Tag Archives: Racism

Paul Henry – apology not good enough, suspended, and great for publicity

Posted on by Brad Heap

Firstly this from the Race Relations Commissioner (via NZ Herald)

“Television New Zealand probably has some responsibilities as a public broadcaster.”

Mr de Bres said Henry often said things to challenge or shock people “but this one was off the planet”.

“What he was saying was that if you were an Indian New Zealander and you were born here, you went to school here, you went to university here, you practised law here, you became a judge, you became an ombudsman and you became a Governor-General, that a key presenter on national television still thinks you don’t look like or sound like a New Zealander.”

This is the best summary of just how offensive Henry’s comments are.

Now TVNZ has suspended him for two weeks but that is still not good enough. He needs to be fired. Blogs from the right, left and centre are saying he needs to go. This isn’t a PC vs not-PC battle this is a battle that strikes right at the heart of what it means to be a NZder we are not just all white! And if you have that mindset you are living in the wrong century and the wrong country.

Danyl at the Dim Post comments:

The story led the MSM news websites all day but has yet to be covered by TVNZ News. How professional. TVNZ’s self-censorship is a perfect illustration of why being the state broadcaster is incompatible with using offensive and controversial material to boost your ratings.

Danyl also mentions his own blog stats from yesterday:

Busiest day ever on the blog yesterday with 9,464 visitors. Average for a weekday is 4,500 which goes up to around 6,000 if I find the time to write something original or amusing, which isn’t very often these days. If I advertised I’d be rich!

My visits were also about double normal rates and my busiest day since April when I blogged on the new version of Ubuntu Linux… although my numbers are only about 1.5% of Danyl’s numbers.

Why do we keep a racist on Government TV?

Posted on by Brad Heap

Until now I have been reluctant to dislike Paul Henry. When he is in his prime he is a damn good interviewer. However, he is far too much of a shock jock to continue on national TV. Particularly on Government funded TV.

His latest bout of stupidity is from this morning, while interviewing the Prime Minister about the appointment of a new Governor General he asked if the new GG would look and sound more like a New Zealander. Watch for yourself:

This was not a gaffe or a mistake this was a deliberate racist comment against a senior representative of New Zealand.

Only last week CNN sacked Rick Sanchez for anti-Jewish remarks against Jon Stewart. Yes a commercial TV station sacked a news anchor for radio comments against a comedian.

Yet here we have a government funded national broadcaster willing to keep on air someone who is racist in an interview with the Prime Minister. Disgusting.

How many nine lives has Paul Henry had now?

Update: Oh god, I missed this from last week:

Update 2: @nzben (Ben Gracewood) of www.ben.geek.nz fame has withdrawn from his regular gadget section on the show. Good on him for standing up on principal. His comments are here.

New Zealand should play no role in endorsing Australia’s racism

Posted on by Brad Heap

It is rather alarming that New Zealand Prime Minister, John Key is involved in discussions with the Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard over the processing of asylum seekers: (from the NZ Herald)

Ms Gillard said she had also spoken to New Zealand Prime Minister John Key about the possibility of a regional processing centre for asylum seekers.

“John said to me that he would be open to considering this initiative constructively,” she said.

“East Timor and New Zealand are vital countries in this initiative, as they are already signatories to the refugee convention.

“And New Zealand, like Australia, is a key resettlement country.”

Currently the two major political parties in Australia are locked in a battle of who is the biggest bigot and racist. This is not a game that New Zealand wants to join. New Zealand prides itself on its multiculturalism.

Declining asylum applications from people of Afghanistan and Sri Lanka just because they are from those two countries is racist segregation in its most simple form. For any New Zealand politician to support the immigration policies of a country that is happy to endorse racism is political suicide. Crosby|Textor may have done well with John Key so far but this is one push poll that they will lose.

Racism has no place in modern society

Posted on by Brad Heap

Over the last week and a bit racism has been a key theme in the Australian media after Andrew Johns called a league player a “black c***” followed a few days later by an AFL coach calling aboriginal players “cannibals”.

On Friday morning’s Sunrise TV show there was a discussion about racism and they gave the dictionary definition of racism as:

“The belief that each race has distinct and intrinsic attributes; The belief that one race is superior to all others”

Now I am not of the politically correct belief that any comments about any race is instantly racism. In fact I believe there are differences between races, these have developed as cultural differences in some cases genetic differences based on the local world in which people have lived over a long period of time (a good study of this is Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel). However, these differences do not make one race superior to another instead it makes us different, in exactly the same way that as humans we are all unique and special just like everyone else.

What is more interesting is looking at the excuses people make for making racist remarks. In the case of Andrew Johns his excuse was that he was merely rallying the troops with a pep talk. In the ARL case it was brushed aside as merely being an in-joke.

Closer to home someone I know wrote a blog post the other day in which they referred to “gweilous”. I have been around enough south east asian friends to recognise that as an extremely offensive racist comment towards “white people”, in fact Urban Dictionary* defines it as this:

Gweilo is Cantonese. It translates as ‘Ghost Man’ and is used to describe a Caucasian foreigner.
Although most of China is familiar with this word only Cantonese speakers use it as a derogative way of describing a white person.
It is considered highly offensive in Mandarin China and with some white people.

When I asked the author of the blog if they knew the meaning of that word they replied that they did and the reason why they had chosen to use it was because they were in a bad mood. That begs a question, is a bad mood a good enough excuse to use foul language? I think not.

There are always times when we lose our cool and say things that we regret at a later date but there are certain words that no matter how bad a mood you are in you are fully aware of the meaning of and there is simply no excuse for the use of.

In the case of Andrew Johns he lost two coaching jobs as a fall out from his comments, so far the ARL coach has kept their job, and the blog post was taken down – with me being accused of over analysing things.

Is taking offensive at racist comments an overreaction? Or should we take offence more often to stamp out racism?

*I know Urban Dictionary is not a real dictionary but it was the clearest, simplest and best definition I could find.

Racism, Irony, and the continuing Gaza controversy.

Posted on by Brad Heap

For the second week in a row Michael Laws has written a piece in the Sunday Star Times about Gaza, this time looking at the Kebab Shop owner who threw out two Israelis just because they were Jewish.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4822100a22678.html

Michael Laws: There’s no place for old hatreds in NZ

IF THERE IS one great virtue that our founding fathers gifted New Zealand it was the rejection of a state religion. And the eschewing of all the doctrinal disputes that plagued their old homeland.

This is not to suggest that there was not sectarian conflict in this new land because there was. Nor that God necessarily took a backseat in Godzone.

But they were minor influences compared to the Old Country. As a rule, the distance loosened their old religious prejudices. Faith gradually became a private affair, and was not allowed to intrude upon the daily business of policy-making.

The embodiment of this brilliance was the Education Act of 1877 delivering schooling that was compulsory, free and secular. The latter was crucial.

Sure, there were the extremists. Catholic Bishop Moran who established the separatist Catholic school system was one. So too, the Protestant Political Association of the 1920s with their anti-Papist activity. Even into the 1960s, the idea of a Catholic-Protestant marriage had its societal impediments.

So maybe we could be patient with the outflow of Muslim support for the moronic decision of Turkish cafe owner Mustafa Tekinkaya to refuse service to two Israeli sisters in Invercargill ostensibly because their country is at war with the fundamentalist Hamas organisation. Except that, in this case, tolerance would be weakness.

Because the nature of this culinary discrimination signalled that the immigration doors have admitted more than just different peoples from different lands these past two decades. They have also admitted age-old loathings and ancient animosities which have no place in this new land.

One might also think that Tekinkaya’s refusal was about the conflict in Gaza. It is not. This Turkish Muslim and his fellow kebab shop supporters must have disliked Israelis for a long, long time. You don’t suddenly expel Israelis from your shop because their government has done something you don’t like. Confronted with this country’s human rights legislation, Tekinkaya said that he did not care. Neither did his supporters, who phoned into my radio show last week. All were migrants, all self-identified as Muslims and all loathed Israel. They saw no problem with his actions whatsoever. The dreaded Jews were massacring their Palestinian brothers and sisters in Gaza; ipso facto, all Israelis are bad and must be refused even the most menial of service.

And this is the guts of this issue.

The Herald’s cartoon yesterday had a reversal of this situation, where by a Muslim was refused service because other Muslims are suicide bombers, and the next frame of the cartoon showed how nasty the reaction would be.

This is the same issue as John Minto’s protest the other day, targeting individuals is racism, it is not political protest.

Then let’s consider the women involved. Not Israeli tourists on some grave scouting expedition but one sister married to a Kiwi, with two children aged four and two, and her visiting sister from the home country.

Similarly, the discriminators: Kiwis. Turkish-Kiwis, but Kiwis. Resident in this country, and trying to raise both a business and a family in deepest, darkest Southland.

Meanwhile, Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres made all the right noises in declaiming the cafe owners’ actions but his next actions will be the more important. Formal complaints have been laid and a prima facie case established. Given his public utterances, there will be no possibility of a rapprochement between Mustafa and his Israeli clientele. So where next?

Dear lord, the racist cafe owner assembled every Turk and kebab seller within hailing distance in Southland all three of them to be photographed in support. These are not the actions of a contrite man. Unless the law falls on Mustafa from a great height and repeatedly nothing will permeate his thick Turkish skull.

Which is a shame. Because I rather like the Turks. Thoroughly decent at Gallipoli, and founder Ataturk’s words about our war dead was poetry and compassion combined. They’re desperate to be part of Europe rather than part of the Arab world, and equally desperate to resist the deadly embrace of Islamic fundamentalism. And they make lovely desserts.

And this is an important point to note, like Israel’s actions do not represent the views of every Israeli nor do they actions of one Turk represent the views of all Turkey.

But then I suspect Mustafa Tekinkaya and his kebab-mates, including the Friends of Palestine, are not big on compassion. They care not that Hamas loosed no fewer than 6000 (yes, six thousand) rockets on Israel after that country withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Or that Hamas deliberately hide behind innocents to carry out their outrages. Or that Hamas are Muslim madmen.

The truth is that Islamic fundamentalism exists in this country. It has arrived with the migrants and refugees and it is as evil and myopic here as it was over there.

And this should be of concern to all of NZ. We are an open, free, liberal and democratic country, for the most part we don’t take sides, we remain neutral, and we tolerate a lot. But one thing we will not tolerate is racism, because racism is not tolerating others in the extremist of forms.

And coming away from racism for a few seconds, I found the irony very laughable with yesterdays Global Peace and Justice march against Rakon. If global peace involves hurling paint bombs at Police and Buildings then that is not a peace that I want. I am surprised that only one person was arrested, if I was a cop there I would have taken out every single person throwing things, but good on the police for showing some restraint.