Tarrant Book: The Missing Chapter

Tarrant: A View from the Right

KR Bolton. 6950 Words

In 2019 journalist, historian and author Tom O’Connor asked me to write a chapter for a book he was editing on the Tarrant killings: Our Darkest Day: The Terrorist Attack on Two Mosques, Christchurch, New Zealand, March 15, 2019, (Kirsten Wilson Publishing, 2021).

Mr O’Connor wanted a “right-wing” perspective. I entitled the essay “Tarrant: A View from the Right.” He accepted the essay on which he did very little editing. He commented that unlike some I had been easy to work with.

Having heard nothing further of the project I assumed that the book had not gone ahead. I was recently told that the book had been published in 2021, and that Mr O’Connor had passed away in August 2025. My contribution had not been included. I asked the publisher, his daughter, why this was? She did not have an answer but assured me of her father’s honesty, as I had suggested that what he was expecting was a right-wing Islamophobic tirade which he could showcase.

Abdullah Drury, who had been asked to write a chapter from an Islamic perspective, also had his contribution excluded, but at least he was given the courtesy of being told in 2019. Drury, a White New Zealand convert to Islam, is anti-Leftist, and his contribution reflected that. He was a particularly apt choice as a contributor, being New Zealand’ foremost historian on Islam in New Zealand, and having been social secretary of the Muslim Association of Canterbury, which includes the two mosques targeted by Tarrant.

Instead of Hajji Drury, Jennifer Khan-Janif and Mohamud Mohamed were chosen to write on Islam in New Zealand. Also: Jon Bird, a former British military computer technology expert, examining social media and terrorism; John Battersby, specialist on terrorism at Massey University; and the omnipresent Paul Spoonley, the media’s favourite go-to “expert” on the “far right.”

Clearly, both Hajji Drury and I would have been out-of-place, and my contribution would have undermined the other contributors. Mr O’Connor is obviously of Left-wing persuasion, and while I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, it could well have been that he was given notice by some contributor(s) to have my contribution dropped.

It is ironic, given that I have never uttered a single word critical of Islam or Muslims, but have:

• detailed the neocon and Zionist origins of Islamophobia,
• delineated the differences between the actual Right and the neocon pseudo-right,
• documented the historical links between on the one hand Islam and the Right and on the other Zionism and the Left,
• and in 2014, five years prior to the Tarrant massacre, had my book Zionism, Islam and the West translated into Arabic by an Algerian scientist (which remains available), receiving praise from Australia’s leading Islamic scholar, Dr Zouhir Gabsi,
  

I have nevertheless recently been associated by an Australian academic with Islamophobia. Jennifer B. Robinson, now postures as an expert on national defence and security. Her doctoral thesis is based on a mythical “trans-Tasman far right network” entirely of her invention, through the creative use of network theory. Her recent journal paper on the same theme, with Tarrant’s name sensationalistically in the title, was upheld as sound by the publisher Taylor & Francis, having rejected my complaint without explanation. It is notable that “Dr” Robinson’s thesis and paper are both completely devoid of a single reference to anything I have ever said or written. Such is the character of these “experts” who carve a career out of nonsense, because the “Right” has been demonized, and anything can be said of it in the expectation that any robust peer review or examination processes will be suspended.

My contribution that was dropped from Our Darkest Day follows.

Tarrant: A View from the Right

Journalists and academics alike are to be congratulated for their ability to write about a subject without defining terms. Precise definitions would not allow the conflation of terms such as Alt-Right, Far Right, ‘white supremacist,’ and ‘neo-Nazi’. Creating a poisonous brew of a world-wide ‘white supremacist conspiracy’ can only be achieved by such a lack of precision.

Such lack of precision is not new to the Tarrant situation. Especially in the English-speaking world, there is a lack of historical and ideological depth, in contrast to Continental Europe, where the ‘New Right’ (la Nouvelle Droite) was born, particularly around the figure of Alain de Benoist, first in France among an intelligentsia disaffected with the banalities of both the Old Left and Old Right of the Cold War era. But again, in the English-speaking countries, when the term ‘New Right’ is used, it refers to parties, policies and personalities (think of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher) that are the antithesis of what the ‘New Right’ is. What is meant is Whig Liberalism, which is contrary to the Right, other than with the anomalous but notable presence of Edmund Burke in the Whig Party.

Neocon & Alt-Right

In 2008 Dr. Paul Gottfried, a scholar of Jewish background, sought to draw a clear line of distinction between an ‘Alternative Right’ and the ‘neo-conservative’ masquerade, which is neither ‘new’ nor ‘conservative’, but reanimated 19th century Whig Liberalism, better called after its abbreviated name, ‘neocon’. Gottfried identified the bogus character of what is often called ‘Right’, which includes parties and individuals discussed below:

More recently we have been confronted by another problem on the right, namely groups that give little evidence of being what they claim to be. As far as I can tell, there is nothing intrinsically rightwing about denying the claims of family and society on the putatively autonomous individual. And the dream of living outside of the state in a society of self-actualizing individuals, opening themselves up to being physically displaced by the entire Third World, if its population chooses to settle on this continent, is not a rightist alternative to anything. It is a failed leftist utopia. It is one thing to deplore the modern welfare state as a vehicle of grotesque social change or for its violations of the U.S. Constitution. It is another matter to believe that all authority structures can be reduced to insurance companies formed to protect the property and lives of anarcho-capitalists. Such a belief goes counter to everything we know about human Nature, and even such an embattled anti-welfare- statist as H.L. Mencken never hoped to destroy all government. He loathed egalitarian democracy but not the traditional social and political authorities in which communal life had developed and which conforms to our intertwined social needs.
http://www.unz.com/pgottfried/the-decline-and-rise-of-the-alternative-right/

Paul Gottfried, address to the H.L. Mencken Club Annual Meeting; November 21-23, 2008

Gottfried also stated that the ‘true Right’ is ‘radical’, ‘in the sense that it is an oppositional force that tries to uncover the root causes of our political and cultural crises and then to address them’. He coined the name ‘Alt-Right’ to liberate the Right from the neocon aberration that had subverted it for decades during the Cold War. He also coined the term ‘palaeoconservative’ to distinguish traditional American conservatives of the Robert Taft variety, who eschewed entangling the U.S. in international adventurism, from the neocons who are exponents of American global intervention. When Trump used the slogan ‘America First’ he was drawing on a palaeoconservative legacy, which was promptly dumped on being elected. This reversal of policy is epitomised by the return of John Bolton, a leading neocon, as national security adviser.

So far from being Right-wing in origin, the neocons derive from the post-1918 internationalism of Wilsonian Democrats, augmented by disaffected ex-Marxists who saw the USSR and Stalinism as greater obstacles to the ‘world revolution’ than the USA during the Cold War, and become zealots for an American liberal ‘world revolution’.

Yet still the news media manages to conflate Alt-Right with neocon. For example, Professor Jordan B. Peterson, elevated into an Alt-Right celebrity by the news media, is nothing of the kind. He is a free-market liberal who regards the ‘identity politics’ of the Alt-Right as ‘tribalism’, as an intrusion on the individual, and the same as Left-wing ‘identity politics’. This is the neocon attitude toward the Alt-Right. Neocons believe in the primacy of the individual held together by social contract; the Alt-Right, in the organic community. In sociological terms it is the difference between the concepts of Gemeinschaft (organic community) and Gesellschaft (artificial social construct). Simple.

What is ‘Right’? From Adolf Hitler to Don Brash

When the news media lump together the Alt-Right, the ‘extreme Right’ and ‘white supremacy’, and claim that this was Tarrant’s inspiration for the Mosque shootings, to what are they referring? The term ‘right-wing’ is routinely used in New Zealand by journalists and academics to describe anything and anyone from Don Brash, the Act Party, Business Round Table, and the National Party, to skinheads, the National Front and the Dominion Movement; from the doctrine of Classical Liberalism and Free Trade economics, to Fascism. When a government policy seeks to restrict welfare for example, it is called ‘right-wing’. The common ideological and historical thread remains elusive and unexplained. Does it mean the degree to which a party or individual is removed from the Left, and which of a Free Trade Liberal or a Fascist is closer?

Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere supported Free Trade economics because of the destructive impact in would have on what remained of the traditional social order, which would enable the triumph of Communism. That is why such pre-eminent historian-philosophers of the Right, Oswald Spengler (The Decline of The West, Hour of Decision), and Julius Evola (Revolt Against the Modern World, Men Above the Ruins) saw Marxism as the mirror image of liberal-capitalism; that Marxian-socialism does not want to transcend capitalism, but to expropriate it.

This is the basis of the Rightist ideology: to recreate the organic social community (Gemeinschaft); organic in the sense that the Right sees society as analogous to a living organism, with each individual a ‘cell’ serving the social community by fulfilling a productive, creative function that is honoured as an essential element of society, whether as a labourer or a physician, and each individual ‘cell’ being part of an ‘organ’ (traditionally a guild), the totality of which comprises the organic society, co-ordinated by the ‘brain’ of the state. The neocons see such a concept as akin to ‘socialism’; as an intrusion on the liberty of the individual and his commerce. Many of those mistakenly called ‘Right-wing’, see Islam as a threat to individualism, which they regard as epitomising ‘Western values’.

New Right and Identitarians

The European New Right is the source from which other schools of the Right have arisen, such as the Alt-Right, and Identitariaism. The latter has become a world-wide bogeyman, because Tarrant allegedly gave several donations to Identitarian movements in Germany and Austria. However, to conflate ‘white supremacy’ and ‘neo-Nazis’’ with Identitarianism as journalists and ‘experts’ have done regarding the Tarrant issue, is nonsense.

There was a relatively successful Identitarian organisation emerging in New Zealand named the Dominion Movement (DM). Youth-orientated, as Identitarianism is, its dastardly deeds included feeding homeless in Wellington, clearing off graffiti, and cleaning up beaches. Such services were intended to inculcate a sense of community responsibility and social duty; concepts that are the basis of any genuinely ‘Rightist’ movement. DM was heretical however, in defending rather than denigrating New Zealand’s colonial heritage. Of immigration DM said little; of Islam DM said nothing. Yet there were sinister forces at work here, we are told. Expert advice to Stuff reporters suggested that Tarrant might have been in contact with DM, because he had had a vague contact with the movement in Europe, and more particularly because he exercised at gym, while the lads at DM kept themselves fit by boxing, camping and hiking; and that Tarrant described himself as an ‘eco-fascist’, while the lads at DM practised such ‘eco-fascism’ by cleaning beaches.

DM is said to be in ‘hiatus’. These young chaps, highly articulate and well-read, concerned with personal self-development within the context of ‘Family, Community, Nation’, (their by-line) and with an uncommon knowledge of history, feel thoroughly intimidated, confused, and at least one has been sacked from his job. The success of this organisation was in its careful screening of applicants. That it shut down the first day of the Tarrant atrocity was due to its realisation that its work would be impossible in a climate of hysteria and witch-hunting. Considering the nonsense to which they have been subjected by the news media and its ‘experts’, was DM incorrect in its assessment?

Of the National Front (NF), this shut down several weeks into the hysteria, having had its website closed. Tarrant succeeded where fifteen years of Leftist histrionics had failed. The NF was little more than a website. In its current form, and there have been several incarnations of it since 1969, it lacked ideology, policy, organisation, strategy and activism; other than an annual general meeting that was usually preceded by some confrontational antics caused by the extreme Left.

The NF, such as it had a public persona, was the target of violence, not the instigator. It is notable that the media’s chief ‘expert’ on the ‘extreme Right’, Paul Spoonley, was only able to cite a couple of examples of ‘skinhead’ violence over the course of several decades, when asked for examples. The media was also blessed with the expertise of a gentleman who claimed that he had investigated the ‘extreme Right’ circa 2004, for a Jewish community group. He referred darkly to extreme Right violence including the use of baseball bats. Had the media been interested they might have found that this person had at the time been a stalwart of the Wildcat Anarchist Collective, whose front, the ironically named Peace Action Wellington, featured in riots against the NF annual flag day rally, and whose most notable and celebrated revolutionary activity was the mobbing and beating of a lone NF member after the 2004 event. Shortly before, a young man wearing an NF t-shirt was beaten up by three Somali youths in Newtown, and the extreme Left through skilful use of dialectical semantics portrayed him as the villain and his assailants as the victims. The said ‘expert’ at the time lamented that the extreme Left in New Zealand was not yet in a position to mount the type of violence that was undertaken by their comrades in Europe.

Hence these two groups, the DM, and the barely functional NF, were mythologised into a dangerous ‘white supremacist’ conspiracy with international links and violent intent. This has provided the pretext for introducing a long-wanted ‘hate speech’ law. If such a law is introduced, it will be applied in a very biased manner, fraught with inconsistencies. Will Imams be prosecuted for ‘anti-Semitism’ if they criticise Israel? For example, at the ‘peace’ rally in Auckland organised by a coalition of socialists, gays and gay socialists, which even Muslims and liberals found abhorrent for its politicisation of the tragedy, an Imam loudly condemned Mossad, the Israeli secret service, as being behind Tarrant. While the organiser of the ‘peace rally’, a leading Trotskyite- communist, maintained embarrassed silence, could it amount to ‘hate speech’? Will criticism of Catholicism be regarded as ‘hate speech’? If so, a blog by the editor of this volume, Mr. O’Connor, regarding the Church, where he suggests that it should be ‘excommunicated from civilised society’, would surely be a prime candidate. But one suspects that such laws will be used very selectively according to a Left-liberal agenda, because their actual purpose is to dispossess the European in whatever part of the world he resides, whether as a majority or a minority.

While media ‘experts’ claimed that the youths of the Dominion Movement are delusional in believing they are being dispossessed of their heritage, the very fact that they or any pro-European manifestation are instantly damned indicates their concerns are justified. It is Orwellian doublethink. One might think of the uproar caused with the abortive attempt to form a European cultural association at Auckland University, amidst a multiplicity of other ethno-cultural student groups. The pretext for such ‘reverse discrimination’ is that of ‘white privilege’, but perhaps the Leftist exponents of this could learn some uncomfortable lessons by consulting Friedrich Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). The real history of New Zealand might be deduced by a comment made by John A. Lee when he remarked: ‘the Maori thinks the Pakeha won the land war but he only won the debt’.

The Identitarian movement’s antecedents are in Alain de Benoist’s Nouvelle Droite, founded in 1968, de Benoist having talked from the start about identity in the face of what is now called globalisation. The founding premise of la Nouvelle Droite was summed up as ‘the right to difference’. De Benoist even asserted that multiculturalism is preferable to assimilation, as the latter results in a nebulous, rootless, consumer mass. The actual Right is therefore at odds with the bogus ‘Right’ of the ‘one nation’ variety, where all residents are expected to assimilate into a melting pot, the primary criteria being to work hard, pay taxes and consume. The true Rightist therefore does not feign outrage at the sight of a burqa or hijab.

A white convert to Islam posed some pertinent questions for the Right, in the wake of the Tarrant atrocity:

This is what Whig-Liberals and Socialist alike call ‘progress’, and it is just such a conception of ‘progress’ that the Right rejects, in asserting to the contrary that certain traditions such as ‘family’, and the social community are timeless. These timeless, organic bonds were disparaged by Freudian-Marxian ‘Critical Theorist’ academics such as Eric Fromm as ‘primary ties’ which suppress ‘individualisation’, while Herbert Marcus, icon of the New Left ’68 Generation’, against whose ideology Identitarians rebel, augmented this with the call to create artificial identities to fracture society, which became the ‘identity politics’ that now preoccupies the Left. Whig-Liberals such as Jordan Peterson regard Leftist ‘identity politics’ as the same as Right-wing Identitarianism. To the neocons it’s all a threat to the sanctity of individual liberty, and especially the free market.

While the Whig-Liberal and the Socialist assert that history is the progressive march of some nebulous construct called ‘humanity’ in a straight line of evolution from primitive to modern, the Rightist sees history as proceeding in the ebb and flow of life cycles of self-contained cultures and peoples. Again, the concept of the Right is organic: cultures go through epochs of birth, youth, maturity, old age, senility, decay and death; and when one Civilisation that has dominated the world stage succumbs to decay, then a new, youthful culture takes its place. Hence when some Liberal-capitalist or Socialist refers to a change as ‘progress’, the Rightist asks to what end, as this ‘modern’ change has probably been seen many times before in the epochs of cultures, whether Aztec, Chinese, Indian, Roman, or Greek, and if the sages of those civilisations could come back to this time they would say, ‘we have seen it all before, and it does not end well’.

Hence, when someone such as Tarrant sees Third World fertility as a threat to European populations, he is focusing on a symptom, not a cause, and the problem now faced by the West is the same that caused the fall of Rome in its analogous epoch of decay. It is a problem of morals, not of genes.

As for the conflation of Hitlerism, ‘white supremacy’, the ‘Alt-Right’, and the Identity movement, in some imagined lineage from Genghis Kahn to Hitler to Pauline Hanson to Tarrant, or whatever it is that journalists and their academic advisers imagine, today’s Right traces its antecedents to Joseph de Maistre and other Counter-Enlightenment philosophers, through to Charles Maurras, Oswald Spengler and others of the ‘conservative revolution’ whose fate was to be killed, jailed or exiled during the Third Reich, to Evola, Thiriart, de Benoist, et al.

There is a fundamental difference in world-views between the traditional Right and Hitlerism, especially insofar as the race reductionism of Nazi ideology states that race forms history and civilisations die as the result of ‘blood contamination’ through race-mixing (miscegenation); whereas the traditional Right sees ‘race’ being formed by history and landscape, and civilisation collapsing through organic life-cycles. It is this difference that saw Spengler become persona non grata under the Nazis, and had he not died shortly after the Nazi assumption to government his fate would have likely been the same as other Rightist opponents of Hitlerism. Any notions of ‘white supremacy’ are absurd within this context of the traditional Right’s historicism. Where it exists, it is an Anglo-American aberration, and an irony that Hitler’s race doctrine owed more to English social Darwinism, with is materialistic definition of race by measuring skulls, than to the German Idealism of Herder, Goethe, et al.

Islam and the Right

It is only in recent times that an Islamophobic element has entered the Right as a subversive element. Among those who praised the nobility of Islam, were the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, and Gustave Le Bon in The Civilisation of the Arabs (1884). It could be they knew more about the subject than Pauline Hanson or Tommy Robinson.

Julius Evola, the Italian philosopher and translator of Spengler, has been a major influence on the Right across the world since the post-1945 era. The Frenchman René Guénon’s, a primary philosopher of traditionalism contra modernism, who influenced Evola, converted to Islam. Both Evola and Guénon are important to the Right as critics of modernism and the Liberal and Marxian illusions of ‘progress’.

The ideas of Evola and Guénon’s have been welcomed among Muslim scholars. In 1994, on the initiative of a professor of Islamic theology at the University of Marmara, Modern Dünyaya Baçkaldïrï, the Turkish translation of Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, was published in Istanbul. The same year Turkish translations of René Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World (Modern Dünyanin Bunalimi), and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Niceligin egemenligi ve çagin alâmetleri), were published.

During the 1970s there was practical collaboration between Muslims and Rightists, especially from the Young Europe movement formed by Belgian Rightist Jean Thiriart; from Francois Duprat, a co-founder of the French Front National, who wrote of the Rightist character of the Ba’athist parties in the Middle East, and continuing during the 1980s with collaboration from Dr. Christian Bouchet, organiser of Nouvelle Resistance and associated with the Front National. Professor Claudio Mutti, Thiriart’s primary Italian organiser, converted to Islam.

Tarrant’s ideological inspiration

Given that the Right is not intrinsically anti-Muslim and that there has historically been collaboration between the Right and Muslims, including the important role played by Moors in helping to resist Communism in Spain during the 1930s, and the continuing friendship between Franco’s Spain and Muslim states at a time when Spain was being ostracised by Western states, is it accurate to say that Tarrant was playing out a scenario provided by the ‘Right’?

Tarrant cites only a few ideological inspirations in his manifesto, The Great Replacement. While the title of the manifesto suggests the influence of Renaud Camus, whose book has the same title, Camus is not cited by Tarrant at all. The influences named are Sir Oswald Mosley, Anders Breivik, the People’s Republic of China, and Candace Owens.

Of Mosley, no influence is apparent. Mosley, leader of the pre-war British Union of Fascists, and the post-war Union Movement, whose primary policy was a united Europe, developed his ‘British Fascism’ from the economic planning proposals that had been rejected as too radical by the Labour Government, for which he was an M.P. After the war, Mosley’s policy was a united Europe in alliance with the Arab states.

Anders Breivik’s clichéd Islamophobia provides a clue. Breivik, again portrayed as someone of both the ‘Far Right’ and a ‘neo-Nazi’, was avidly pro-Zionist, and referred to an inherent conflict between so-called ‘Judaeo-Christianity’ and Islam. He appealed to the Jewish community to support anti-Muslim parties, which they have been doing to some extent in some countries. Breivik recommended the views of ‘moderate Jewish writers’ (sic) such as Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum, and Bat Ye’or’, who focuses on a conspiracy theory involving Arab states and the European Union. Daniel Pipes and other neocon eminences were quick to deny any association between their views and the actions of Breivik, regardless of the money and influence this neocon network has in spreading animosity towards Islam as a religion per se, while the ‘Alt-Right’ becomes the scapegoat.
(Bolton, ‘Anders Breivik: Neoconned’, Foreign Policy Journal, 29 July 2011; https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/07/29/anders-breivik-neo-conned/).

This brings us to Candace Owens. Owens is a pro-Trump, neocon Afro-American. In the dialogue Tarrant sets up in his manifesto, he writes:

Is there a particular person that radicalized you the most?
Yes, the person that has influenced me above all was Candace Owens. Each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness. Though I will have to disavow some of her beliefs, the extreme actions she calls for are too much, even for my tastes.

Owens is communications director for Turning Point USA, a neocon organisation. Owens’ being a recipient of an award from the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2018 indicates the source of Islamophobia, and it is not the Alt-Right, Identitarians, or la Nouvelle Droite. [Since this was written in 2019, Owens, has repudiated her former position, and is very forthright in her condemnation of Zionism. KB, 2026].

Shortly prior to the Tarrant atrocity, Sophia Witt, director of “Israel and Jewish Outreach” for Turning Point USA told students at a Florida conference that Islam per se is synonymous with terrorism and claimed there are no ‘moderate Muslims’. (‘Young Trump supporters told they need to start fighting terrorism on campus because all Muslims are “radical’”; Business Insider Australia, 22 December 2018; https://www.businessinsider.com.au/turning-point-usa-conference-students-islam-college-campuses-2018-12?r=US&IR=T). This is the party line of the global neocon network.

The books of Robert Spencer (an inspiration for Breivik) of Jihad Watch, part of the Horowitz network, and others describing Islam not as a religion but as a violent political ideology, and the Koran and a manual for terrorism, continue to be sold by Amazon.com, while scholarly Alt-Right books on philosophy are purged. The Islamophobic neocon social media presence remains unscathed.

Spencer’s interpretation of the Koran is a mainstay of neocon Islamophobia. Spencer has real influence: he has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the FBI, the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Justice Department’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council and the U.S. intelligence community. He has discussed jihad, Islam, and terrorism at a workshop sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the German Foreign Ministry.

Another notable supported by the Horowitz Center is Pamela Geller, editor of The Geller Report, President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), and in 2013 recipient of the Creative Zionist Coalition Queen Esther Award for Jewish Heroism, who has been honoured by the U.S. military.

The Middle East Forum, whose founder, Daniel Pipes, was cited as an inspiration by Breivik, sponsors various fronts such as the ‘Victory for Israel’ project, and gives $2,000,000 in annual grants to 75 organisations. It has funded Geert Wilders, and the ‘Free Tommy’ campaign when Robinson was jailed in Britain in 2018. Another sponsor of Wilders is the Gatestone Institute, founded by Gina Rosenwald who draws on the Rosenwald fortune from the Sears Roebuck legacy. Rosenwald also sponsors the ‘Land for Israel Movement’, which supports the extension of Israel’s borders.

While these organisations operate in the corridors of power, at street level their outreach extends to political parties across the West whose focus is on Islam. While Tommy Robinson has become a poster-boy for the United Kingdom Independence Party, which is veering towards Islamophobia to maintain its relevance; there is Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom in The Netherlands, and Anne Marie Waters’ For Britain party. Wilders started out in the Liberal party, and Waters in the Labour Party.

In Tarrant’s native country, there is Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, Rise Up Australia, and the Liberty Alliance. All these parties are called ‘right-wing’ by the news media and academia, yet every one of them, apart from being avidly pro-Israel, see the ‘values’ they defend in terms of Whig-Liberalism and the free market, and advocate ‘one nation’ assimilation. They see Islam as the primary threat to ‘Western values’ and the USA and Israel as the primary custodians of those values. The Right does not defend such ‘values’. It shares with Islam a rejection of these ‘values’ as symptoms of a civilisation in decay, whose pathology infects the world primarily through the USA, which neocon strategists such as Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters laud as America’s strength. (Ralph Peters, ‘Constant Conflict’, Parameters, U.S. Army War College, Summer 1997;

The Great Replacement?

Neocon historian Francis Fukuyama, whose famous dictum that the global hegemony of American Liberalism and the Free Market would (like Marxism) bring in a millennial ‘end of history’, stated that Islam remains the last traditional bastion against this utopia, naming Iran as particularly problematic. (Francis Fukuyama, ‘They can only go so far’, Washington Post, August 24, 2008). Markus Willinger, of the Identitarian movement, states of this in his book Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the ‘68ers (2013):

No power in this world presents more of an obstacle to your ‘emancipated’ global village than Islam. The East turned against you with all of its power and strength, and challenged the West. The Muslims opposed your fanatical and heedless ideology with an equally fanatical religion, political Islam. You thought that by bringing your message to the East and the Muslim world, you would be greeted as the bearers of good tidings. You thought you would bring the Muslims to Europe in order to ‘enlighten’ and ‘educate’ them. You were convinced that the Muslims would modernise and reform their religion. Yet they did the exact opposite. (Page 65).

The view is consistent with that of de Benoist, who in 1986, like Thiriart before him, called for an alliance between Europe and the Third World against U.S. global hegemony, ‘particularly with the Arab Middle East’, according to Dr. Michael O’Mearea in his New Culture/New Right (2004, page 172), just as during the Cold War, like Thiriart, de Benoist saw the culture-pathology exported by the USA as a bigger threat to the soul of Europe than the possibility of a Soviet invasion. Such issues distinguish the New Right/Alt-Right from the neocons.

In contrast to ‘one nation’ assimilationism, often associated with the ‘Right’, de Benoist advocated the type of policy enacted with success in Singapore, where the religio-ethnic communities are subject to their own laws, including Sharia courts for Muslims. Jewish communities have for centuries lived under their own legal system with their own courts, the Beth Din.

Tarrant showed himself to be for the most part in the neocon mode. In the dialogue he wrote in his manifesto, asking himself whether he hates Muslims, he replied, ‘A muslim man or woman living in their homelands? No. A muslim man or woman choosing to invade our lands, live on our soil and replace our people? Yes, I dislike them’. As to whether there were any ‘innocents’ among those he was to shoot, Tarrant’s reply was that, ‘There are no innocents in an invasion, all those who colonize other people’s lands share guilt’.

The Identitarian attitude, as expressed by Willinger, and one that can be seen to have its antecedents in la Nouvelle Droite, is that,

We neither want a multicultural society, nor do we want to force members of other cultures to take our identity … Right-wingers! Stop defaming immigrants, stop insulting them and blaming them for our mistakes. Stop accusing them of wanting to hold on to their identities … Muslims and Africans! Take down your tents and leave this continent. Entire regions of the world already belong to you. We’ll gladly help you make your homelands better places. (Page 88).

The latter part of Mr. Willinger’s comment is reminiscent of the attitude of the Dalai Lama who stated in 2018 that ‘Europe belongs to Europeans’, at a conference in Sweden, noted for its large migrant communities. ‘Receive them, help them, educate them, but ultimately they should develop their own country’. (‘Dalai Lama says “Europe belongs to Europeans”, and suggests refugees return to native countries’, Independent, 14 September 2018; https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/dalai-lama-europe-refugee-crisis-immigration-eu-racism-tibet-buddhist-a8537221.html). He said something similar regarding Germany in 2016. He knows through his native land how a culture can be destroyed through population displacement.

The actual Right seeks out causes. It sees mass migration as a way by international capital to globalise labour; to break down borders and allow the free flow of capital, labour, technology, and resources according to the needs of global production and marketing. De Benoist called immigration the ‘reserve army of capital’. Marx predicted in The Communist Manifesto that the internationalisation of the modes of production will achieve the internationalisation of the proletariat and hence would serve the historical dialectic towards world Communism. Marx saw the free market as assisting the process and condemned those who opposed the globalisation of his day as ‘reactionists’. Hence, the Left is of no use in resisting globalisation, and jumps on the same bandwagon as George Soros, Rockefeller, and Goldman Sachs. ‘Hate speech’ laws will be handy in suppressing dissent on such matters. Thank you, Brenton. With the United Nations Global Compact on Migration, resistance in New Zealand on such matters was just becoming evident, albeit not yet understanding the deeper implications that had been evident to the European New Right for decades.

For Tarrant the issue was one of fertility, of Europeans being outbred by Muslims. It is called the ‘Great Replacement’, however, there was another ‘great replacement’ that stands at the root of the migration issue: that of displacing the Palestinians, circa 1948, encouraged by Deir Yasin and similar actions.

However, the ‘great replacement’ is not a strategy of mainstream Islam; it is not a plot to invade and reconquer Europe and convert the infidels. There is a very basic reason why it is not. Islam regards as a ‘sin’ the migration of a Muslim from an Islamic state to a non-Islamic state. This is referred to as, ‘At-ta’arrub ba’d al-hijra’, which means ‘becoming shorn of one’s perceptions of faith after migrating’.

Muslim clerics have attempted to mitigate the problem in matters of life and death, due to the chaos and destruction that has been delivered to their lands. Rather than Muslims influencing the West, the decadence of the West is resulting in the secularisation of Muslim youth. Data from the U.S. General Social Survey ‘show that 32 percent of those raised Muslim no longer embrace Islam in adulthood, and 18 percent hold no religious identification. Rates of defection could well be higher in Europe and Canada’, writes Darren E. Sherkat (‘Losing their Religion: When Muslim Immigrants Leave Islam’, Foreign Relations, 22 June, 2015). It is the neocon weapon of culture-pathology written about by Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters: the deadly embrace of Western decay that is confidently predicted to bring the world under the hegemony of the free market, beyond which ‘history ends’.

Wahhabism a Common Enemy

It is against this background of betrayal going back a hundred years that Wahhabism has become entrenched in the Saudi and emirate states, with U.S. backing. Wahhabism, or Salafism, is the religion of Saudi Arabia. It is Saudi and emirate money that extend the Wahhabi influence around the world, seeking to proselytise among the Muslim diasporas. Wahhabism is the sect that motivates what is commonly referred to as ‘Islamism’, but it is regarded as anathema by mainstream Shi’a and Sunni. However, it has been convenient for U.S. geopolitical policy at numerous times, such as the U.S. backing of the Mujahedeen against the USSR in Afghanistan; against the Serbs, when the vast mineral wealth of Kosovo was the target for ‘privatisation’; against Russia in Chechnya; against Qaddafi, who warned that his fall would result in perpetual chaos and an exodus from Africa to Europe; against Iran and Syria, the two major bug-bears of U.S. foreign policy. Taliban, ISL, al-Qaeda, these are Wahhabis organisations whose funding comes from U.S. allies.

The relevance of this is that no distinction seems to be made between mainstream Islam and Wahhabism. If one looks for origins, the assumption that ‘all Islam is the same’, that there are ‘no moderate Muslims’, that the Koran is nothing more than a handbook for terrorism, begins with the neocons, not with the ‘Right’.

A primary concern for Muslim communities should be with the failure to distinguish between Islam and Wahhabism, but other than a 2018 convention of Muslim clerics in Russia, hosted by Putin, and some references on Sunni and Shi’a Muslim webpages, little seems to have been said by Muslims. Hence, the Islamophobic neocon network is left unchallenged, and the response from Muslim organisations is to deflect from the causes by jumping on a band wagon and demanding ‘hate speech laws’. Be careful what you wish for. There are those who regard Muslims as the main instigators of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the West.

New Zealand Situation

What, then, is the ‘white supremacist’/Alt-Right/ ‘neo-Nazi’ movement that supposedly exists in New Zealand, with which Tarrant is alleged to have associated? The answer to that seems to exist in the imaginations of journalists and their academic ‘experts’ (sic), despite Dr. Spoonley’s chart of ‘seventy’ extreme Right groups here. Media claims that Tarrant might have been involved in the Dominion Movement, because they cleaned up beaches (‘eco-fascism’) and kept physically fit, seem a fragile hypothesis.

Although there is no reason to believe that Tarrant was supposedly ‘red pilled’ by anything he read or heard in New Zealand, there are a few projects that have focused to varying degrees on the ‘Muslim threat’. Perhaps he joined a branch of New Zealand First? Maybe he became a Destiny Church congregant?

Right Minds – NZ, which welcomes ‘traditionalists’ and ‘capitalists’ in a scenario that does not make historical or ideological sense, have purveyed the neocon view of Islam. There is also NZ Islamic State Watch, which in 2018 organised relatively successful ‘Free Tommy’ street protests as part of the well-funded worldwide campaign for the then jailed Robinson.

Of more significance is Ian Wishart’s Investigate magazine, which began a series, ‘Islam vs. the West’ in 2007, suggesting the neocon ‘clash of civilisations’ scenario popularised by Samuel Huntington in his book of that phrase. Did Ian Wishart get visited by armed police; did Winston Peters? An article in 2016 ominously entitled ‘The New Jihad – the Radicals Next Door’, claims that the Koran is replete with exhortations to violence, ‘You can pick almost any book of the Qur’an at random, and verses urging followers to violence against non-believers are everywhere’. The interpretation echoes that of the neocons such as Robert Spencer. What then could one claim of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament that form the basis of Judaism and influence Israeli policy?

As for an Islamic viewpoint, Dr. Arash Najaf-Zadeh, a prominent Iranian cleric, in his friendly critique, The European New Right – A Shi’a Response (2018), finds common ground with the New Right in opposition to the liberal pathology that the neocons uphold as ‘Western values’. Referring to the previously cited Dr. Michael O’Meara’s study of the New Right, Dr. Najaf-Zadeh writes that he agrees that

‘the liberal today loudly proclaims the “rights of man”, but has not a word for the rights of communities, the rights of peoples, the rights of nations, the rights of states, or what Catholics once referred to as “the rights of God”. Of these rights, whose integrity resists unregulated markets and the atomising forces of bourgeois individualism, the liberal accords no recognition’. Indeed, we (in the besieged Shi’a citadel [Iran]) still ardently affirm the rights of god, and are in the same camp as Dugin [Russian theorist of ‘Eurasianism’, and sometime Putin adviser], O’Meara and the European New Right when it comes to community rights triumphing over individual rights. Thus when we offer a critique of Alexander Dugin and Alain de Benoist and the European New Right, it is because we agree with their diagnosis and even with their prognosis of what will become liberal democracy, and consider them to be allies in the struggle to defeat the evil hegemonic impetus of what is left of this dying zombie-giant. (Page 13).

It is a strange situation when Rightists jump aboard the neocon bandwagon against Islam, in defence of Whig-Liberalism; but just as strange when Imams jump aboard an ad hoc bandwagon with Communists, atheists, feminists and those on the ‘sliding gender scale’.

 السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ
Peace be upon you.