Category: Everything Political

The National govt., still in their just married phase, have announced that NZ is getting Knighthoods again. In the name of the Queen our worthies will once again be given the titles of Sir and Dame. These will replace the anaemic but functional titles we have had from 2000, Principal/Distinguished Companion of the Order of Merit.
Leaving aside all the reasons why this isn’t a decision I like (see NRT for that), it just strikes me as weird, an odd bit of electioneering when there’s no election coming up. There was no consultation, and no signal that this was coming – nothing I’ve noticed anyway. (My hazy memory is that Labour signalled its intentions to lose the old system a ways in advance, but I don’t remember any consultation then either. Anyone recall?)
Notably, the symbolism of this change sits uneasily with our view of ourselves. Is this the first time since WW2 that we’ve actually taken a step back closer to the Crown, rather than away from it towards our own identity?
I don’t get it. Is it a personal thing for Key, that he wanted to re-establish these symbolic ties with the Queen? What am I missing about this?

The title of this post is facetious, of course. In the West, when an Islamic voice speaks critically, one rhetorical device is frequently employed to neuter this comment: “why don’t they ever put this much effort into condemning the extremism within Islam?”
It’s very prevalent, particularly in the smug brevity of letters to the editor, radio talkback and blog comments, but also in more elaborate form in newspaper columns and so forth. It’s a nasty little trick because it’s taken on the aura of truth for a great many people, taking as self-evident that Islamic voices don’t put much effort into condemning Islamic extremism. And to be quite honest, a surface reading of the culture lends credibility to this claim – you could search a lot of newspapers and TV bulletins before you came across an Islamic voice condemning Islamic extremism.
Of course, the claim is also meritless. The absence speaks more of the limitations of our media and our memory than anything else. The truth is that Muslim grassroots and religious leaders have for many years been energetically condemning violence, denying any religious legitimacy to violent jihad, and working for interfaith community. And finally someone has identified and pulled together these many strands into one short report. The U.S. Institute for Peace has issued a special report, Islamic Peacemaking Since 9/11, which is loaded with evidence that these criticisms are baseless.
I’m glad this report exists, because evidence is helpful in shooting down that claim about Muslims failing to condemn violence in the name of Islam. That claim is actively harmful to peaceful discussion. It takes away any presumption of good faith and presupposes a combative relationship between Islam and “the West” (a.k.a. “civilized people” a.k.a. “me”). Countering it is important, and this report is a key tool for doing so.

I’ve realized that I’m not finished talking about the Bruce Emery conviction.
One of the main arguments back and forth about the Emery/Cameron case is whether Bruce Emery has benefited from privilege; that as a white middle-aged man from what is inexpertly called the middle class, he has been treated better by the justice system and by New Zealand than would have been the case for a different sort of person.
One of the things I’ve seen over and over in response to this is, “I’ve seen nothing that proves he was treated differently”. This question irritates me profoundly, and my immediate response is “Of course you haven’t! That’s the wrong starting point!”.
Privilege and prejudice in society don’t work in obvious ways. They can’t – anything that is obvious and indisputable gets challenged and purged from the system quickly. There isn’t ever going to be one clear moment of bias where patriachal/white/age-based privilege gets caught in the act, and demanding proof of one is setting the bar too high. Privilege can, and does, act in our society without ever meeting such a gross test of existence.
Instead, you need to look at the whole picture, the cumulative effect of many small points and angles. Indeed, to continue the analogy, you need to consider things outside of the picture too – how has this been framed, and what sits outside of the frame?
In the case of Bruce Emery, I don’t think there’s any question that the public view of the man and his crime reflects his privileged status in New Zealand’s culture. In the media coverage, similarly, I think this privilege comes through. In the trial itself and its outcome – well, the more specific you get, the harder it is to be definite, and I wasn’t at the trial so this can only be a guess – but a trial reflects and is part of the wider cultural conversation, so I think there’s likely to be some degree of privilege there as well.
The points and angles I’m talking about? There are plenty. Here’s a couple:
The main piece of media coverage from the NZ Herald, one of the most important articles about the case as it happened. Headline: The day Bruce Emery saw red. Just consider for a moment how that headline minimises what happened: a man grabbed a knife and chased some people down a street then stabbed one of them, and this amounts to “seeing red”. Consider now all the many other ways they could have headlined that article. WIthout even going beyond those six words you have a very particular framing that aligns perfectly with the expected effects of privilege. Would another man, a Maori or a Somali or a petty criminal like the exonerated David Dougherty, have been given that headline?
More: what about the widespread media coverage of Emery being denied the chance to spend Christmas with his family after being convicted of manslaughter? How often do we care about whether people convicted of serious crimes don’t get to go home for Christmas? Would the NZ media really have found this newsworthy if Emery wasn’t who he was? Would we get big pieces like this about the pain his family will suffer without him being there to open presents?
Specifically about the trial, another comment I’ve seen made frequently was that the stabbing happened under “disputed circumstances”. Which, of course, it did; the same is true of nearly every murder/manslaughter trial, because that’s how the adversarial system works. The prosecution and defence offer alternative versions of events and the jury and/or judge have to consider if they have reasonable doubt about guilt. The thing that sets these disputed circumstances apart is that one version is by a witness to what happened, and the other version is by the killer. Somehow, this close-up eyewitness account has been balanced by the killer’s own version, and somehow now the truth will never be known. If the eyewitness wasn’t a young brown tagger, would his story be given so little credibility against the killer’s version, not just in court but in the media coverage and the conversations in pubs and on blogs? If it was a white kid from the North Shore playing at being naughty, would his version somehow become more believable?
(Yes, of course there was physical evidence that the blow wasn’t deep, etc. That is hardly proof that Emery’s version is accurate.)
Consider Miri’s comments from a lawyer’s point of view about how far Emery was from meeting the legal criteria for self-defence or provocation; and yet how those two words drive the public conversation about him. If Emery were different, would these words have gained such purchase?
Consider the whole way the sentencing of Emery has been mixed up with the Cameron family’s parenting failures. That should be a completely separate conversation, but it’s being leveraged in because of who Emery is and who Cameron is, and it quietly shifts responsibility away from Emery. Would this really happen if Emery was someone different?
There’s plenty more, of course. This is the way privilege works; this is the kind of thing it does. It’s subtle, and up close any one instance of it can be argued either way. It’s a pattern, though, a consistent push in one direction over and over again. It can’t be put on a slide or proved in a blog post – if it could be demonstrated so easily it would not be allowed to happen. This means, however, that identifying it, being convinced of its existence, is about awareness of a big picture, about drawing inferences and conclusions. But you can’t start investigating those inferences without asking good questions, and checking expectations at the door.
(For those who don’t know me in real life: I’m a white, middle-class male. I operate in a sea of privilege and benefit from it every day; I’m hardly the best person to write about privilege. But what the heck.)

A year ago, Bruce Emery chased down a youth who was tagging his property, stabbed him to death, then went home, concealed the evidence and went to sleep. These facts were not in question. His trial just ended; he was sentenced to four years and three months for manslaughter. Cue a storm of argument about whether this sentence was sufficient, with the dead boy’s mother announcing her disgust.
I’m not a fan of prisons as a fundamental component of our criminal justice system. I am not a fan of throwing people away for longer to make society feel better. That said, I am invested in ensuring our criminal justice system is unbiased; that it does not systematically treat better or worse people of different kinds. That’s the essence of the charge against Emery’s sentence, that were he not a white middle-aged middle-class businessman then his sentence would have been greater.
A common theme in the discourse around the sentence (see, if you dare, the NZ Heralds’s “Your views” reader feedback section) is of understanding about Emery’s action, and of a willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt, to empathise: there but for the grace of god… This of course reaches its sickening nadir in a notice from the sickening hypocrites at the Sensible Sentencing Trust that Emery shouldn’t have been jailed at all, and the family deserves some blame for letting a 15 year old boy roam the streets.
Anita at Kiwipolitico brings a lot of this together in an interesting post suggesting that Emery received a reduced sentence because he is “one of us”.
I think that’s not quite right; I think a better frame is to say that people who aren’t Emery receive greater sentences than he because they aren’t one of us. In other words, I don’t think the problem is that we have collectively extended our understanding to Emery; I think it’s that fail to extend the same understanding to those who aren’t like Emery. There’s a general failure of empathy.
This NZ Herald coverage at the time of the trial emphasizes Emery’s “ordinariness”, particularly his physical ordinariness – fat and middle-aged. Unspoken, is his whiteness, but it is there in the text because the question begged is “whose ordinariness”? Is being a fat, white, middle-aged man really ordinary? Would the victim and his community see it that way? What does that make them?
The ordinariness of his behaviour became an issue in the case:

Did he react as an ordinary person would? Was he fired by anger that his home had been defaced again? How did anger influence what happened when he and the two taggers confronted each other in a neighbouring dead-end street 365 metres from Emery’s home?

But what about the ordinariness of the victim’s behaviour, getting stoned, tagging some fence; how is this not ordinary? Isn’t this extremely unremarkable stupid kid behaviour? That word “ordinary” is at work in this discourse, allowing empathy for Emery’s circumstances and behaviour, while at the same time excluding the victim.
When Emery killed Pihema, it fed into a general theme of youth fear, a cultural conversation we were having in our country about whether our young people were out of control. That conversation has lapsed in the last year, and is almost forgotten – no doubt because the election is over – and now the frame is about property, and pressure, and how sometimes you get pressed to breaking point and can’t we all understand that?
I can understand that. I don’t begrudge Emery his relatively light sentence; I hope he learns from it and is not destroyed by it. I only wish that the same empathy could somehow be offered more widely.

Man, that does feel good to say.
Much better than whatever that last one’s name was.

Previously
Now: Barack Obama writes to his daughters
“And I want every child to understand that the blessings these brave Americans fight for are not free-that with the great privilege of being a citizen of this nation comes great responsibility.”
Hee.

Silly Bushy leaves office shortly. He’s delivering a farewell speech in about 24 hours but his last press conference signalled what that will be like: arrogant, unrepentant, blinkered.
How unfit this man was for office; how naive and clueless he was. For example, this staggering foolishness of this claim, so ridiculous in its audacity that I clipped it from a newspaper and kept it: Jan 10, 2008: Bush Predicts Mideast Peace In A Year. How bitterly ironic that as that year ticks up, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is not merely unresolved, but as far from peaceful as it has been for many years.
Aside from his enormous ignorance, it is his lack of empathy that I will remember, and his complete subjugation to the monstrous Dick Cheney. I have been waiting so long for Bush to be gone, we all have, but it now seems like such an anticlimax; is he still on the stage? How long is he going to stand there? When’s the new guy coming on? I want to see the new guy! Bush has been prematurely forgotten, which is astonishing considering the massive harm he has presided over and, frequently, caused. But I suppose we’re just sick of thinking about him. He wore out our fury, in the end.
Which means that I find myself in the unsettling position of agreeing with Boris Johnson, who wrote a chiding mockery of Bush for the Telegraph, but concluded: “without wishing to defend G W Bush, I want to enter an important qualification. Yes, he did lead the coalition to topple Saddam, and was, therefore, implicated in the loss of tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives. But at every stage he did so with the messianic support of Tony Blair, and the tacit approval of Gordon Brown; and when it came to persuading a reluctant public of the threat posed by Iraq, it should never be forgotten that the Labour Party and their spin doctors were far more ruthless and duplicitous than the White House.”
Quite. The venom I felt, and still feel, towards Tony Blair is undiminished but I have nothing like that degree of fury towards Bush. Bush was always a tool of those more clever and more wicked than he; this does not exonerate him in the least, but at least makes sense of the pity that I feel for him mixed in with the anger. I expect he will not find life easy outside of office. (At least until he is revisioned into a misunderstood hero in, say, twenty years, as Nixon was.)
Goodbye Silly Bushy, and your Cheney and your entire noxious ecosystem. The reality-based community delights in your departure.

Otago Daily Times, 6 Jan
About 1000 people were protesting against Israel’s air and ground offensive in Gaza…
Father Gerard Burns, the Parish Priest of Te Parisi o te Ngakau Tapu in Porirua, took part in the demonstration marching to the Yitzhak Rabin peace memorial in Wellington’s CBD. Father Burns smeared the memorial to Mr Rabin with a mixture of a drop of his blood and paint.

Kiwi Friends of Israel, 8 Jan
Pressure mounts on Priest gone wild
Pressure is mounting on Catholic Priest Fr Gerard Burns to apologise for desecrating a memorial to murdered Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, says Kiwi Friends of Israel…

NZ Herald editorial, 8 Jan
For Father Burns to desecrate the Rabin memorial is not only in breach of any civilised standard of protest but utterly wrongheaded in terms of his target. Rabin, a former Israeli general-turned-two-time-Prime-Minister, was perhaps the greatest hope for peace between Jews and Palestinians in a generation… The memorial in central Wellington marks that commitment to peace. The sins (as Father Burns might see them) of his successors in the Israeli Government cannot be visited upon Rabin… The organisers of the Wellington march… must know that their message against the killings of civilians, including children, is diverted and made hollow by a calculated insult to Jews everywhere….

NZ Herald, 9 Jan
The Archbishop of Wellington has apologised for the actions of a clergyman who attacked a memorial to former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin… Auckland’s Catholic Bishop Patrick Dunn has also joined calls for Father Burns to apologise for desecrating the memorial to Mr Rabin.

I know Father Gerald (Gerry) Burns a little. He served in the church where I went as a child and supported my childhood school . He impressed me with his youth and energy, but I was quite frankly far too young to make any further comment about what he was like in those days, and when I was older I saw him too infrequently to know him as more than a friendly face. But while I can’t speak to his character, I can still speak to his impressive commitment to social justice issues and his concern for the suffering of innocents. Specifically, the way he spoke to me and others about his experiences in East Timor during the horrible fighting there. I’ve googled up this second-hand account from 1999:

In July, Father Gerry Burns returned to Wellington from East Timor with grave concerns as to the well-being of the people – he was part of an aid convoy attacked by militias, the third attack on UN convoys that week. He reported on a range of atrocities perpetrated by the pro-integration forces aimed at intimidating those in favour of independence – homes burned out, people tortured and killed, bodies mutilated. Food production was dropping all over East Timor as people were afraid to leave their homes and work the fields in case they were kidnapped or attacked.
The militias had a deliberate policy of targeting aid convoys to the displaced persons; and of mayhem and destruction to terrorise the people to prevent them registering to vote. Father Gerry described an atmosphere of total terror.

There was much more. Maybe East Timor radicalised Gerry; maybe he was already so inclined. Regardless, it is easy to imagine that his experiences in East Timor then would make him sensitive to the situation in Gaza today. So I have some sympathy for Burns, and I have to wonder that his side of the story is hardly anywhere to be found.
Burns and his fellow activists have claimed that the Rabin peace memorial is itself part of a manipulation of history that contributes to the situation in Gaza. It’s a rational (although complex) position to take* and makes instant sense of the chosen focus of the protest. However, this explanation has been thoroughly absent from media coverage. Partly this was because the explanation was only released Jan 10, several days after the narrative of the protest had been established; but that communicative ineptitude doesn’t excuse the news media from failing to ask whether there was, perhaps, a rationale behind the actions. Instead, the story stabilised around the image of an irrational rogue priest who had no idea of what he was doing and didn’t much care to find out.
Targeting the Rabin memorial for protest was, of course, foolish. The generally-accepted perception of the memorial is the precise opposite of the protester perception, and there’s hardly a clear link to the events in Gaza. That makes symbolic communication doomed to failure. (And spilling blood over a memorial stone? That’s just crass, no matter who the stone commemorates.)
So I don’t support the protest action, but nor can I find a reason to share in the outrage. I can see why Burns did what he did; I can see what he was getting at. And where is ignorance of his motives going to get anyone? Condemn the protest and disagree with the protester’s claims, by all means (and no-one has held back from that), but I would imagine a healthier society wouldn’t settle for “loony priest gone wild” as the sum total of explanation for his behaviour.
And let’s not forget, as the NZ Catholic hierarchy distance themselves from Fr Burns, that Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace, just called Gaza a “big concentration camp.” Perhaps Gerry Burns isn’t as much a rogue as some would take comfort in believing.
* For the record, I think there is definitely something to the claim that the Rabin memorial is part of a process of hagiographical revisionism that serves the purposes of PR for the Israeli state; but I’d take some convincing, given the compelling fact that he was assassinated by someone on the far right of Israeli internal politics. Regardless, it would be a complex argument, covering a number of historical variables that are still very uncertain.