A stoush between the Chief Human Rights Commissioner and a Jewish community leader has flared up following a showdown at Parliament.

Appearing before a parliamentary select committee today, Dr Stephen Rainbow was asked about his recent apology for incorrect comments he made about Muslims earlier this year.

“If my language has been injudicious . . .  then I have apologised for that,” he told MPs.

“I’ve apologised publicly. I’ve apologised privately. I’ve met with FIANZ [The Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand] to hear their concerns and to apologise to them, both in person and publicly, and I hold to that apology.”

The apology relates to a meeting he had with Jewish community leader Philippa Yasbek, from the anti-Zionist Jewish groups Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu, in February.

Yasbek said Rainbow claimed during the meeting that the Security Intelligence Services (SIS) threat assessment found Muslims posed a greater threat to the Jewish community in New Zealand than white supremacists.

In fact, the report states “white identity-motivated violent extremism [W-IMVE] remains the dominant identity-motivated violent extremism ideology in New Zealand”.

Rainbow changed his position
Rainbow told the committee he had since changed his position after receiving new information.

He said was disappointed he had “allowed [his] words to create a perception there was a prejudice there” and he would do everything in his power to repair his relationship with the Muslim community.

“Please be assured that I take this as a learning, and I will be far more measured with my comments in future.”

But Rainbow disputed another of Yasbek’s assertions that he had also raised the supposed antisemitism of Afghan refugees in West Auckland.

“It’s going to be really unhelpful if I get into a he-said-she-said, but I did not say the comments that were attributed to me about that. I do not believe that,” Rainbow said.

“I emphatically deny that I said that.”

‘It definitely stuck in my mind’ – Jewish community leader
Yasbek, who called for Rainbow’s resignation yesterday, was watching the select committee hearing from the back of the room.

Speaking to reporters afterwards, Yasbek said she was certain Rainbow had made the comments about Afghan refugees.

“It was particularly memorable because it was so specific and he said that he was concerned about the risk of anti-semitism in the community of Afghan refugees in West Auckland.

“It’s very specific. It’s not a sort of detail that one is likely to make up, and it definitely stuck in my mind.”

Yasbek said the race relations commissioner and two Human Rights Commission staff members were also in the room and should be interviewed to corroborate what happened.

“There were multiple witnesses. I am concerned that he has impugned my integrity in that way which is why there should be an independent investigation of this matter.”

Raised reported comments
Speaking to RNZ later, FIANZ chairman Abdur Razzaq said he raised the commissioner’s reported comments about Afghan refugees when he met with Rainbow several weeks ago.

“I raised it at the meeting with him and he did not correct me. At my meeting there were other members of the Human Rights Commission. He did not say he didn’t [say that].”

Razzaq said it was up to the justice minister as to whether or not Rainbow was fit for the role.

“When you hear statements like this, like ‘greatest threat’, he has forgotten it was precisely this kind of Islamophobic sentiment which gave rise to the terrorist of March 15, rise to the right-wing extremist terrorists to take action and they justify it with these kinds of statements.”

“[The commissioner] calls himself an academic, a student of history. Where is his lessons learned on this aspect? To pick a Muslim community by name… he has to really genuinely look at himself as to what he is doing and what he is saying.”

Minister backs Rainbow: ‘Doing his best’
Speaking at Parliament following the hearing, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said he backed Rainbow and believed the commissioner would learn from the experience.

“The new commissioner is doing his best. By his own admission he didn’t express himself well. He has apologised and he will be learning from that experience, and it is my expectation that he will be very careful in the way that he communicates in the future.”

Goldsmith said he stood by his appointment of Rainbow, despite the independent panel tasked with leading the process taking a different view.

“There’s a range of opinions on that. The advice that I had originally from the group was a real focus on legal skills, and I thought actually equally important was the ability to communicate ideas effectively.”

Speaking in Christchurch on Thursday afternoon, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said Rainbow had got it “totally wrong” and it was appropriate he had apologised.

“He completely and quite wrongfully mischaracterised a New Zealand SIS report talking about threats to the Jewish community and he was wrong about that.

“He has subsequently apologised about that but equally Minister Goldsmith has or is talking to him about those comments as well.”

‘Not elabiorating further’
RNZ approached the Human Rights Commission on Thursday afternoon for a response to Yasbek doubling down on her recollection Rainbow had talked about the supposed antisemitism of Afghan refugees in West Auckland.

“The Chief Commissioner will not be elaborating further about what was said in the meeting,” a spokesperson said.

“He’s happy to discuss the matter privately with the people involved,” a spokesperson said.

“Dr Rainbow acknowledges that what was said caused harm and offence and what matters most is the impact on communities. That is why he has apologised unreservedly and stands by his apology.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater is many things. It is:

• A family history
• A social history
• A history of the left-wing in Aotearoa
• A chilling reminder of the origin and continuation of the surveillance state in New Zealand, and
• A damn good read.

The book is a great example of citizen or activist authorship. The author, Maire Leadbeater, and her family are front and centre of the dark cloud of the surveillance state that has hung and still hangs over New Zealand’s “democracy”.

What better place to begin the book than the author noting that she had been spied on by the security services from the age of 10. What better place to begin than describing the role of the Locke family — Elsie, Jack, Maire, Keith and their siblings — have played in Aotearoa society over the last few decades.

And what a fitting way to end the book than with the final chapter entitled, “Person of Interest: Keith Locke”; Maire’s much-loved brother and our much-loved friend and comrade.

In between these pages is a treasure trove of commentary and stories of the development of the surveillance state in the settler colony of NZ and the impact that this has had on the lives of ordinary — no, extra-ordinary — people within this country.

The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.

I have often deprecatingly called myself a mere footnote of history as that is all I seem to appear as in many books written about recent progressive history in New Zealand. But it was without false modesty that when Maire gave me a copy of the book a couple of weeks back, I immediately went to the index, looked up my name and found that this time I was a bit more than a footnote, but had a section of a chapter written on my interaction with the spooks.

But it was after reading this, dipping into a couple of other “person of interest” stories of people I knew such as Keith, Mike Treen, the Rosenbergs, Murray Horton and then starting the book again from the beginning did it become clear on what issues the state was paranoid about that led it to build an apparatus to spy on its own citizens.

These were issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, de-colonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought. These are the issues that come up time and time again; essentially it was seditious or subversive to be part of any of these campaigns or ideologies.

Client state spying
The other common theme through the book is the role that the UK and more latterly the US has played in ensuring that their NZ client settler state plays by their rules, makes enemies of their enemies and spies on its own people for their “benefit”.

It was interesting to read how the “5 Eyes”, although not using that name, has been in operation as long as NZ has had a spying apparatus. In fact, the book shows that 3 of the 5 eyes forced NZ to establish its surveillance apparatus in the first place.

Maire, and her editor have arranged this book in a very reader friendly way. It is mostly chronological showing the rise of the surveillance state from the beginning of the 19th century, in dispersed with a series of vignettes of “Persons of Interest”.

Maire would probably acknowledge that this book could not have been written without the decision of the SIS to start releasing files (all beit they were heavily redacted with many missing parts) of many of us who have been spied on by the SIS over the years. So, on behalf of Maire, thank you SIS.

Maire has painstakingly gone through pages and pages of these primary source files and incorporated them into the historical narrative of the book showing what was happening in society while this surveillance was taking place.

I was especially delighted to read the history of the anti-war and conscientious objectors movement. Two years ago, almost to the day, we held the 50th anniversary of the Organisation to Halt Military Service (OHMS); an organisation that I founded and was under heavy surveillance in 1972.

We knew a bit about previous anti-conscription struggles but Maire has provided much more context and information that we knew. It was good to read about people like John Charters, Ormand Burton and Archie Barrington as well more known resisters such as my great uncle Archibald Baxter.

Within living memory
Many of the events covered take place within my living memory. But it was wonderful to be reminded of some things I had forgotten about or to find some new gems of information about our past.

Stories around Bill Sutch, Shirley Smith, Ann and Wolfgang Rosenberg, Jack and Mary Woodward, Gerald O’Brien, Allan Brash (yes, Don’s dad), Cecil Holmes, Jack Lewin are documented as well as my contemporaries such as Don Carson, David Small, Aziz Choudry, Trevor Richards, Jane Kelsey, Nicky Hager, Owen Wilkes, Tame Iti in addition to Maire, Keith and Mike Treen.

The book finishes with a more recent history of NZ again aping the US’s so-called war on terror with the introduction of an anti and counter-terrorism mandate for the SIS and its sister agencies

The book traverses events such as the detention of Ahmed Zaoui, the raid on the Kim Dotcom mansion, the privatisation of spying to firms such as Thomson and Clark, the Urewera raids, “Hit and Run” in Afghanistan. Missing the cut was the recent police raid and removal of the computer of octogenarian, Peter Wilson for holding money earmarked for a development project in DPRK (North Korea).

When we come to the end of the book we are reminded of the horrific Christchurch mosque attack and massacre and prior to that of the bombing of Wellington Trades Hall and the Rainbow Warrior. Also, the failure of the SIS to discover Mossad agents operating in NZ on fake passports.

We cannot but ask the question of why multi-millions of dollars have been spent spying on, surveilling and monitoring peace activists, trade unionists, communists, Māori and more latterly Muslims, when the terrorism that NZ has faced has been that perpetrated on these people not by these people.

Maire notes in the book that the SIS budget for 2021 was around $100 million with around 400 FTEs employed. This does not include GCSB or other parts of the security apparatus.

Seeking subversives in wrong places
This level of money has been spent for well over 100 years looking for subversives and terrorists in the wrong place!

Finally, although dealing with the human cost of the surveillance state, the book touches on some of the lighter sides of the SIS spying. Those of us under surveillance in the 1970s and 1980s remember the amateurish phone tapping that went on at that time.

Also, the men in cars with cameras sitting outside our flats for days on end. Not in the book, but I have one memory of such a man with a camera in a car outside our flat in Wallace Street, Wellington.

After a few days some of my flatmates took pity on him and made him a batch of scones which they passed through the window of his car. He stayed for a bit longer that day but we never saw him or an alternate again.

Another issue the book picks up is the obsession that the SIS and its foreign counterparts had with counting communists in NZ. I remember that the CIA used to put out a Communist Yearbook that described and attempted to count how many members were in each of the communist parties all around the world.

In NZ, my party, the Workers Communist League, was smaller than the SUP, CPNZ and SAL, but one year near the end of our existence we were pleasantly surprised to see that the CIA had almost to a person, doubled our membership.

We could not work out why, until we realised that we all had code names as well as real names and we were getting more and more slack at using the correct one in the correct place. Anyone surveilling us, counting names, would have counted double the names that we had as members! We took the compliment.

Thank you, Maire, for this great book. Thank you and your family for your great contribution to Aotearoa society.

Hopefully the hardships and human cost that you have shown in this book will commit or recommit the rest of us to struggle for a decolonised and socialist Aotearoa within a peaceful and multi-polar world.

And as one of Jack Locke’s political guides said: “the road may be long and torturous, but the future is bright.”

Robert Reid has more than 40 years’ experience in trade unions and in community employment development in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is a former general secretary the president of FIRST Union. Much of his work has been with disadvantaged groups and this has included work with Māori, Pacific peoples and migrant communities. This was his address tonight for the launch of The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of State Surveillance in Aotearoa New Zealand, by Maire Leadbeater.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The release of the threat assessment by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS) this week is the final piece in a defence and security puzzle that marks a genuine shift towards more open and public discussion of these crucial policy areas.

Together with July’s strategic foreign policy assessment from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the national security strategy released last week, it rounds out the picture of New Zealand’s place in a fast-evolving geopolitical landscape.

From increased strategic competition between countries, to declining social trust within them, as well as rapid technological change, the overall message is clear: business as usual is no longer an option.

By releasing the strategy documents in this way, the government and its various agencies clearly hope to win public consent and support — ultimately, the greatest asset any country possesses to defend itself.

NZSIS’s first unclassified threat assessment targets competition, public trust, technology https://t.co/5wetaOL1oA

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) August 10, 2023

Low threat of violent extremism
If there is good news in the SIS assessment, it is that the threat of violent extremism is still considered “low”. That means no change since the threat level was reassessed last year, with a terror attack considered “possible” rather than “probable”.

It is a welcome development since the threat level was lifted to “high” in the
immediate aftermath of the Christchurch terror attack in 2019.

This was lowered to “medium” about a month later — where it sat in September 2021, when another extremist attacked people with a knife in an Auckland mall, seriously
wounding five.

The threat level stayed there during the escalating social tension resulting from the government’s covid response. This saw New Zealand’s first conviction for sabotage and increasing threats to politicians, with the SIS and police intervening in at least one case to mitigate the risk.

After protesters were cleared from the grounds of Parliament in early 2022, it was
still feared an act of extremism by a small minority was likely.

These risks now seem to be receding. And while the threat assessment notes that the online world can provide havens for extremism, the vast majority of those expressing vitriolic rhetoric are deemed unlikely to carry through with violence in the real world.

Changing patterns of extremism
Assessments like this are not a crystal ball; threats can emerge quickly and be near-invisible before they do. But right now, at least publicly, the SIS is not aware of any specific or credible attack planning.

Many extremists still fit well-defined categories. There are the politically motivated, potentially violent, anti-authority conspiracy theorists, of which there is a “small number”.

And there are those motivated by identity (with white supremacist extremism the dominant strand) or faith (such as support for Islamic State, a decreasing and “very small number”).

However, the SIS describes a noticeable increase in individuals who don’t fit within those traditional boundaries, but who hold mixed, unstable or unclear ideologies they may tailor to fit some other violent or extremist impulse.

Espionage and cyber-security risks

There also seems to be a revival of the espionage and spying cultures last seen during the Cold War. There is already the first military case of espionage before the courts, and the SIS is aware of individuals on the margins of government being cultivated and offered financial and other incentives to provide sensitive information.

The SIS says espionage operations by foreign intelligence agencies against New Zealand, both at home and abroad, are persistent, opportunistic and increasingly wide ranging.

While the government remains the main target, corporations, research institutions and state contractors are now all potential sources of sensitive information. Because non-governmental agencies are often not prepared for such threats, they pose a significant security risk.

Cybersecurity remains a particular concern, although the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) recorded 350 incidents in 2021-22, which was a decline from 404 incidents recorded in the previous 12-month period.

On the other hand, a growing proportion of cyber incidents affecting major New Zealand institutions can be linked to state-sponsored actors. Of the 350 reported major incidents, 118 were connected to foreign states (34 percent of the total, up from 28 percent the previous year).

NZSIS’s first unclassified threat assessment targets competition, public trust, technology https://t.co/5wetaOL1oA

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) August 10, 2023

Russia, Iran and China
Although the SIS recorded that only a “small number” of foreign states engaged in deceptive, corruptive or coercive attempts to exert political or social influence, the potential for harm is “significant”.

Some of the most insidious examples concern harassment of ethnic communities within New Zealand who speak out against the actions of a foreign government.

The SIS identifies Russia, Iran and China as the three offenders. Iran was recorded as reporting on Iranian communities and dissident groups in New Zealand. In addition, the assessment says:

Most notable is the continued targeting of New Zealand’s diverse ethnic Chinese communities. We see these activities carried out by groups and individuals linked to the intelligence arm of the People’s Republic of China.

Overall, the threat assessment makes for welcome – if at times unsettling – reading. Having such conversations in the open, rather than in whispers behind closed doors, demystifies aspects of national security.

Most importantly, it gives greater credibility to those state agencies that must increase their transparency in order to build public trust and support for their unique roles within a working democracy.

Dr Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

MPs confront Iran’s Ambassador to New Zealand over protest crackdowns https://t.co/Mtqr5OLetS

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) August 3, 2023

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Peacemonger is a collection of essays about the much travelled Aotearoa peace activist and researcher Owen Wilkes, who died in May 2005. Wilkes was an extraordinary peace campaigner who discovered a foreign spy base at Tangimoana and was once charged with espionage in Norway and again while on a cycling holiday in Sweden.

After he took up beekeeping near Karamea on the West Coast in 1983, it was discovered that Customs was helping the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service to read his mail, apparently worried about his legendary ability to snuffle out secret installations by foreign powers in countries from New Zealand to Norway.

They were right to note his impact – this book explains just how enormously influential Wilkes was.

Many of these short essays are by big names in the Aotearoa peace firmament, such as Maire Leadbeater, Murray Horton, David Robie, Nicky Hager and Peter Wills. Each chapter contains gems; some hilarious, others sobering.

Wilkes was a rare beast, a man who could be, as Mark Derby writes, “unpretentious, fearless, indefatigable, at times insufferable”.

Hager, a phenomenal investigative journalist, has contributed the chapter “The Wilkes How-to Guide to Public Interest Researching’.

Coming from Hager, one of the greatest public interest researchers in the country, this should be catnip to a new generation of proto-Hagers, Thunbergs and Wilkeses.

The last chapter, “Memories of Owen”, was written by his partner, peace activist May Bass.

It is a heartfelt send-off to a human comet who lit up everything he touched, one who may never have realised in his arc across the sky what a void he left behind him, not just in the peace movement, but in the hearts of his friends and loved ones.

Jenny Nicholls writes reviews for The Listener and this review has been republished from the Waiheke Weekender with permission. She is also a graphic designer: designandtype.org

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz