By Olivia Pierson
First published on Insight@theBFD 23/04/2020

In an article which one of my readers recently drew to my attention, Green MP Golriz Ghahraman wrote an essay titled Freedom of Speech and Its Limits where she makes the case for why more hate speech laws should be introduced in New Zealand.

Because Ms. Ghahraman lays out the common arguments in favour of this cause as clearly as her abilities allow, it’s worth a read to see the one-track groove of thought those who advance this cause are stuck in. The obsession with minority groups is paramount: gender, sexual, ethnic, racial and religious (except for Christian). They view society through groupthink lenses to pass themselves off as the bold “defenders of minorities” in the eyes of other groupthinkers, which reminds me of a notable quote by philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand:

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”

Groupthinker Ghahraman uses the Christchurch massacre as the central example of just how damaging the individual right of free speech can be in her mind.
 
This one-year-old New Zealand tragedy which, even as it took place in real time, many predicted instantly the degree to which it would be milked in the most opportunistic manner by our current government. 

Ghahraman did not disappoint on this score anymore than did Prime Minister Ardern. From the act of one single tragedy, long standing gun laws were swiftly turned on their head, free speech was put on notice by the Justice Minister and police have made a disturbing habit out of visiting the homes of social media users who express views which they find to be a bit objectionable (conservative). Legal gun owners with objectionable views were raided by armed police.  And those are just the things we know about.

In her 2,600 word essay about the limits of free-speech in NZ, it took Ghahraman only three paragraphs to get to the Christchurch terrorism incident:

“Since the Christchurch terrorist attacks, many New Zealanders have started to wonder what sort of country they truly live in and to ask themselves some difficult questions. Are we, in fact, a country filled with equality, fairness and unity, or is there a problem with hate, violence and racism that needs work? Part of the challenge in coming to terms with the attacks will be to acknowledge that hate speech can lead to extremism and violence – that how we speak can have impacts in real life. This will in turn require us to define the right to freedom of speech and where its protections and limitations lie in a truly free and equal society.”

But groupthinker Ghahraman was wrong about New Zealanders.  The massacre did not make them start to wonder what sort of country they truly lived in, since the terrorist was an interloper from Australia. What they did wonder was just how a troubled young non-NZ citizen such as Tarrant got to spend an hour in the company of police for his gun license interview without giving off a single clue or cause for suspicion of what he was in fact; a cold-blooded killer with a malicious plot fomenting in his mind.
 
This momentary police inattentiveness explains why they are now cracking down so hard on gun owners and social media users with anti-Islam views, not because these citizens are any kind of imminent threat to other New Zealanders, but because this time the police royally screwed up – and maybe Tarrant was uncommonly gifted in the art of stealthy deceit. 

Ghahraman writes:  

“It is increasingly clear, following the Christchurch mosque attacks, that unregulated online platforms are hosting dangerous white supremacist content. Online hate is causing real world violence and our laws don’t have the tools to respond effectively.”

Through the paragraphs of her essay, one can almost feel the gleeful frisson which Ghahraman must’ve felt as news came through on March 15th 2019 that the terrorist was a white male with a gun club membership, plus an online manifesto.

She then goes further down this conspiratorial road of white supremacists lurking under every rock by citing a shooting during Passover, April 2019, in Poway, Las Vegas, killing 1 person and injuring 3, and a shooting in El Paso, Texas, on August 3rd 2019, killing 22 people and injuring 24; both murderers claimed they had been inspired by the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Tarrant’s manifesto, which is banned in New Zealand only. 

I have no doubt that these sub-human killers may have been inspired by Tarrant, but alarmingly, Ghahraman commits an unforgivable blank-out by ignoring the 259 people killed and the 500 others injured in the massive Easter Sunday massacre in Sri Lanka on April 21st 2019, just one month after the Christchurch tragedy and within the same week of the Passover shooting Ghahraman cites in her essay.

Why did Ghahraman blank-out this massacre of massacres, which the Islamic State quickly took responsibility for?

The answer lies in the fact that, most awkwardly for our government, this massacre was yet another incident of Islamic jihad committed against Christians – and both Ghahraman and Prime Minister Ardern were neck-deep in loudly pushing the “They Are Us” empathy-with-Muslims campaign, all the while encouraging New Zealand women to cover their heads with hijabs in solidarity with the adherents of a particularly violent and female-oppressing ideology.
 
Which brings me to another unconscionable omission in Ghahraman’s essay about hate speech. 

The brutality and violence of Islam is prescribed in a well known ancient manifesto bursting with hate speech, i.e., actual incitements to violence – that is the Koran itself. This 7th-century manifesto openly calls for the murder of non-Muslims (infidels) and has not been banned in New Zealand.
 
Neither is there a ban in New Zealand on the fifteen issues of the Islamic State’s official recruitment tool, Dabiq magazine, an impeccably edited, glossily photographed, online publication still used to inspire young jihadis around the world to commit acts of terror wherever they are – and they do, as they did in Sri Lanka in the Easter Sunday massacre. Dabiq is currently available for free download in New Zealand – heck, you don’t even have to download it to view it. 

​But nary a word is ever spoken or written by the Iranian-born Ghahraman on this Islamic evil – she is solely focused on shutting down the free speech of the group called “white supremacists” – which has become a leftist euphemism for Christians or conservative-minded folks who seek to uphold traditional Western values, gifted to us by our magnificent colonial ancestors.
 
Ghahraman begins winding up her essay with these words:
 
“Everyone, every person of every race, gender and religion, has a huge interest in ensuring harmful and abusive content is appropriately regulated.”

Okey-dokey Wokey. Regulations be damned. All Jews outside of Germany still have to live with Mein Kampf being sold in bookstores and made freely available in libraries, and I don’t hear them constantly lamenting the fact – and they practically invented evocative Lamentations.
 
What is of huge interest to most of us, is to see our individual freedoms and equality before the law be kept intact as our forefathers intended, not be overridden by the woke groupthink of Ghahraman and her uncomely clan of ahistoric diversity worriers. They are the most toxic pedlars of harmful, abusive content into New Zealand’s cultural and political landscapes, and their shameless use of the Christchurch massacre to try to squelch our individual rights is well and truly obvious. 

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"

By Olivia Pierson
First published on Insight@theBFD 16/04/2020

This is the ten-trillion-dollar question burning in the minds of many – except for NZ journalists, who day-after-day sit through press conferences about the Covid crisis with our government leaders and never mention the word “China.”

The fact that our largest trading partner has obviously indulged in a monumental cover-up that has brought the entire world economy to its knees and literally paused our lives in a Kafkaesque lockdown should see all our journalists peppering our leaders with questions about our country’s future relations with China.  Instead we hear them only asking about the details of government handouts.  They are beyond pathetic and the very definition of “non-essential” workers.

The Chinese Communist Party has an official narrative, which, along with the World Health Organisation, they’ve peddled daily since the Wuhan virus wrecked China’s economy before it travelled down the Silk Road to wreck the economies of the rest of the world.

That narrative is: the virus originated from a live animal market in the city of Wuhan.

If this is true, why then did health officials inside China go to such extraordinary lengths to silence the medical whistleblowers, like Dr. Li Wenliang, who warned his medical colleagues in a private message about a SARS-like illness spreading in Wuhan on December 30th, 2019? 

“Days later, he [Dr.Li] was summoned to the Public Security Bureau in Wuhan and made to sign a statement in which he was accused of making false statements that disturbed the public order.

Dr. Li died of the virus on February 7th, 2020, or so we were told.

On January 1st 2020, the genome sequence of the virus was submitted to Chinese health authorities. An employee at a genomics company claims that the Hubei Provincial Health Commission ordered them to stop testing samples from Wuhan and destroy all existing samples of the disease.

On January 2nd, one study of 41 patients in Wuhan accounted for 27 having contact with the live animal market, leaving 14 which did not, signifying that human-to-human transmission was occurring and the CCP knew that it was, or that the CCP knew it had come from another source other than the market.

On January 14th, the World Health Organisation announced on Twitter:

“Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan, China.”

By January 15th, both Thailand and Japan record their first known cases of the virus from people who had visited China. 

January 19th, the BBC reported that: 

“Chinese officials say there have been no cases of the virus spreading from one person to another.

Instead, they say, the virus has crossed the species barrier and come from infected animals at a seafood and wildlife market in Wuhan. The WHO’s China office said the analysis was helpful and would help officials plan the response to the outbreak.”

The United States announces on January 21st its first case of the virus in a resident who had recently returned from China.
 
For the next five days, millions of people move around China and the world as they celebrate the Lunar New Year with loved ones on January 25th.
 
The virus went global.

On January 22nd, the World Health Organisation’s Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, commends President Xi and China’s Health Minister in this official statement to the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee:

“I was very impressed by the detail and depth of China’s presentation. I also appreciate the cooperation of China’s Minister of Health, who I have spoken with directly during the last few days and weeks. His leadership and the intervention of President Xi and Premier Li have been invaluable, and all the measures they have taken to respond to the outbreak.”

The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is located 20 miles away from the Wuhan live animal  market – this is a high level biohazard level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory purpose built for the study of the most lethal pathogens in China. 

Professor Guizhen Wu, an expert in infectious disease and prevention, said that a silver-lining to the 2003 outbreak of SARS – which wrought havoc on the Chinese society and economy – was the construction of China’s LB (Laboratory Biosafety) system, an organised network of synchronised national procedures and biosecurity labs, culminating in China’s only level 4 Biosafety lab in Wuhan.  Wu wrote: 
 
“Currently, China has raised biological safety and security, of which LB is a crucial part, to the height of national strategy.”

Professor Wu went on to mention a pathogen “leak,” perhaps because of the need to have the pathogens transported:

“After a laboratory leak incident of SARS in 2004, the former Ministry of Health of China initiated the construction of preservation laboratories for high-level pathogens such as SARS, coronavirus, and pandemic influenza virus. Samples previously preserved by provincial research institutions and medical institutions were transferred to designated national institutions for storage.”

Professor Wu raised concerns about biosecurity not given enough attention in China, not having enough “well-trained and experienced LB specialists”:
 
“Moreover, compared to developed countries, China is still in the beginning stages of LB development. Our innovation capacity is relatively weak… Similarly, the research and development of LB techniques and equipment fell behind some western countries. The design and reliability of our LB system also lacks acute evaluation criteria and schemes.”

What is more likely – that a Wuhan live animal market contained a virus which jumped the species barrier from animal-to-human transmission, rapidly allowing  for human-to-human transmission, or that the Chinese Communist Party lied about another “leak” of a SARS-like virus which could already pass from human-to-human originating from its only level 4 biosecurity lab?

It is highly believable that upon seeing his own country’s economy tanking from the effects of this new virus, President Xi and his officials clamped down forcibly on the whistleblowers so that the virus could spread around the world in an act of malevolence along the lines of “we’re going down and you’re coming with us.”

What else explains the litany of lies the world was subjected to from China and WHO as the virus went global?

Whether the spreading of the virus was intentional on China’s part or not, the fact that they did not communicate their knowledge of a lethal human-to-human contagion the very second that they knew about it, speaks volumes about their respect for the rest of humanity.

Are we as a nation going to keep our economy hitched to a trading partner who is either this negligent or this malign?

That is the major question that every single NZ journalist should be asking of our leaders in the press briefings…again and again and again. 

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"