Author: Ashley Church
By Ashley Church. We’ve just had a big cyclone here in New Zealand and we were fixated on every aspect of its arrival, progress and eventual departure – constantly checking apps, following the news for updates, watching the maps, and trying to work out what was coming and whether we needed to prepare any differently. That’s just common sense. When people think a storm is coming, they want forewarning and enough information to prepare and adjust so as not to be caught out. But what if you checked your weather app and discovered that the storm that you were preparing…
OPINION: Ashley Church Have you ever watched a magic trick which has left you scratching your head – only for the penny to drop once you saw how it was done? What initially looked impossible became relatively straightforward once the mechanism behind it was revealed. The past few years have been a bit like that, for me. Over that time it has been my privilege to write and speak about Israel and the Jewish people. Not just in the context of the events of 7 October 2023 – but going back much further than that. In fact, I’ve been writing…
OPINION: Ashley Church There is something about Israel that feels bigger than politics and bigger than the events of the moment. You might support Israel or oppose it. You might understand it well or badly. You might see the current conflict through the lens of security, terrorism, diplomacy, ideology or humanitarian concern. But whatever view you take, Israel doesn’t feel like just another country caught in just another war. Because it isn’t. One of the great mistakes of our age is to imagine that Israel’s story began on 7 October 2023, or in 1967, or in 1948. It didn’t. Israel’s…
OPINION: Ashley Church. For a long time, after October 7, I tried to respond to the claims that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza in good faith. I assumed that most people were using that word out of ignorance. That they’d picked it up from headlines, activists, or social media feeds, without really understanding what genocide actually means in law, history, or reality. I thought that, if I just explained the term, people would stop using it. I was wrong. It became obvious that the word “genocide” wasn’t being used because people were confused or misinformed. It was being used…
Image featured was created by AI. OPINION: Ashley Church If the recent Newstalk ZB claim that “there is no bias in our newsroom” – attributed to TVNZ CEO Jodi O’Donnell – was intended as a joke, then it revealed an extraordinary sense of humour and a missed career in comedy. If it wasn’t, then it leaves only two other possibilities: either a level of naivety that is concerning in someone holding such an important role, or a belief that the public are too stupid to recognise what is going on front of them. Because the ‘fact’ of bias at TVNZ…
OPINION: Ashley Church. Right now, much of the world’s attention is focused on the events unfolding in Iran. We follow every development, debate the details, and argue it all through the lens of our own worldviews. As a result, today, in every sense, Iran is shaping the international narrative. But go back six months, or a year, or five years, and the focus would have been on something completely different. That’s the rhythm of modern history. One crisis replaces another. One global drama gives way to the next. And like obedient marionettes, we shift our attention to whatever event currently…
Opinion: Ashley Church. As decent people everywhere mark the elimination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – Iran’s supreme leader since 1989 – serious questions need to be asked of the Western left. For nearly 5 decades, the Islamic Republic suppressed speech, denied women equal legal standing, executed dissenters, and exported militancy abroad – all while influential voices in the so-called “progressive” left in the West framed Iran as a victim of U.S. influence and as the heroic face of “resistance” against Israel. The contrast with reality could not be more stark. In 1979, just before the Revolution, Iranian society was making…
OPINION: Ashley Church January 27, 2026 The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Treblinka. It began much earlier, with ideas, laws, exclusions, and the slow normalisation of cruelty. The part that history often forgets. When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, there was no plan to exterminate the Jews. What did exist was a heavily racist worldview: that Jews were alien, that they were a corrosive presence within society – and that the economic hardship, moral decay, and national humiliation that the Germans were facing was their fault. So the early years were not…