By William McGimpsey

The recent furor in New Zealand around John Minto and his so-called “genocide hotline” provides a good illustration of just what life will be like inside the multicultural longhouse our society is being steered toward.

Minto is a long-time human rights and anti-racism campaigner. He was heavily involved in organising the protests in New Zealand surrounding the Springbok tour, where he campaigned for an end to apartheid in South Africa. Even prior to the current conflict over Gaza, Minto viewed the Israeli Government’s treatment of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank as basically another form of apartheid. This view is not uncommon – it is widely held across Western society, although perhaps more often by people on the Left. Now with the latest military incursion by the IDF into Gaza, Minto, like many others, argues there is a genocide and/or an ethnic cleansing being carried out by the Israeli Defence Forces. This view is obviously heavily contested, but not unreasonable. It is held by eminent international relations scholar John Mearsheimer for example:

Anyway, Minto is concerned about the Human Rights abuses in Gaza and wants to organise some sort of protest activity about it. The Genocide Hotline allows people to dox IDF soldiers holidaying in New Zealand where Minto and his crew will then follow up with some sort of communication expressing disapproval over IDF actions in Gaza and also apparently making it clear that IDF soldiers are “not welcome here”. Minto explained his goals quite succinctly in this interview on Newstalk ZB.

So Minto’s basic idea is to raise awareness of human rights abuses and bring the moral opprobrium of the community to bear on the IDF perpetrators.

Meanwhile, someone complained about Minto’s hotline to the Human Rights Commission, claiming that it violates the human rights of IDF members visiting New Zealand because it is racist or discriminatory. Human Rights Commissioner Stephen Rainbow issued a statement condemning Minto’s hotline and asking for it to be shut down.

Did the Human Rights Commission behave appropriately?

The Human Rights Commission came under significant fire during the Ardern administration for seemingly taking partisan left-wing positions, rather than impartially defending human rights. With the appointment of new commissioners by the current government, many are hoping for a different approach.

A couple of questions to ask here are:

1. Is the Human Rights Commission trying to censor legitimate political speech/expression/protest from John Minto?
2. Is the Human Rights Commission behaving in a politically and ideologically neutral way?

The free speech question:

The Human Rights Commission’s call for Minto to shut down his hotline has no legal authority. So Minto’s free speech is not being legally taken away. However, my criticism is that this sort of soft policing of people’s speech has a pervasive impact over time, making people more reluctant, in aggregate, to discuss issues that some group or another might find offensive. That might seem like no big deal on the surface, but over time, that soft mechanism has had devastating results across Western institutions and society – making it impossible to tackle important issues around race, sex, sexuality, religion and leading to good people having their reputations and careers destroyed for trying. It is the origin of cancel culture and the woke mob, and as long as these cultural taboos persist, they will have negative effects on our society. My feeling here is that pushback on this behaviour is necessary to preserve the ability for important yet controversial issues to be discussed.

Minto’s genocide hotline is certainly a bit iffy – personally identifying IDF members does have a vague air of intimidation about it, but it is criticising the behaviour and actions of the IDF, not aiming to censor or suppress speech. The hotline is not illegal, and Minto, as a New Zealand citizen, has the right to free speech. That is what should take priority here.

Institutional neutrality:

What’s interesting is that what John Minto is doing with the “genocide hotline” is very similar to what the Human Rights Commission does: the Commission is itself a kind of “hotline” people can ring to bring attention to potential human rights abuses, and in this case, that appears to be what has happened, members of presumably the Jewish community have expressed concern about Minto’s hotline being a potential human rights issue, and asked for the Commission’s help in bringing the moral opprobrium of the community to bear on the perpetrators, in the hopes of changing their behaviour.

It is very difficult for the Commission to condemn and call for the shutdown of what Minto is doing, without opening themselves to charges of hypocrisy for doing basically the same thing – if what Minto is doing is discriminatory on the basis of nationality, isn’t what the Human Rights Commission is doing also discriminatory on the basis of political opinion?

Some have argued that what Minto is doing puts the safety of the IDF tourists in jeopardy, particularly as they are being personally identified and dobbed in. There is perhaps some truth to this. However, it seems to me that that could work both ways too – someone on the other side of the debate, ginned up by the Human Rights Commission order, could just as easily go and bash Minto – it’s stochastic terrorism all-round.

To my mind, there is no principled way of defending what the Human Rights Commission has done. If what Minto is doing is wrong, then what the Human Rights Commission has done, in identifying Minto and other potential Human Rights abusers and bringing the moral opprobrium of the community to bear on them, has to be wrong too. The only way they could call for Minto’s hotline to be shutdown while remaining politically and ideologically neutral would be to also write themselves a letter calling for the shutdown of the Human Rights Commission.

The multicultural longhouse

This issue is yet another illustration of the problem of preserving free speech in multicultural societies. This has become a huge issue as of late – we saw it in New Zealand during COVID, where criticism of the Government’s pandemic management was characterised as conspiracy theories and mis and disinformation, but we’ve also seen it in the UK during the Southport saga, and in the US and elsewhere with the close cooperation between governments and social media companies to censor criticism of immigration and multiculturalism and “control the narrative”.

The left-liberal establishment are totally committed to the idea of transmuting all Western countries into multicultural, multiracial societies. The problem is that multiculturalism, by definition, destroys any shared moral framework across society – the basic values of one group differ from and are offensive to others, and when people give voice to their offence, this is met with a series of reciprocal condemnations from other groups. The result is kind of circular firing squad of thought-policing which cannot be resolved due to the fundamental nature of the differences. These moral outrages undermine social cohesion and sometimes escalate to violence.

The basic approach of our elites to this problem is to try to “keep a lid on it”. In order to preserve social cohesion, they have created an oppressive atmosphere where the important fault lines in our society are just not publicly discussed, and people who try face various forms of soft ostracism or repression. This is one way of understanding what “political correctness” or wokeness is – taboos around discussing potentially controversial issues of race, sex, sexuality, religion, etc. It is debateable whether this repressive atmosphere really improves social cohesion, but it certainly stifles free speech.

This “keep a lid on it” mentality is part of what has elevated the idea of “anti-discrimination” over and above our traditional liberal freedoms of speech, association and contract.

A good way of understanding the divide between defenders of free speech and those who want restrictions on so-called hate speech is to think of each group as advancing and defending fundamentally different and competing moral visions:

Group 1, the free speech defenders, are what you might call “classically liberal” and adhere to roughly the political ideals outlined by America’s founding fathers and enshrined in the US constitution – this group gives traditional liberal freedoms of speech, association and contract very high moral priority.

Group 2, the hate speech restrictors, ascribe the highest moral priority to “anti-discrimination” and freedoms of speech, association, contract and so on are assigned secondary importance. Diversity, equity and inclusion programmes and affirmative action are logical outgrowths of this ideological perspective.

Writer and thinker Christopher Caldwell, in his book “The Age of Entitlement”, explains the origins and implications of this partisan divide:

As a result, in recent years we’ve seen a fierce battle waged in New Zealand and in other Western countries between defenders of free speech, and those who want more hate speech laws. It seems like in New Zealand at least, we’ve reached a standoff, and what we’re seeing here is a compromise position – legally allowing so-called “hate speech”, but using the Human Rights Commission to issue official condemnations of it.

…and so here we are stuck in the multiculture being lectured by the Human Rights Commission anytime we try to stick up for our basic values or discuss controversial issues. This way of doing things is going to prevent any shared moral framework from developing and limit our ability to discuss and solve the important problems plaguing modern society. As a result, we’re faced with a nihilistic moral landscape that is leading to the array of social pathologies – atomisation, loss of trust in institutions, materialism, decline in religious affiliation, feminisation, falling birthrates, the mental health crisis, and so on. Former Prime Minister Chris Hipkins couldn’t even explain what a woman was in a press conference for fear of offending the trans lobby.

Does anyone really think this is working?

Addendum: The ‘Genocide Hotline’ goes global

John Minto’s genocide hotline now appears to have caused a diplomatic incident between New Zealand and the US. The latest developments are that Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a fake news story, that incorrectly asserted that every Israeli must detail their military service to our immigration department in order to receive a visitor's visa to enter New Zealand. Texas Senator Ted Cruz retweeted the story, blasting New Zealand for “denigrating and punishing” Israeli citizens. Foreign Minister Winston Peters tweeted back, saying that the Haaretz story was false and that the New Zealand government has condemned Minto’s hotline. The Haaretz story was subsequently withdrawn and Kiwi diplomats scrambled to contact Senator Cruz and explain the New Zealand government’s position to him.

According to the AIPAC tracker website, Ted Cruz received around $1.7 million from the pro-Israel lobby. I refuse to believe that they hand out this money while expecting nothing in return. Could it be that Senator Cruz was asked by AIPAC to put out that tweet in order to publicly embarrass the New Zealand government and pressure us over John Minto?

It is important to remember that what John Minto is doing to IDF members on holiday in New Zealand is very similar to what the Jewish lobby does to anyone who says anything that can be remotely construed as antisemitic – that is, dox or publicly highlight the speech in a way that is vaguely threatening in the hopes of discouraging it. This sort of thing is standard practice for the Jewish lobby – they have a lot of experience living as an ethnic minority in other people’s countries and this is a system they have developed to defend their ethnic interests. It is literally what organisations like the ADL, the Jewish Council, and the Israel Institute of New Zealand do.

My point here is that if you consider what John Minto is doing to be threatening, intimidating, or contrary to human rights, then so is this longstanding pattern of behaviour from the Jewish lobby.

Meanwhile I, like a lot of ordinary Kiwis, just want to be able to speak freely about the important problems plaguing our society – something that’s very difficult to do without getting caught in the crossfire.

William McGimpsey runs the X account @TheZeitgeistNZ and contributes to RCR.