up for decency and truth. However, when it came to the crunch and Israel found itself the target of continual condemnatory resolutions New Zealand either voted with the immoral majority or abstained. Despite the obvious bias and unbalanced obsession against Israel at the UN on far too many occasions NZ has, by its voting record, joined those for whom Israel can never do anything right. This pattern of benign neglect is in stark contrast to Australia which to its credit has taken every opportunity in speaking out about the hypocritical double standards and voted accordingly.
