I bet the irony of a catchphrase coined by white Australians to denigrate Australians of Middle-Eastern ancestry being used by a “local” against mainland visitors is totally lost on the owner of this sticker. It’s amusing that although it pains him that mainlanders from the CONUS come to Hawai’i to “steal his surf”, his Nissan Pathfinder is nonetheless plastered with large stickers advertising for a mainland company from Hood River, Oregon with a pidgin English name, and a Costa Mesa, California company with a faceted jewel-like logo. If he really hates everything post-Cook so much, he better ditch his Japanese car and Chinese surf trunks and get himself a homegrown Koa surfboard… and learn ‘olelo Hawai’i while he’s at it.
That sticker has always bugged me. It’s straight up racism.
The other one that bugs me is…Defend Hawaii. Militant crap and from who?
Hawaii is really one of the most racist places i’ve been. Never been called “Jap” anywhere else but here.
Aloha!
Everyone here is an immigrant or the progeny of immigrants. There was nobody here to begin with. Do these people think that time or generations confer legitimacy? Whether you came on the first canoe from the Southeast or just got off a plane from the Northwest, you came from someplace else!
We’re all squatters here. The original stewards of the land thought along those lines. If the individuals expousing this grown/flown attitude even learned a smidgen of the culture, they wouldn’t be spouting this nonsense, nor be xenophobically defending this place from whatever it is. I’m probably giving them too much credit – assuming that they have the ability to learn and apply critical thinking.
This is sort of a suck topic. On one hand, I want it to be known that this brand of hate-mongering is out there, but on the other, I don’t want to lend these folks any more legitimacy than they deserve (and that’s none).
If you want to know where the phrase came from, and who used it against whom, look up “Cronulla riots”.
Isnt the Defend Hawaii design from the old Defend Brooklyn design? Replace the weapon with another type.
It does seem derivative of that design. Does that put them in the same league with the “de-occupy Hawaii” folk? We’re not creative, original, nor relavent, but we can substitute the word “Hawaii” in phrases?