Whilst we have been watching the New Zealand government hand wringing and virtue signalling over the Christchurch Al Noor mosque massacre, there has been less attention paid to the question of how clean politically and morally is the New Zealand Islamic community? The answer may well be, if the information that I’m relaying below is correct, slightly less clean than the NZ govt and the various media outlets may be saying it is.
The first bit of information that makes me suspect that the New Zealand Islamic community is not the paragon of virtue comes from an archived web page, which has been circulated widely already. The second comes from a recently released video by Christian commentator David Wood about how Muslim leaders in New Zealand are blaming ‘the Jews’ for the Christchurch mosque horror.
I think nearly all of the mainstream media left out of their coverage of the Christchurch massacre, the case of a convert to Islam, Christopher Harvard, who was killed, along with a New Zealand convert to Islam, in a drone strike in Yemen in 2014. Harvard attended the Al Noor mosque and allegedly got radicalised there. It has later emerged that Harvard was linked to the Islamic terror group ‘Al Qaida on the Arabian Peninsular’. Harvard was a troubled young Australian man, who drifted into petty crime before converting to Islam. Harvard attended the Al Noor mosque in 2011 however there have been allegations that on special weekends for converts to Islam that there were speakers praising the idea of violent jihad and disparaging New Zealand culture as being morally weak.
According to a ‘Stuff Magazine’ article published in 2014, the mosque put on a special weekends to welcome Islamic converts which on previous occasions included speakers that one attendee said would be classed as ‘radical’. Of course the mosque denies this but I’m afraid that they would say that wouldn’t they? Too often we hear the excuse from mosques that they ‘didn’t know who the speaker was or what they would say’ when caught out hosting extreme preachers so I’m going to take the mosque’s denial with a pinch of salt.
Stuff Magazine said:
Mosque leaders confirmed Harvard stayed there and studied in 2011, but denied radical teaching took place. But a man who attended a converts’ weekend at the mosque 10 years ago said a visiting speaker from Indonesia talked about violent jihad and plenty shared his views. “Most of the men were angry with the moral weakness of New Zealand. I would say they were radical.”
If this statement from the man who attended this mosque in what would be 2004 is correct then the Al Noor mosque has had a long history of promoting or at the very least tolerating religious extremism. It may of course be a one off error that the mosque made in booking these particular speakers, but the combination of this allegation and the attendance of and dwelling at this mosque by a jihadist, makes me wonder how politically and morally clean is the Al Noor mosque?
The closeness of the relationship between the mosque and Christopher Harvard does raise some awkward questions for the management of the Al Noor mosque. Questions such as what was he being taught at the mosque along with who, if anyone, was paying him to stay at the mosque and why was he staying there and not elsewhere? There is certainly the strong possibility, if the information about the ‘converts weekend’ is correct, that the Al Noor mosque may tolerated stuff that we would call extreme,and that this extremism was quite well received by the audience. There seem to me to be at least fourteen years of questions about radicalisation that the Al Noor mosque should answer and most importantly answer honestly.
The second bit of information that makes me query the moral and political cleanliness of the New Zealand Muslim community comes from the learned Christian commentator on Islamic matters, David Wood. In a video published on the 26th March, Mr Wood gave an example of how the Christchurch massacre is feeding the inbuilt Jew-hatred of Islam. His video opens with footage of an Imam attending a ‘no hate’ event accompanied by the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden. The video then progresses onto an ‘anti hate’ demonstration, also attended by this Imam, who then proceeds to blame the Jews for the Christchurch massacre. The Imam harangues the crowd of Muslims and Lefties with the claim that the Israeli security service Mossad along with ‘Zionist businessmen’ in New Zealand paid for the attack.
This sort of behaviour is I’m afraid ‘normal for Islam’. As Mr Wood points out, Jew hatred is baked into Islam via the Koran and Hadiths. It’s the sort of ‘Jewish conspiracy theory’ thinking that is rife in the Islamic world and because it comes from Islamic scripture is very difficult to ameliorate or remove without destroying major tenets of Islam itself. There is much more open hostility to Jews in the Islamic scripture than there is for example in the Christian Testament. The ‘blood curse’ verse that inspired so much Christian related Jew hatred over the centuries has been reinterpreted and robbed of its power by putting it into historical context, by most of the world’s major Christian denominations. Islamic Jew hatred on the other hand is much more difficult to shift as there is little room for debate over matters of religion as opposed to that found in both Judaism and Christianity. Also there is, as Mr Wood says, a lot of Jew hatred in the Koran.
However even though I know how hard wired Jew hatred is within Islam, it is still disturbing to see an Imam, especially one whom the New Zealand Prime Minister has hobnobbed with, publicly promoting ‘Zionist plot’ guff. It does make me wonder how committed to integration or how peaceful the Islamic community of New Zealand really is? Hosting a jihadi and having a Jew hating Imam ranting in the street does not look to me like the actions of a peaceful group nor one that desires to integrate properly with those around them.
It is right and proper that decent people, even those opposed to Islam, condemn the murders of Christchurch, that should go without saying. But that justified condemnation should not blind us to the possibility that neither the Al Noor mosque itself nor elements in New Zealand’s Islamic community may have completely clean hands when it comes to extremism or hatred.
