PERSPECTIVE ON CHRISTCHURCH

This week south east Africa was hit by a cyclone of hitherto unprecedented power. Another extreme weather consequence of global warming we’re told and who am I, not being a scientist, to quarrel?

An estimated death toll of up to a thousand has been reported to date, mainly in Mozambique who’s capital city has been destroyed, but also smashing long suffering Zimbabwe and Malawi. 400,000 folk in Mozambique are homeless. Simultaneously during the week an estimated 100 lives were lost in Indonesian floods.

In fairness the Herald covered these awful events but less so the rest of our media; obsessed with mushiness about love (sorry-aroha), hug a Muslim and much more ghastly ill-placed sentimentality.

Let’s get some perspective. A single Australian loser did a terrible thing. No-one else; just him out of 8 billion people in the world. That is the fact of the matter and all of this righteous outpouring of self-recrimination is completely over the top.

Former Evening Post editor Karl de Fresne, a man who’s never written a word in his life that doesn’t cut to the heart of issues with blinding common sense, wrote a brilliant piece in the Dom’. In essence he pointed out the underlying hypocrisy (my words – Karl’s a polite bugger) in all of this abominable mush and finger-pointing.

That is that amidst all of this preaching of tolerance and brotherly love, an underlying message of intolerance has reared its ugly head, namely blaming so-called white male nationalism.

As I’ve written before, nationalism whether white, black or whatever, is a sentiment held by most people in the world. Furthermore, it’s a perfectly legitimate belief, albeit not one I subscribe to, having spent too much of my life abroad. I’d be delighted if the All Blacks for example, lost to Italy solely for underdog reasons. My only nationalism is with test cricket. I can’t stand our team losing.

That said, since the European refuge crises arose, nationalism emerged in Europe as perfectly decent people understandably became alarmed at watching their homeland under threat of being engulfed by middle eastern Muslims and Africans, desperate to escape their corrupt and mismanaged homelands.

This country has a pitiful refugee record; up until recently a lousy 750 per annum. It’s since been increased but is still disgraceful when compared with other European nations plus Australia and North America, or put another way, solely white nations. Are China, Japan, Taiwan etc putting their hand up to help? Nope; it’s solely evil white countries.

I can well imagine New Zealand’s reaction if following another Middle East blow-up (history says they’ll keep occurring) an easily obtained flotilla of ships containing 15,000 Syrian refugees sailed into our harbours.

I’d welcome them but I’ve travelled a lot and know what all Arabs from Morocco to Yemen will tell you, specifically that Syrians are lovely people. So too the churches would have their helping hands up on humanitarian grounds but everyone else? Would we see any of the aroha preaching, the twilight candle-waving ghastly excess of the last week now welcoming these invaders? I don’t think so, and I understand that too.

Well that’s the position many European nations have found themselves in, so too America, a nation with an extraordinarily generous migrant quota. You don’t hear the term “melting pot” much these days but it was the foundation of America’s greatness as refugees poured in and made it what it is, symbolically reflected by the Statue of Liberty welcoming them.

But there’s a limit and Trump was right to address it, although wrong to talk about refugees as rapists, criminals and so forth. The fact is that the overwhelming numbers surging north from the corrupt and ill-managed nations to America’s south, was of an intolerable scale. All countries are entitled to decide who they admit as migrants.

Here’s a thought for the twilight candle-wavers. What do you suppose would be the government’s reaction if I approached them and said I wanted to hire a ship to rescue 1,000 Yemeni families currently enduring horrendous lives, or say 1,000 Mozambique homeless? No need to wonder about the answer as I can tell you. It would be a flat no, no matter my assurance of helping the newcomers, backed by the churches.

And guess what? It would be the right decision for a host of reasons. In short, talk is cheap when there’s nothing at stake.