How Terrorism Wins

Terrorists want you to change your behaviour and how you think. They win when their acts of terror, or their threats of terror make you do what they want you to do or think the way they want you to think.

And so terrorists won when the organisers of the Christchurch Santa Parade caved in to threats of terror. Shame on you Santa Parade organisers and where are the police in all this? Why are the police waiting for a complaint to be lodged, when terrorism is involved they don't need to receive a complaint.

Here's the background: http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/87072747/santa-parade-defiant-over-red-face-claims

Christchurch woman Michelle Flores saw the float in last year's parade and emailed the organisers this week to ask them to remove it from this year's event.

"Many people in NZ don't seem to understand how inappropriate it is for white people to dress up in essentially what is 'redface'," she wrote in the email.

"If white Americans or Canadians dressed up as Maori people with brown paint on their faces and in traditional Maori dress and had a float in a Santa parade doing the Haka somewhere in North America, that would be incredibly inappropriate right?"

But Santa Parade manager Pam Morris said she was "offended" by the request.

"If she had a good look at that float, some of it belongs to a tribe that I went to the reservation of in Buffalo. They know about this float and they gave me some headgear to use on this float.

"We have the blessing of that tribe."

Chairwoman of the Santa Parade's trust, Anne Jamieson, said the float would be included because it was a tradition that children enjoyed.

<snip>

Professor of Maori and indigenous studies at Massey University, Rawiri Taonui, said the costumes were only offensive if they mocked First Nations people.

"It is OK if they are dressing up in costume as a way of learning about that culture in a respectful way.

"If that is the intent we should support it. It depends on the intent."

And then when the float was paraded during the Santa Parade the Indian costumes were pulled from the float after threats of violence from a terrorist group:-

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/87194113/emails-threaten-to-set-controversial-parade-float-on-fire

First Nation and Native American costumes were pulled from a Christchurch Santa Parade float after one of the organisers received emails threatening to set it on fire.

Okay, so to recap; this float was approved of by the tribe who provided the Native American dress, but that wasn't good enough for the terrorists who issued threats and the organisers caved.

Well, there we have it, it's easy to intimidate New Zealanders eh. Wow. Just Wow.