Karl du Fresne: Professor Dutta ducks below the parapet

It’s now more than three weeks since I challenged Professor Mohan Dutta (below) of Massey University to a debate, and still there has been no response.

In the meantime, he has locked his Twitter account after I urged readers of this blog to check it out. I thought people should see for themselves how incendiary – in fact borderline crazy – some of his tweets were.

Dutta would no doubt say he locked his account to protect himself from racist abuse, but another explanation is that he realised how bad it looked for him. Better to limit his readership to fellow zealots whom he knows won’t challenge him.

Before he ducked for cover beneath the parapet I cut and pasted bits of his Twitter feed as examples of his off-the-wall extremism. They reveal his overtly racist obsession with the evils of whiteness and how white supremacy “erases” minority voices in New Zealand.

He characterises free speech as an American idea that doesn’t fit New Zealand and needs to be “decolonised”. This from a man who (a) exercises his own right to free speech in a highly inflammatory way and (b) assumes the right to decide what’s good for New Zealand despite having arrived here only five minutes ago, metaphorically speaking.

For the record, I don’t dispute Dutta’s right to say what he thinks. He’s as entitled to freedom of speech as I am. In fact he has done us all a favour by obligingly exposing to the world the poisonous, polarising rhetoric he spouts from his privileged position as the Dean’s Chair in Communication at Massey.

My argument is not with Dutta’s right to express himself. But I do object, strenuously, to the fact that the state generously provides him with a taxpayer-funded platform from which to propagate ideas that undermine democracy and promote division; ideas that are fundamentally hostile to the society he has chosen to live in, and in a broader sense openly hostile to the values of Western civilisation that most New Zealanders (including the vast majority of immigrants) hold to.

In fact a crucial question that I would put to Dutta, in the unlikely event that we meet face to face, is this: Why is he here? Why choose to live in New Zealand when he clearly finds this country so vile? It was a downright perverse move unless you accept either or both of two explanations. One is that he came here with the aim of tearing down a civilised, tolerant, liberal democracy painstakingly built up over nearly two centuries. The other is that he was made welcome by a university sector that seems to have infinite room for second-rate imported academics pushing brazen ideological agendas, but which shows zero tolerance for any competing narratives.

Dutta may be a particularly conspicuous and egregious example of this phenomenon, but he’s not alone. The system is infested with people like him.

There is an argument that the best response to Dutta is ridicule, on the basis that his pronouncements are so risible they don’t deserve to be taken seriously. People say he’s deranged and that I’m only encouraging him. To take that approach, however, would be to ignore the damage he’s doing. He needs to be held accountable for his choleric, hateful rhetoric – as do the vice-chancellor of Massey (the Australian Jan Thomas, who famously and dishonestly banned Don Brash as a supposed menace to public safety) and the university council. After all, Dutta is operating with impunity under their imprimatur.

So I continue to wait patiently for the professor's response to my invitation. I also eagerly anticipate Parts Three, Four and Five of his promised five-part hit job on me, which seem to be taking some time to materialise. In the meantime, other people have been digging into Dutta's record – engaging in the type of online archaeology that the extreme neo-Marxist Left, as represented by people like the excitable Secret Squirrel conspiracy theorists at the Disinformation Project, normally specialises in.

Auckland lawyer Juliet Moses, spokeswoman for the New Zealand Jewish Council, has exposed Dutta’s support – along with another far-Left New Zealand academic, Professor Richard Jackson from the comically misnamed National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies – for a British academic who has been branded as anti-Semitic.

Someone else has found evidence that that Dutta was previously known by the surname Dutta-Bergman, raising the tantalising possibility that he is himself tainted by the ineradicable stain of white supremacy.

Meanwhile, Ben Espiner of The Platform has weighed in with a muscular and well-reasoned critique that concludes with the line: “It is generally believed that the most ignorant and indefensible of ideas wilt the fastest under the light of public scrutiny”. Public scrutiny is what Dutta, who's normally an incorrigible attention-seeker, now seems suddenly eager to avoid.

Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. He blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz where this article was sourced.