By Professor Paul Spoonley on Stuff…
OPINION: When I began researching the radical right in New Zealand in the 1980s, one of the defining characteristics of the groups and individuals I looked at were beliefs about what they saw as conspiracies involving Jews.
I was part of a team that surveyed the local Jewish community in 1983. We asked whether New Zealand Jews had experienced anti-Semitism. Some had. The majority hadn’t. And most did not see New Zealand and New Zealanders as being particularly anti-Semitic.
I have been involved in another three surveys of the Jewish community since then. Two repeated the findings of the earlier survey when it came to the hostility or hate experienced by New Zealand Jews. But by the 2019 survey, a rather different story had begun to emerge. Anti-Semitism was being experienced by a much larger proportion of those surveyed.
As I have begun to return to my research on the radical right in the last few years, I have realised that local anti-Semitism has migrated from being largely the preserve of an extreme fringe to a much more substantial component of local racism.
The same can be said for other expressions of racism. In the 1980s, Islamophobia was not a major feature of the local radical right. Now it is – and it, too, has taken hold in a variety of communities and settings.
Read Professor Spoonley’s article in full here.
