To focus on only one blunder, Minto delivered this beauty with his trademark sanctimony: “Israel has killed any potential Mandelas.” South Africa would be evoked a lot last night as if a knowledge of one conflict can excuse almost total ignorance of another. The hosts nodded solemnly. Those damn Jews. Murdering any Palestinian Christ-like figures figures, doesn’t it? Except, the claim was bullshit, and not only that but a complete inversion of the truth.
If there ever was a Palestinian Mandela, their greatest threat was not Israel, but other Palestinians, along with surrounding despotic regimes that patronised the most fanatical and violent among them.
PLO moderate Issam Sartawi had grown weary of Arafat’s rejectionism, and the unhelpful delusions sold to a suffering people (such as Arafat’s boast that the PLO had won the Lebanon war). It is claimed that Sartawi once said, “The antisemites are the greatest enemy of the Palestinian people”. Rumoured to be engaging in backchannel peace talks, Sartawi was assassinated in 1983 by the Abu Nidal Organization, a group so unhinged that it made Arafat look like Dag Hammarskjöld. Abu Nidal’s base of operations? Baghdad. His benefactor? Saddam Hussein. And this was no covert alliance, either: Saddam openly housed, armed, and bankrolled this and other groups committed not to peace, but to continued death and mayhem.
During the Second Intifada, Saddam went further, offering $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers – not those who protested, not those who negotiated, but those who strapped explosives to their chests and murdered civilians in pizzerias and on buses. The strategic demolition of any prospect for compromise was Ba’athist policy in Iraq. And Arafat’s own relationship with Hussein was cordial. Recall his support for Iraq in the butcher’s invasion of Kuwait that severely cost him Western support. But after bankrolling the most annihilist factions in the PLO for so long, to ensure that no peace was ever reached, did Arafat have a choice?
The history is there for anyone not too lazy, or too ideologically committed, to see. What may have helped the bewildered trio on BHN is to view a PLO and Hamas as a dictatorship first, with a chief goal being to survive, and a resistance movement a distant second. When you’re in the business of war – and Arafat showed us just how lucrative this business can be – what use do you have for peace? Or peacemakers? They’d be akin to inviting cockroaches into your restaurant. Call in the exterminator.
But Minto has constantly shown us he is completely immune to reality. He is what you get when activism hardens into dogma: when you start at the destination of chosen villain and walk backward from that point. He wasn’t asked to name any of these so-called Mandelas of course, nor to detail one of their assassinations. Brittenden, to be fair to him, would assume someone so committed to a cause carried an entry-level knowledge of it. But Minto simply does not.
And this is the reason the rhetorical arsenal of the entire movement consists of apartheid comparisons, slogans about genocide (that long pre-date this war), and a tired lexicon of anti-imperialist grievance. It’s the vocabulary of people who haven’t read a book in twenty years that wasn’t written by someone in the church, in large print, and no longer than 120 pages.
When writing for Bomber Bradbury’s The Daily Blog, Minto once referred to Turks as Arabs. Need I say more? One of the oldest and most obvious distinctions in the Middle East obliterated in a single sentence by New Zealand’s self-appointed authority on the region. You’d have to place Darryl Cooper alongside Andrew Roberts by comparison.
Oh, for a Douglas Murray, huh? To scold poor Pat for his recklessness and gullibility.
Dane Giraud is a comedy writer and a member of the NZ Jewish community. This article was first published HERE
If there ever was a Palestinian Mandela, their greatest threat was not Israel, but other Palestinians, along with surrounding despotic regimes that patronised the most fanatical and violent among them.
PLO moderate Issam Sartawi had grown weary of Arafat’s rejectionism, and the unhelpful delusions sold to a suffering people (such as Arafat’s boast that the PLO had won the Lebanon war). It is claimed that Sartawi once said, “The antisemites are the greatest enemy of the Palestinian people”. Rumoured to be engaging in backchannel peace talks, Sartawi was assassinated in 1983 by the Abu Nidal Organization, a group so unhinged that it made Arafat look like Dag Hammarskjöld. Abu Nidal’s base of operations? Baghdad. His benefactor? Saddam Hussein. And this was no covert alliance, either: Saddam openly housed, armed, and bankrolled this and other groups committed not to peace, but to continued death and mayhem.
During the Second Intifada, Saddam went further, offering $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers – not those who protested, not those who negotiated, but those who strapped explosives to their chests and murdered civilians in pizzerias and on buses. The strategic demolition of any prospect for compromise was Ba’athist policy in Iraq. And Arafat’s own relationship with Hussein was cordial. Recall his support for Iraq in the butcher’s invasion of Kuwait that severely cost him Western support. But after bankrolling the most annihilist factions in the PLO for so long, to ensure that no peace was ever reached, did Arafat have a choice?
The history is there for anyone not too lazy, or too ideologically committed, to see. What may have helped the bewildered trio on BHN is to view a PLO and Hamas as a dictatorship first, with a chief goal being to survive, and a resistance movement a distant second. When you’re in the business of war – and Arafat showed us just how lucrative this business can be – what use do you have for peace? Or peacemakers? They’d be akin to inviting cockroaches into your restaurant. Call in the exterminator.
But Minto has constantly shown us he is completely immune to reality. He is what you get when activism hardens into dogma: when you start at the destination of chosen villain and walk backward from that point. He wasn’t asked to name any of these so-called Mandelas of course, nor to detail one of their assassinations. Brittenden, to be fair to him, would assume someone so committed to a cause carried an entry-level knowledge of it. But Minto simply does not.
And this is the reason the rhetorical arsenal of the entire movement consists of apartheid comparisons, slogans about genocide (that long pre-date this war), and a tired lexicon of anti-imperialist grievance. It’s the vocabulary of people who haven’t read a book in twenty years that wasn’t written by someone in the church, in large print, and no longer than 120 pages.
When writing for Bomber Bradbury’s The Daily Blog, Minto once referred to Turks as Arabs. Need I say more? One of the oldest and most obvious distinctions in the Middle East obliterated in a single sentence by New Zealand’s self-appointed authority on the region. You’d have to place Darryl Cooper alongside Andrew Roberts by comparison.
Oh, for a Douglas Murray, huh? To scold poor Pat for his recklessness and gullibility.
Dane Giraud is a comedy writer and a member of the NZ Jewish community. This article was first published HERE
4 comments:
Let us be clear: John Minto is not interested in peace. He is interested in positions—ones that flatter his sense of righteousness while demanding nothing of his intellect. He mistakes volume for virtue and confusion for complexity. And like all career activists who long ago swapped inquiry for ideology, he has become the kind of man who can tell you everything about the villains in his head, but nothing at all about the real world he’s been shouting at for 40 years.
What’s striking is not Minto’s dedication — he’s nothing if not consistent — but his remarkable ability to ignore every geopolitical complexity that doesn’t fit his binary worldview.
In Minto’s universe, Israel is the imperial Goliath, Palestinians are eternal Davids, and everyone else (including Hamas and Iran) is just background noise best left unexamined.
Iran’s funding of terror groups? Its regional power games? Public executions and suppression of dissent? Not Minto’s concern. It doesn’t fit the narrative. He’s not anti-Jewish in the traditional sense, but his activism traffics in the kind of selective outrage that lets antisemitic tropes flourish in the guise of moral clarity. When you only ever protest one nation — the only Jewish one — while ignoring far worse crimes elsewhere, your bias isn’t just glaring; it’s ideological camouflage.
And now, in true performance-activist fashion, Minto has declared that New Zealand — population five million, foreign policy impact negligible — must “lead the way” in standing up to Israel. It’s the kind of statement that would make one raise an eyebrow and quip, “Yes, because shouting in Auckland is definitely going to solve the Middle East.”
These are not diplomatic efforts; they’re theatrical ones. Minto’s protests have long ceased to be about outcomes.
They’re about posture, about being seen to be on “the right side,” even if that means marching past the nuances and complexities that real peacemakers wrestle with.
New Zealand has every right to care about global justice. But when that care is reduced to simplistic slogans, selective rage, and symbolic protests that achieve nothing beyond self-congratulation, we’ve moved from politics to pantomime.
John Minto and the greens too, are no longer protesting against injustice. They performing, but without the talent. Zealots in drag.
Dane amplifying his article, I think....
Very well skewered Anon@10.31.
This Dane Giraud isn't very bright. He wants to analyze John Minto's comment about Nelson Mandelas being killed to see if there really might be some. It's just an illustration of something Mr Giraud - amongst the multiple thousand killed by your heroic Israelis there could have been people of world stature. Or maybe it's just regular people who are being blown apart by your army and airforce.
Jewish people seem to be like that though - maybe hidden away somewhere there's guilt about the death and destruction you have caused, so you take comments like this one seriously, and try to disprove them, as if in a small way you are being unfairly criticized for this man made disaster.
Your article is a simple attack the messenger one. What John Minto has or hasn't done os totally irrelevant to what you are doing in Gaza. Call it what you like - genocide or murder - that is what you are cheerleading for.
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