Carterton’s deputy mayor is “disappointed” and “disgusted” at the response to a proposal to erect a memorial sculpture of the late Georgina Beyer.
“I’m just really disappointed at how some people have expressed their views by tearing apart a deceased person and their character when they can’t defend themselves,” Carterton’s Deputy Mayor Dale Williams said.
Beyer, who died last year, was elected mayor of Carterton in 1995 — making her the world’s first openly transgender mayor.
Carterton councillors met on Wednesday to discuss the proposal, but decided to seek public feedback on the idea and potential location before supporting the project further.
The sculpture would be externally funded and has been endorsed by the executors of Beyer’s estate. The estimated price to complete the sculpture is between $300,000-$500,000.
Beyer became the world’s first transgender Member of Parliament and was celebrated for her courage, sharp humour, and fierce advocacy of the communities she represented.
Georgina Beyer was a good Mayor of Carterton. She got re-elected with 90% of the vote. And her election as both Mayor and MP was significant, especially in such a rural area. She wasn’t elected because she was transgender, or in spite of it. It just wasn’t an issue to locals who judged her on her performance.
I think it is quite appropriate to honour a former Mayor, who attracted significant attention nationally and globally.
But a $500,000 statue is way over the top, especially in a district of 10,000 people. That is $50 per person or over $100 per household.
Naming a street or a park after her, with an appropriate plaque would be far more sensible.
Former federal trade minister Andrew Robb says he has quit his A$880,000-a-year consultancy job with Chinese-owned Landbridge Group because it didn’t have anything for him to do.
Former Victorian premier John Brumby says he has quit as a director of Chinese tech giant Huawei in Australia because he has too much else to do.
Former federal foreign minister and ex-NSW premier Bob Carr has quit his job as director of the Australia-China Relations Institute, an organisation bankrolled by a Chinese billionairewith a history of using donations to cosy up to politicians.
It might be just a coincidence that these decisions have come just days before new foreign influence transparency laws come into effect on March 1.
I’m sure it was coincidence.
This is what made the tawdry scandal involving former NSW senator Sam Dastyari so alarming.
Though a humble senator, Dastyari was a key Labor Party fundraiser and powerbroker. He later admitted that vanity and arrogance made him susceptible to the charm offensive of Huang Xiangmo – the billionaire who courted Bob Carr to head up the Australia-China Relations Institute.
Dastyari accepted financial gifts from Huang’s company, including a A$44,000 payment to settle a legal dispute, along with payments from other donors connected to the Chinese Communist Party.
I’m really surprised the NZ Labour Party invited Bob Carr to come to New Zealand, to tell us that we should not have closer relations with Australia through AUKUS. Very undiplomatic to have foreign former politicians intervening in NZ policy discussions.
DOC has published a 30 page report with options for restoring walking access to Cathedral Cove, which close almost 18 months ago. It is unbelievable that it has remained closed for so long, especially having just been ranked one of the world’s top 50 beaches.
The obvious priority is option 2A which is stick in a new boardwalk on the one section where it is damaged, and put in some steps from the beach. This should have actually happened automatically- take a week or so.
After you get access going, then you can consult on which long term solution is chosen, so long as it isn’;’t the one to ban visitors from walking in.
On Wednesday last week Māori Party MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi gave a general debate speech in the House with this opening sentence, “No matter my words today, the Government will not waver in its mission to exterminate Māori.”
She went on to say, “The theory of the Minister is that…
Read the whole tweet. A Member of Parliament got up in the House and said the Government (which has a Cabinet which is 35% Māori) wants to exterminate Māori. Has the media reported this, with the editorials decrying such nonsensical and abusive language?
Imagine if an ACT MP said in the House that a Labour-led Government was trying to exterminate Europeans? It would be the major story in every news medium, with cries for them to resign.
This is why trust in media keeps falling. The blatant double standards.
At present, the compulsory law degree subjects are The Legal System, The Law of Contracts, The Law of Torts, Criminal Law, Public Law and Property Law.
The tikanga regulations make it compulsory for all students commencing a law degree from 1 January 2025 to complete a subject on the general principles and practices of tikanga Māori | Māori laws and philosophy, and for tikanga Māori | Māori laws and philosophy to be included in all other subjects which are part of the compulsory requirements for the LLB and LLB Honours degrees.
This will not be about education, but indoctrination. Law students will have to agree with a particular interpretation in order to become lawyers.
The principal purpose of this complaint is to urge that one of the committee’s members move a resolution that the House disallow the tikanga regulations.
That’s a good idea, and a way for Parliament to say this is going too far.
IMO Parliament need to go even further and legislate so that no professional body can insist on completing some sort of cultural course as a requirement for registration. We’ve seen this for real estate agents now, and this is actually all about trying to impose a unilateral world view on all professional bodies.
UPDATE: The Dean of the AUT Law School, Khylee Quince, responded to Mr Judd’s article on social media saying:
I suppose it was inevitable that one of the old racist dinosaurs would make a pathetic squeal in an attempt to preserve the status quo…. Mr Judd and his “matauranga Maori is not science” friends can go die quietly in the corner…
Mr Judd points out:
What sort of lawyers will be produced by a law faculty led by someone who resorts to petty abuse instead of engaging in rational argument?
Why did she not explain why tikanga is law? Why did she not explain why a body of law built up over centuries for the purpose of testing whether a custom should be accorded the status of law must be jettisoned because tikanga cannot meet those standards? Why did she not answer other matters raised in my complaint to the regulations review committee? Responses like those could have been expected from a person holding a privileged leadership position.
The mindless abuse by Dean Quince of Mr Judd is something you might expect from an excitable first year law student, not the Dean of a Law School.
t makes you worry for any student at AUT Law School. If they dare disagree with the Dean, will they also be subject to such abuse? Does AUT Law School strike you as a place that welcomes debate and disagreement?
I can only suggest that law firms and others avoid hiring anyone who graduates as a lawyer from AUT. We want lawyers who are trained got debate and think, not just call people names and say they hope they die.
Incidentally Mr Judd has been a KC/QC for 29 years. As far as I can see he has appeared before the Supreme Court over a dozen times, and before the Privy Council almost the same. I’d say he has learnt the right to express his opinion on legal matters, without being abused for it.
Dean Quince, before she became an academic, was a staff solicitor for three years.
Kāinga Ora has been ordered to pay a tenant $6000 after she was “terrorised” by her neighbours and fellow social housing tenants, who pooed outside her door and allegedly threw a woman off a balcony.
Poor woman.
The tenant said they had been “terrorised” by their neighbours, who had made death threats, left blood, urine and phlegm around the complex, pooed outside her door, slashed car tyres, had fights in the hallways, used methamphetamine, intimidated other tenants and invited antisocial visitors onto the premises who knocked on residents’ doors asking for money.
Any of these should lead to eviction. Being able to carry on doing all of these is unthinkable.
Kāinga Ora sent six notices to the tenants requesting a meeting to discuss the bad behaviour – all which went ignored – before finally applying to the tribunal to have them evicted in March 2024, two weeks after the complaining tenant filed their own complaint to the tribunal.
Why six notices? At the most you would do two and the third should be a final warning or eviction notice.
The tribunal decision noted that Kāinga Ora had offered to move the complainant to another home multiple times, instead of applying to the tribunal to have the unruly tenants evicted sooner.
“I am very confident in concluding that any reasonable landlord would have applied to the Tenancy Tribunal well before the landlord did in this case,” Woodhouse said in his decision.
Would be nice to have the state being a “reasonable landlord”
Minister of Housing Chris Bishop said Kāinga Ora needed to be a better landlord.
Two articles give a useful contrast in balance. Both seek to be neutral explainer articles.
This one in the Herald on Social Investment covers the pros and cons nicely. It links to critical pieces and talks about aspects that failed and aspects that are more promising.
Then we have the Stuff article which says it is about explaining Maori Wards. I don’t think it means to be biased, but the total absence of any of the principled arguments from opponents means it is. I suspect it is because they have never been reported in almost any medium.
Some extracts:
Aotearoa never even noticed as nearly two-thirds of its councils adopted Māori wards, but that quiet revolution could be set for a very public execution.
They did notice. They just had their right to have any say in it removed by Labour.
Unlike every other type of ward, Māori wards could be overturned by community-initiated votes (also called referendums, or polls).
There is no mention of the view of opponents that wards based on racial ancestry are fundamentally different to wards based on geography. You can change where you live but can’t change your ancestors.
Geographic wards or constituencies exist in almost every democratic form of Government, and have been around for hundreds of years.
A decision on whether or not to a specific geographic ward is routine. A decision on whether to introduce a race based ward is a significant constitutional change, and opponents argue one the public should get to decide, not politicians.
Now you may not agree with my view, but that is the view of many who are opposed, and it is never given a mention in the story,. They accept the framing of the left/proponents entirely that there is no difference between the two type of wards.
If a Council wanted to introduce a gender based ward, would that be no different? Or an age based ward? A religious ward?
The article quotes Professor Meihana Durie (Ngāti Kauwhata), a long-time campaigner for Māori wards in Manawatū and Kaihautū for Māori Laws and Philosophy at Te Wānanga o Raukawa, Dr Carwyn Jones. No opponents are quoted. The latter said:
Fundamental rights like equality and non-discrimination ‒ giving voice to under-represented communities ‒ is something all democracies recognise as important, he said.
No mention of the fact that after the 2019 local body elections, we actually had Māori Councillors slightly over-represented to their shoe of the adult population – 14% to 12%. The removing of the public in having a say, now means Māori Councillors are massively over-represented at 21%. So there is no under-representation.
Also note 75% of Maori members were not elected in Maori wards, so if there were no wards, there would still be around 16% of members who are Maori.
The actual under-represent ted communities are Asian NZera and Pacific NZers.
There’s nothing fundamentally different about Māori wards ‒ they ensure people who haven’t been “well-served or well-heard” can be involved.
That’s his view, and it should be in the article. But the total failure to give voice to a different view, means this is not an explainer – it is advocacy.
The NZ Media Council has found that an opinion piece written by Damien Grant contained a significant factual inaccuracy.
However, the Council agreed with Dr Ali that the statement: “The worst intentional crime committed by Israel is to buy land off West Bank farmers and build houses” was inaccurate. The word “buy” is problematic.
The vast balance of opinion is that a lot of the land acquired by Israelis in the occupied territories was not purchased from Palestinians in the usual sense of an agreement and payment of money. It is inaccurate to describe the West Bank and/or the territories as having been bought off the Palestinians.
The Media Council said that Stuff, to their credit, published a correction and explanation, changing the word “buy” to “acquire”.
Let’s assume that the word acquire should have been used instead of buy. It is still interesting that a one word inaccuracy can get a negative finding by the Press Council. Will this standard be applied to all opinion columns in future? If so, I think they will be very busy.
And whether buy is inaccurate is highly debatable – it is a contentious topic, not an undisputed fact.
“There are less children in care now than as at 30 June 2019 when there were 6450 children and young people in care and protection custody and 140 in youth justice custody, a total of 6590 children in care. As at 30 June 2023 there were 4317 children and young people in care and protection custody and 162 in youth justice custody, a total of 4479 children in care.”
So the number of children in care or custody have dropped by a third since 2019.
This could be a good or a bad thing. It is like Labour’s policy to reduce the prison population by 30%.
If you achieve that because less violent crimes are occurring, that is good. If you achieve that because you are just not sending serious recidivist criminals to prison, and more violent crimes are occurring, it is a bad thing.
In this case, a good thing would be if fewer kids are in care, because fewer kids are being abused and assaulted.
There were (in 2019) 891 acts intended to cause injury perpetrated against 0-4 year-olds.
There were 1,296 acts intended to cause injury perpetrated against the same age group. That’s an increase of 45% (with no equivalent rise in the size of the demographic.)
So violent offending against under 5s has increased 45% but the number of kids in care has decreased by 33%. That is a huge concern.
Spend 20 minutes viewing this video by Unherd about the disinformation industry, and how this is used by social media to suppress sites who interview the wrong people!
Imagine what the outcry would have been if it was discovered in the 1990s that Bill Clinton didn’t just have affairs, but that he:
Arranged for a friendly newspaper to buy up all the stories of affairs, so they could bury them, as confirmed by the one
Had the newspaper pay off some of the women, as illegal undisclosed campaign contributions
Had the newspaper pay off a doorman who said that Clinton had a baby with a woman he wasn’t marred to
Also arranged for the newspaper to invent fake stories about his contenders for the nomination, and then repeated the fake stories after they were published.
Had his lawyer pay off the women he had affairs with, and claimed the payoffs were legal expenses
had a newspaper editor who said ““At least if he wins, I’ll be pardoned for electoral fraud,””
I suspect those who say it is no big thing for one former President, wouldn’t say the same if it was Clinton.
Another allegation has come to light against Green MP Julie Anne Genter, with a business owner claiming the MP, who is working from home after an incident this week in Parliament, grabbed her arm “and gave it quite a strong shake” as they spoke.
Wellington business owner Nicola Cranfield said she saw Genter at Midlands Park at the end of last year.
“I didn’t know if it was her, so I said, ‘excuse me, are you Julie Anne Genter?’
“I was really curious to know about the letter that she had originally written to [former mayor] Justin Lester and I’ve never been able to get any clarification on it. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is a great opportunity’.
“I asked her about it and she immediately got really, really defensive and quite… She definitely blocked me and didn’t want to talk about it.
“I also said to her, ‘you might not realise but I’ve got a retail store just there and I just don’t think it would be viable if [the Golden Mile] goes ahead.’
Cranfield, who has run the Cranfields homewear store on Johnstone St for 25 years, is closing this year after 33 years of business in Wellington, citing uncertainty over the Golden Mile project.
“I thought maybe she doesn’t hear stories on the ground. Maybe everything’s filtered through and that could be useful information for her and that was when she grabbed my arm and gave it quite a strong shake.”
Cranfield said she was quite “quite surprised that she grabbed my arm”, and said it felt “really inappropriate”.
“I was so shocked… I was just like, ‘oh, that’s next-level to be grabbed by a politician.
So that is No 3.
Simon Woolf, formerly a Wellington city councillor, now with the Greater Wellington Regional Council, alleged an incident in 2019 where he was photographing an event, in a personal business capacity, outside Parliament. Genter was attending as associate transport minister. Just a few months earlier Lets Get Wellington Moving had been launched, sparking heated debate about cycleways and mass rapid transit.
Woolf said Genter “came right up to my face and complained bitterly about the slow progress with the city council and the cycleway implementation. I had to tell her three times that I wasn’t there as a councillor, I had two cameras around my neck, and that I was there as a photographer”.
And No 4.
So we have allegations of:
Losing her cool in Parliament and storming across the House to shut at an MP opposite
Losing her cool at a small business owner in her electorate on the issue of cycleways, and filming her
Grabbing the arm of another small business owner who wanted to talK to her about the Golden Mile project
Haranguing a City Councillor who was attending an event in his capacity as a photographer
I don’t think it is unfair to conclude she seems to have anger issues.
Last week, we were sent draft principles for what discourse Victoria University intends to allow on campus. …
“We should not provide a platform for, nor invite, individuals or groups to speak on campus that have previously demonstrated or are expected to express hate speech as the current law defines…”
So Vic wants pre-crimes where they can decide in advance what someone is likely to say, and ban them on that basis. The left see hate speech as anything that isn’t identity politics, and hence Don Brash was banned from Massey.
No one in NZ has ever been prosecuted for so called hate speech under the current law, so this is why VUW needs to allow them to decide in advance that someone might.
We should not provide a platform for, nor invite, individuals or groups to speak on campus that have previously demonstrated or are expected to express hate speech as the current law defines or are likely not to support the principles above.
Once again, expected to express.
How about you just let invited guests speak. If what they say breaks the law, then someone can complain afterwards.
Imagine two farmers, each with a plot of land. One farmer finds ways to make his land just 1% more productive each year – a bit better irrigation, a new crop rotation strategy, or a slight improvement in fertiliser use. The other farmer, content with his current methods, sees no need for change.
Fast forward 20 years, and the difference between the two farms is dramatic. The innovative farmer’s land is now 22% more productive, while the passive farmer’s plot has stagnated. Which farm would an heir prefer to inherit?
This simple example illustrates the power of compound growth, a concept famously marvelled at by Albert Einstein, who reportedly called it the “eighth wonder of the world.”
Just as small, consistent improvements can lead to dramatic long-term gains in farming, the same principle applies to a nation’s productivity.
The only sustainable way to lift our standard of living is to lift our productivity.
Unfortunately, New Zealand’s productivity figures are troubling. Statistics New Zealand’s latest estimates, released this week, show negative growth for the year ended March 2023 across all three measures – labour, capital, and multi-factor productivity.
Even more worrying is the long-term trend: decadal labour productivity growth has steadily declined from 1.9% p.a. in 2006, to a paltry 0.6% to 2023.
Negative productivity is a disaster.
But let’s look at the average by Government in power.
So from March 1996 to March 2000 we had spectacular labour productivity and muktifactor productivity and modest capital productivity.
From March 2000 to March 2009, reasonable labour productivity, negative capital productivity and near zero multi factor productivity.
March 2009 to March 2018 also saw reasonable labour productivity, modest capital producitivyt and reasonable multi factor productivity.
March 2018 to March 2023 saw near zero labour productivity, negative capital productivity and negative multifactor productivity. Basically we went backwards with productivity.
To put these numbers into perspective, let us consider their impact on the average New Zealand household. If labour productivity continues to grow at the current sluggish rate of 0.5% per year, the average household income from salaries and wages will only reach $92,000 in 2023 dollars by 2043.
However, if productivity growth is a robust 2% annually, that figure jumps to $124,000 – markedly helping future generations to afford a higher standard of living, a cleaner environment, and more leisure time.
The difference to our standard of living is immense.
So, what can be done to turn the tide on New Zealand’s dismal productivity trend?
The answer lies in a concerted and sustained effort from successive governments, with businesses, and individuals able and willing to respond. Attracting overseas investment, reducing red tape to encourage innovation, and improving educational outcomes are all crucial components of the recipe.
Also important is helping those without jobs to find work and shifting people out of low-productivity roles
We need far far more stories on productivity and fewer on job losses.
This graph is pretty striking: New Zealand's productivity performance is historically poor and now looks shocking h/t @dskillingpic.twitter.com/eNZaPcQYF6
In what’s been described as a win for common sense, and after an exhaustive 18-month process, the building regulator has determined that water tanks are “unlikely” to be a fire risk.
MBIE concluded:
“[It is] very unlikely a fire could occur in the tank given that the plastic tank would contain water and air”
As parents, teachers and community leaders shivered together on that wintry morning, the project was already in trouble: costs had blown out from an estimated $63m to a staggering $405m.
$400 million to move two schools is just crazy. That is almost a cost of $200,000 per student!
By December, Hipkins had made up his mind: Bohally would be demolished and the two new campuses established there. The intermediate would move across town and be rebuilt on the old Marlborough Boys’ College site with space for up to 720 pupils.
Design work was set to start in the new year. But there was no mention of a revised budget in the official announcement. Officials, and Hipkins, already knew the cost had reached $170m, but that wasn’t made public.
So already blown out by over 150% and public not told.
Two years later and the costs kept going up, so officials brought in consultants Deloitte who reviewed the business case, and delivered more bad news: the bill was now $250m. Deloitte’s bill for that work was $356,763.
Still, the project rolled on. Officials needed a cash injection to pay for the design work and so in December 2020 advised Hipkins of the blow-out.
This time, the rest of the Cabinet was not officially advised, although Robertson was given “an A3”.
The cost has increased 300% and Hipkins didn’t tell Cabinet!
“We went through a process of a lot of consultation with the ministry and the other schools on the design … and the design concept was very good. There was just no talk about budgets at that time,” Tim Burfoot, chair of Marlborough Boys’ board of trustees said.
Of course not. It’s wasn’;’t their money, it was ours.
Rick Herd stepped down after 10 years as chief executive of Naylor Love in March.
“There seemed to be no accountability for managing the budget,” he said. “When prices went up, no-one said: ‘How can we bring this back down?’
“It snowballed. We were always asking ourselves when someone would come in and take control of the budget.”
The design was “ambitious and reflected aspirations of the community”, the ministry’s head of property infrastructure and digital Sam Fowler acknowledged.
As opposed to the aspirations of taxpayers!
“Given the scale of the cost escalation, it is appropriate to test the Minister and the Government appetite for the current approach at this price… we need direction,” officials wrote. It presented a range of options, ranging from proceeding with the $400m+ build, scaling the project back, or abandoning the relocation in favour of upgrading the existing buildings, at a cost of $200m.
Hipkins didn’t bring the options to Cabinet. He directed the ministry to proceed “under the current investment approach”, which meant getting smaller amounts approved each year through the Budget process.
So Hipkins told them to just for a bit more money each time, so Cabinet wouldn’t realise the costs had blown out 500%!
With the 2023 Budget fast approaching, Hipkins could have taken the opportunity to take the entire project and its over-run to Cabinet. He opted not to, and directed officials to continue with the approach of making Budget bids for incremental amounts.
I’d be annoyed if I was in that Cabinet!
“This was the perfect example of a project which could have been done through fantastic, repeatable designs, on a budget. And they chose not to do that. It was all architects and fancy designs and a bespoke building.”
A gold plated building charged to taxpayers than than a modest but effective one.
As the HRC “invests approximately $120 million per year on behalf of government”, what independent analysis, if any, has the HRC undertaken to ensure the almost three-quarters of a billion dollars invested since 2018 has benefitted New Zealanders and their health.
Seems a reasonable question. You spend $360 million every three years on health research, so can you pint to the benefits of it for NZers health.
HRC undertakes a rigorous assessment process where each application is assessed by science experts before any grant is recommended for funding and any investment is made. Any independent analysis to determine the benefit of investment in health research would need to be undertaken by an agency other than the HRC.
So the answer seems to be there is no independent analysis of health benefits from the research.
I’d like to see much more health research focused on areas such as communicable diseases (ie the next pandemic) and less on spending millions to discover that if your kids go to the supermarket with you, they see lots of advertisements!
A good approach for the Government would be to mandate much more of a focus on actual outcomes. For example does a sugar tax actually led to decreases in obesity as opposed to just decreases in that food or drinks that is taxed.
55% of 1st strikers were sentenced to less than 2 years imprisonment (or no imprisonment)
20% of 1st strikers were sentenced to 2 – 3 years imprisonment
25% of 1st strikers were sentenced to more than 3 years imprisonment
2nd strikers
31% of 2nd strikers were sentenced to less than 2 years imprisonment (or no imprisonment)
22% of 2nd strikers were sentenced to 2 – 3 years imprisonment
47% of 2nd strikers were sentenced to more than 3 years imprisonment
This data comes from someone who has OIAd this data.
The Government’s proposed new law will see 55% of violent or sexual offenders not get a first strike and 31% of what would have been second strikers not get a second strike.
Arguably it could even see 75% of first strikers and 53% of second strikers avoid strikes as Judges who give a sentence of just over two years would probably reduce it to avoid having to give a strike.
The proposed new law is not adequate. We need to demand a stronger law, not a symbolic law.
As is usual on Kiwiblog (and other NZ sites) there are habitual ‘Trolls.‘ Unfortunately any pro-Israel statements, and even my blog series on archaeology in Israel, attracted anti-semitic comment and statements (haters are everywhere).
However, on Blog #7 of that illustrated series, “Tranquil” published this very well-researched and definiative comment by Lawrence Auster, which is worth reposting here for those interested…
Obviously founder of Kiwiblog DPF has in more recent years researched and celebrated his own Jewish heritage. John Key’s mother was Jewish, which makes him Jewish by most definitions.
This article may help to shed some light on the Palestinian claim conundrum.
Quote – “There is a myth hanging over all discussion of the Palestinian problem: the myth that this land was “Arab” land taken from its native inhabitants by invading Jews. Whatever may be the correct solution to the problems of the Middle East, let’s get a few things straight:
§ As a strictly legal matter, the Jews didn’t take Palestine from the Arabs; they took it from the British, who exercised sovereign authority in Palestine under a League of Nations mandate for thirty years prior to Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. And the British don’t want it back.
§ If you consider the British illegitimate usurpers, fine. In that case, this territory is not Arab land but Turkish land, a province of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until the British wrested it from them during the Great War in 1917. And the Turks don’t want it back.
§ If you look back earlier in history than the Ottoman Turks, who took over Palestine over in 1517, you find it under the sovereignty of the yet another empire not indigenous to Palestine: the Mamluks, who were Turkish and Circassian slave-soldiers headquartered in Egypt. And the Mamluks don’t even exist any more, so they can’t want it back.
So, going back 800 years, there’s no particularly clear chain of title that makes Israel’s title to the land inferior to that of any of the previous owners. Who were, continuing backward:
§ The Mamluks, already mentioned, who in 1250 took Palestine over from:
§ The Ayyubi dynasty, the descendants of Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim leader who in 1187 took Jerusalem and most of Palestine from:
§ The European Christian Crusaders, who in 1099 conquered Palestine from:
§ The Seljuk Turks, who ruled Palestine in the name of:
§ The Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, which in 750 took over the sovereignty of the entire Near East from:
§ The Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, which in 661 inherited control of the Islamic lands from
§ The Arabs of Arabia, who in the first flush of Islamic expansion conquered Palestine in 638 from:
§ The Byzantines, who (nice people—perhaps it should go to them?) didn’t conquer the Levant, but, upon the division of the Roman Empire in 395, inherited Palestine from:
§ The Romans, who in 63 B.C. took it over from:
§ The last Jewish kingdom, which during the Maccabean rebellion from 168 to 140 B.C. won control of the land from:
§ The Hellenistic Greeks, who under Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. conquered the Near East from:
§ The Persian empire, which under Cyrus the Great in 639 B.C. freed Jerusalem and Judah from:
§ The Babylonian empire, which under Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. took Jerusalem and Judah from:
§ The Jews, meaning the people of the Kingdom of Judah, who, in their earlier incarnation as the Israelites, seized the land in the 12th and 13th centuries B.C. from:
§ The Canaanites, who had inhabited the land for thousands of years before they were dispossessed by the Israelites.
As the foregoing suggests, any Arab claim to sovereignty based on inherited historical control will not stand up. Arabs are not native to Palestine, but are native to Arabia, which is called Arab-ia for the breathtakingly simple reason that it is the historic home of the Arabs. The terroritories comprising all other “Arab” states outside the Arabian peninsula—including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, as well as the entity now formally under the Palestinian Authority—were originally non-Arab nations that were conquered by the Muslim Arabs when they spread out from the Arabian peninsula in the first great wave of jihad in the 7th century, defeating, mass-murdering, enslaving, dispossessing, converting, or reducing to the lowly status of dhimmitude millions of Christians and Jews and destroying their ancient and flourishing civilizations. Prior to being Christian, of course, these lands had even more ancient histories. Pharaonic Egypt, for example, was not an Arab country through its 3,000 year history.
The recent assertion by the Palestinian Arabs that they are descended from the ancient Canaanites whom the ancient Hebrews displaced is absurd in light of the archeological evidence. There is no record of the Canaanites surviving their destruction in ancient times. History records literally hundreds of ancient peoples that no longer exist. The Arab claim to be descended from Canaanites is an invention that came after the 1964 founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the same crew who today deny that there was ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Prior to 1964 there was no “Palestinian” people and no “Palestinian” claim to Palestine; the Arab nations who sought to overrun and destroy Israel in 1948 planned to divide up the territory amongst themselves. Let us also remember that prior to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the name “Palestinian” referred to the Jews of Palestine.
In any case, today’s “Palestine,” meaning the West Bank and Gaza, is, like most of the world, inhabited by people who are not descendants of the first human society to inhabit that territory. This is true not only of recently settled countries like the United States and Argentina, where European settlers took the land from the indigenous inhabitants several hundred years ago, but also of ancient nations like Japan, whose current Mongoloid inhabitants displaced a primitive people, the Ainu, aeons ago. Major “native” tribes of South Africa, like the Zulu, are actually invaders from the north who arrived in the 17th century. India’s caste system reflects waves of fair-skinned Aryan invaders who arrived in that country in the second millennium B.C. One could go on and on.
The only nations that have perfect continuity between their earliest known human inhabitants and their populations of the present day are Iceland, parts of China, and a few Pacific islands. The Chinese case is complicated by the fact that the great antiquity of Chinese civilization has largely erased the traces of whatever societies preceded it, making it difficult to reconstruct to what extent the expanding proto-Chinese displaced (or absorbed) the prehistoric peoples of that region. History is very sketchy in regard to the genealogies of ancient peoples. The upshot is that “aboriginalism”—the proposition that the closest descendants of the original inhabitants of a territory are the rightful owners—is not tenable in the real world. It is not clear that it would be a desirable idea even if it were tenable. Would human civilization really be better off if there had been no China, no Japan, no Greece, no Rome, no France, no England, no Ireland, no United States? Back to the Arabs
I have no problem recognizing the legitimacy of the Arabs’ tenure in Palestine when they had it, from 638 to 1099, a period of 461 years out of a history lasting 5,000 years. They took Palestine by military conquest, and they lost it by conquest, to the Christian Crusaders in 1099. Of course, military occupation by itself does not determine which party rightly has sovereignty in a given territory. Can it not be said that the Arabs have sovereign rights, if not to all of Israel, then at least to the West Bank, by virtue of their majority residency in that region from the early Middle Ages to the present?
To answer that question, let’s look again at the historical record. Prior to 1947, as we’ve discussed, Palestine was administered by the British under the Palestine Mandate, the ultimate purpose of which, according to the Balfour Declaration, was the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. In 1924 the British divided the Palestine Mandate into an Arabs-only territory east of the Jordan, which became the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and a greatly reduced Palestine Mandate territory west of the Jordan, which was inhabited by both Arabs and Jews.
Given the fact that the Jews and Arabs were unable to coexist in one state, there had to be two states. At the same time, there were no natural borders separating the two peoples, in the way that, for example, the Brenner Pass has historically marked the division between Latin and Germanic Europe. Since the Jewish population was concentrated near the coast, the Jewish state had to start at the coast and go some distance inland. Exactly where it should have stopped, and where the Arab state should have begun, was a practical question that could have been settled in any number of peaceful ways, almost all of which the Jews would have accepted. The Jews’ willingness to compromise on territory was demonstrated not only by their acquiescence in the UN’s 1947 partition plan, which gave them a state with squiggly, indefensible borders, but even by their earlier acceptance of the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan, which gave them nothing more than a part of the Galilee and a tiny strip along the coast. Yet the Arab nations, refusing to accept any Jewish sovereignty in Palestine even if it was the size of a postage stamp, unanimously rejected the 1937 Peel plan, and nine years later they violently rejected the UN’s partition plan as well.
When the Arabs resorted to arms in order to wipe out the Jews and destroy the Jewish state, they accepted the verdict of arms. They lost that verdict in 1948, and they lost it again in 1967, when Jordan, which had annexed the West Bank in 1948 (without any objections from Palestinian Arabs that their sovereign nationhood was being violated), attacked Israel from the West Bank during the Six Day War despite Israel’s urgent pleas that it stay out of the conflict. Israel in self-defense then captured the West Bank. The Arabs thus have no grounds to complain either about Israel’s existence (achieved in ’48) or about its expanded sovereignty from the river to the sea (achieved in ’67).
The Arabs have roiled the world for decades with their furious protest that their land has been “stolen” from them. One might take seriously such a statement if it came from a pacifist people such as the Tibetans, who had quietly inhabited their land for ages before it was seized by the Communist Chinese in 1950. The claim is laughable coming from the Arabs, who in the early Middle Ages conquered and reduced to slavery and penury ancient peoples and civilizations stretching from the borders of Persia to the Atlantic; who in 1947 rejected an Arab state in Palestine alongside a Jewish state and sought to obliterate the nascent Jewish state; who never called for a distinct Palestinian Arab state until the creation of the terrorist PLO in 1964—sixteen years after the founding of the state of Israel; and who to this moment continue to seek Israel’s destruction, an object that would be enormously advanced by the creation of the Arab state they demand. The Arab claim to sovereign rights west of the Jordan is only humored today because of a fatal combination of world need for Arab oil, leftist Political Correctness that has cast the Israelis as “oppressors,” and, of course, good old Jew-hatred.”
