Daniel Greenfield
September 01, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog When Christopher Kunzelman’s wife was
diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, he asked her where she wanted to
spend the last days of her life. She chose Maui.
Kunzelman
came from Scottsboro, Arizona, bought a house and prepared to move his
family in, but he soon learned that he did not belong there. Locals
warned him “this is a Hawaiian village. The only thing coming from the
outside is the electricity,” and “you don’t even belong in Hawaii.”
While he was moving in the furniture, two men
showed up.
They told him, “You seem like a nice guy, but you’re the wrong color
for this place.” When he didn’t get the message, one of the men told
him, “your skin is the wrong f****** color.” and hit him on the back of
the head with a shovel.
The Polynesian islanders beat him with
the shovel, punched him, and kicked him in the ribs while he lay
unconscious. They told him, “No white man is ever going to live here.”
Kunzelman
regained consciousness and made his escape while the two men were
discussing how to kill him and his uncle. But when he made it to the
hospital, the police refused to do anything even though he had severe
injuries and had recorded part of the incident on video.
Meanwhile one of the attackers went out and assaulted another white man.
The Maui attackers had
told Kunzelman,
“We’re the law, we’re the police, the police have our backs, we’re the
ones who make the laws, we’re the ones who enforce the laws, we’re the
judge in Kahakuloa, and we’re the ones who decide if you live or die.”
And it seemed they were right. The Kunzelmans were never able to sell the house because it wasn’t safe to live there.
When
the men were finally arrested, they got off with probation while
Kunzelman lost vision in one eye. That was in 2014. The hate crime
victim never stopped campaigning for justice and federal charges were
finally brought and the men were sentenced to prison in March 2023.
Had
the races in the Maui assault been reversed, we would have all heard
about it. Not only did we not hear about it, but local leftist activists
and the media rallied in support of the attackers.
An Associated
Press article claimed that two racist thugs beating a man and planning
to kill him reflects “Hawaii’s nuanced and complicated relationship with
race.”
That’s not how attacks on black people moving into white neighborhoods were described.
Hawaii Public Radio, an NPR member,
provided
“context” and “complex history” for the case. A Hawaiian language
professor blamed white colonialism, called the vicious assault a “clash
of cultural values”, and worried that ‘Haole’, the slur that the
Polynesian attackers had used, would make them “fearful of expressing
ourselves using our own language in our own homeland”.
Another
leftist professor claimed that ‘Haole’ is a legitimate slur because it
names “colonial settler whiteness” and that the assault should be
ignored because the real problem was “settler colonialism”. The article
contained no quotes from the victim. Not even his name.
Hawaii Maui College
hosted an event defending
the vicious racist attackers in which a leftist activist complained
that, “these young men had already been pled guilty in the state system,
but that wasn’t good enough. They’re being used as scapegoats for the
white culture to teach everybody else a lesson.”
The Kunzelman case can help us understand what happened before and after the Maui fires.
What
looks like incompetence by government officials really reflects an
ongoing racial conflict. Leftist activists, most of them white or black,
have organized some activist Polynesian residents (often wrongly
referred to as native Hawaiians) along the American Indian or Australian
aboriginal model into their own system with extensive leverage over the
bureaucracy.
Ongoing conflicts over water rights between
plantations and so-called ‘native cultivation” led to a denial of water
to fight the fires. The widely reported
denial of water
by M. Kaleo Manuel, the deputy director of the Hawaii Commission on
Water Resource Management, to fight the fires led to national outrage,
but local pro-Polynesian activists and the media rallied to his defense
since what he was really defending was ‘native cultivation’ against the
sugar cane plantations.
Even with the wildfires going on, the
Hawaii Supreme Court rejected a petition from the state government to
free up water to fight the fires. The state was not allowed to divert
water from that being wasted for “customary Hawaiian practices and
ecological balance”.
The court ruled that the state government
had not shown a “clear and indisputable right to the relief requested”
that being the use of the water needed to put out the fires instead of
using it to inefficiently grow the ‘Taro’ plant: an Asian root vegetable
that we are told by activists is specially sacred to Hawaii even though
it’s grown and eaten all over Asia and even Africa.
Taro
requires a lot of fresh flowing water, especially when grown the
‘native’ way, and ‘traditional methods’ ignore all the accomplishments
of modern agriculture to grow it in the most wasteful way possible. Taro
plants suffer from innumerable diseases while the ‘native’ approach is
to ignore modern cross-breeding methods that would make the crops more
resilient.
Nigeria grows and exports Taro around the world, while
Hawaii’s ‘native agriculture’ is so hopeless that the state has to
import 2 million pounds of its ‘sacred vegetable.’ If you visit Hawaii,
the Taro you eat could very well be coming from Nigeria or China. But
growing Taro the traditional way isn’t about functional agriculture, but
striking a blow against the plantations.
And denying the
plantations the water they needed to fight fires, like the Kunzelman
assault, was about striking a blow against the hated ‘Haoles’ who
colonized the land after the Polynesians had originally colonized it by
enslaving the original inhabitants, tattooing their heads and then using
them as human sacrifices while making Captain Cook look like a saint.
Growing
Taro the ‘native way’ was more important than fighting fires and saving
lives. Local activists have shown little interest in the wildfires
which may have claimed hundreds of lives, but view the fires as a
colonialist conspiracy to take away water rights from a bureaucracy of
“indigenous” activists. ‘Native rights’ matter much more than fighting
wildfires or human life.
The ‘missteps’ that killed people, from
failing to sound the sirens to setting up a barricade that blocked
drivers trying to escape the fires, are typical of an insular society
where things are often done informally and outsider ‘Haoles’ are
deliberately denied the information they need unless they have lived
there long enough to cultivate relationships and get a feel for what is
going on.
Much of Hawaii operates by third world rules that
subvert American norms. Corrupt cronyism is ubiquitous. Rules, including
safety regulations, are only honored in the breach. And resentment
toward mainlanders, while not universal, is enough of a factor that the
perpetrators of the Kunzelman assault could not only expect to get away
with it, but they nearly did.
What role did all of those factors
play in the record wildfire deaths? The answer is some. It will be very
hard to separate disdain from malice, an obsession with maintaining a
racial power struggle even during a crisis, a disregard for outsiders
that under normal circumstances might be merely inconvenient but in this
case proved fatal, and line up a specific body count.
But what happened is what leftists in America call “systemic racism”.
The
system in Hawaii, while often headed by Americans, is handicapped by a
significant presence of ‘indigenous’ activists who may be merely
neglectful or actively hostile. And there’s little question that some
people of all races died because of the systemic racism of a setup that
treated outsiders as despised interlopers and used informal, rather than
formal, systems.
That is the story of the Maui wildfires that no one will tell. It’s the background behind the tragedy.
After
the wildfires, the battle over land and water will continue to be
fought between leftist groups like the Sierra Club and its Polynesian
activist allies, and everyone else. Hawaii’s original Polynesian
colonists are not villains in this. Most of them simply want to live
their lives. Like minority communities in America, leftists have
recruited ugly, racist and radical elements from among them and
weaponized them to seize power and wreck their share of the country.
The
Maui wildfires, like the aftermath of disasters in Puerto Rico or the
misery in urban inner cities in America, reflect an inculcated culture
of systemic racism, victimhood and dysfunction.
The damage from the wildfires will heal, but the underlying crisis of Hawaii will continue.
A
decade ago, Christopher Kunzelman was told that, “no white man is ever
going to live here.” Hawaiian activists worsened the impact of the
wildfires to make sure that “no white man is ever going to live” in a
much broader swath of Hawaii than just one house in one village.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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