"Sit Down, and Shut Up"
The radical Left wants free speech for itself to be maintained at all costs. It also wants free speech to be denied every other occupant of the public square.
Karl Du Fresne, a serious journalist, has written a piece which hoists upon the proverbial petard some of our worst agitators against free speech. He is reflecting upon the behaviour of the "sit down, and shut up" brigade in the aftermath of the Christchurch shootings.
PERHAPS all . . . can be forgiven as a collective rush of blood to the head, brought about by the shock of the appalling events of March 15. But far less excusable is the manner in which prominent people, many of them on the public payroll, exploited the deaths of 50 innocent people to further an ideological agenda.
By this I mean people like the Green MPs Golruz Ghahraman and Marama Davidson. In Parliament, Ghahraman blamed unnamed fellow MPs and breakfast radio “shock jocks” – presumably meaning NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking – for the “hate speech” that she claims led to the killings. (Hosking, incidentally, is another bête-noire of the Left, and for the same reason as Jordan Peterson: his daily commentaries connect with a large number of New Zealanders who are not racist or xenophobic and reject extremist ideology of both the Right and Left.)
Ghahraman, a highly accomplished self-publicist, was in such a rush to apportion blame that she wasn’t prepared to wait before making a considered response based on facts and evidence rather than supposition, assumption and prejudice. And why should she, when it was so much easier to make sweeping, unsubstantiated and emotive assertions about the killings being caused by “hate speech” (undefined), “white supremacy” and “gratuitous racism”?
She didn’t even have the decency to wait until all the victims’ bodies had been released to their grieving families for burial. The blame game took priority. Davidson, meanwhile, took advantage of a vigil in honour of the shooting victims to unleash a barrage of denunciation. “New Zealand was founded on the theft of land, language and identity of indigenous people,” she was reported as saying. “This land we are standing on is land we were violently removed from to uphold the same agenda that killed the people in the mosques yesterday.”
This was not about honouring or mourning the dead. It was about finding someone to blame and settling old ideological scores. It stood in jarring contrast to the tone set by the Muslim community of Christchurch, which was all about reconciliation, forgiveness and unity. No recrimination, no anger, no fulminating about Islamophobia or white supremacy; just shock and sadness that this terrible thing had happened in a country they thought of as inclusive and welcoming. And which remains inclusive and welcoming, because the depredations of a single terrorist (an Australian, we shouldn’t forget) doesn’t change who we are.
I find people like Ghahraman and Davidson almost as frightening as terrorists. They don’t kill anyone, but their power to change society is greater. They use the institutions of a liberal democracy to whittle away at the open society. They are, in their way, as totalitarian and intolerant of difference as any gun-toting fascist or jihadist. They virtuously embrace ethnic and religious difference (except when it comes to Christianity, which is seen as part of the white power structure) but are aggressively intolerant of political difference and free speech.
It was no surprise to read that some attendees left an Auckland vigil early, apparently upset at a series of speeches attacking colonialism, white supremacy and white terrorism. One disillusioned early leaver was quoted as saying they wanted the vigil to be more focused on the victims; another said that while she understood the need for a conversation about racism and white supremacy, she felt that a week after the attacks was too soon.
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