With security issues highly newsworthy in New Zealand in wake of the atrocity last March, domestic terrorism a hot-button subject and the anniversary of the despicable act looming you could be forgiven for thinking that the launch of a New Zealand based journal featuring the writings of experts in their field and dealing with issues of domestic security and terror might have jolted the average journalist from twitcom-induced slumber, sufficiently arousing said navel-gazer’s to bring attention to the expert utterings therein.
Instead: there is only the sounds of silence. It’s almost inexplicable. Three months have passed since the inaugural issue of the “National Security Journal” and not a single scribe from main-stream news has made it to print with a report of the journal’s content.
How so?
Could it be the corral of cubs are too busy looking under rocks for unhinged right-wing extremists to have noticed the journal’s launch? Or perhaps the content was devoured but found to be unpalatable, indigestible in fact, and not aligned with the press-gang’s narrative thread? I strongly suspect the latter.
Since the MSM won’t do it, your favourite alternative news source will do the heavy-lifting (again).
Managing Editor John Battersby’s contribution to Issue 1, entitled “The Ghost of New Zealand’s Terrorism Past and Present” is an excellent and concise piece summarising the past fifty-years of our brushes with extremist lunatics. It’s a politically neutral, objective and memory-jogging summation in plain English, therefore an entirely newsworthy contribution, but I reckon some of our journalists will have choked on Battersby’s words:
“Contrary to the emerging media myth that New Zealand has gone easy on its Right-Wing activism, it has been generally true that historically there has been more Left-Wing political violence in New Zealand.”
[My emphasis in bold]
If that wasn’t enough to unsettle the horses, there’s more. Examining the attitudes of some precious pearls of domestic political activism, including a certain ’author’, Battersby tells a truth the fake-news choose to ignore: the left will turn a blind-eye, play down, or even defend the un-defendable, if it suits their own political narrative:
“Hager seems to be denying that an act of political violence is terrorism because it is an act of political violence and the nobility of the cause made it alright.”
I guess such comment is blasphemy in some circles and perhaps that explains what appears to be a media snub to the journal’s launch.
Based on Issue 1, I say the ‘National Security Journal’ may become a valuable contribution to our understanding of the evil that is terrorism and the politics at play in suppressing, or promoting, it.
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