Who watches the watchers?

Juliet Moses writes:

You may have heard of Byron C Clark. In the last few years, he has been promoted as an authority on the far right/alt right extremism, and disinformation. With the parliamentary protest a year ago, he became one of the media’s go-to experts on such matters. This expertise is based largely, it seems, on him spending untold hours burrowing down fetid rabbit holes on the internet. He has just published a book “Fear: New Zealand’s Hostile Underworld of Extremists” and is doing the press rounds promoting it. 

The far right is clearly a growing problem in New Zealand and elsewhere and, while I and others have serious doubts about Clark’s methodology, I don’t doubt his good intentions. However, if someone is purporting to be an expert on extremism, I believe it’s important to know about their own history on that subject. 

It is a matter of public record that Clark was a member of the Workers Party of New Zealand, a socialist/Marxist political party that operated for about a decade from 2002. He was not just any member of the party. He unsuccessfully stood for the Christchurch mayoralty in 2007 on its ticket.

So what, you might ask? Well, a major policy of the party was to actively support and fundraise for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, known as the PFLP, which was by then a designated terrorist organisation in the US, the EU, Israel and other places (although not New Zealand). In a 2014 profile on the PFLP, the BBC noted “Combining Arab nationalism with Marxist-Leninist ideology, the PFLP saw the destruction of Israel as integral to its struggle to remove Western capitalism from the Middle East.” The PFLP became notorious in the late 1960s and 70s for attacking airports and hijacking commercial aircraft and holding passengers hostage, sometimes destroying the aircraft and killing passengers.

So the guy who is held up by the media as an expert on the so called extreme right is himself a member of the extreme left. Marxism and fasicsm are equally bad, having caused untold misery and death. Both stand for powerful authoritarian governments.

But Clark was not only a Marxist, but an active supporter and fundraiser for a terrorism.

Terrorists always believe that their attacks on innocent civilians are justified in pursuit of their political or ideological aims, and that they are resisting oppression of one sort or another. The Christchurch gunman was no different.

The end does not justify the means.

If someone who was held up as an authority on extremism had supported and fundraised for the KKK or another far right organisation, however long ago, I feel confident that there would be a powerful drive – championed by Clark himself – for that person to be deplatformed and suffer other social and financial consequences, and not to attend the Counterterrorism Hui, as Clark did last year.    

In a followup post, Moses counters a response by Clark.

It seems incredible that Clark, an organiser of this group at the time, and someone whose name is on the pamphlet, would have thought that the PFLP had denounced violence. The PFLP has never renounced vioence. If we are to believe Clark we would have to believe he never read any of the literature the Party put out, and that he had put his name on. Or that he never read the slogan on the T-shirt he and his comrades were selling, or seen the images on the T-shirt of armed militants.

Or, in fact, that he never read his own post on the Fightback website from 2009 when he said “All profits raised by the campaign go directly to the PFLP to help fund all aspects of their struggle against the Zionist state of Israel both politically and militarily.” [emphasis added]

His claim that the PFLP never received funds from the Workers Party is questionable also. Was the Party lying when they announced, in 2010, that it was donating $1,000 to the PFLP, raised mostly through the sale of PFLP t-shirts? According to a former comrade (who wished to remain anonymous) a payment was sent to the group and a second one was forthcoming until the Christchurch Earthquake struck, and the individual in charge of the money dissapeared with it.

For once, a thief may have done some good.

And as for the book itself, Damien Grant reviews it:

My real problem with this book isn’t its sloppiness, dreary re-telling of uninteresting internet encounters, or uninteresting prose; it is how it wraps vile ideologies around decent people with either careless or intentional ambiguity.

Chris Lynch is a popular Christchurch journalist with what appears to be a mainstream, mildly conservative world view. He interviewed then New Conservative deputy leader Elliot Ikilei over Ikilei’s opposition to the UN compact on refugees. 

No credible author can consider either Lynch or Ikilei as part of a hostile underworld of extremists, and yet in Clark’s re-telling of a mundane interview a cloud forms over both men. “It is concerning,” Lynch is quoted. “[O]ur friends across the ditch, why are they not signed up to it? … Makes you wonder.” 

You can disagree with Ikilei, and Lynch, but what is Clark trying to achieve here? Why are these two conventional gentlemen woven into a narrative about a “hostile underworld of extremists”?

If the extremely moderate Chris Lynch has made it into a book on extremism, I’m surprised I’m not featured also!