KEY POINTS:
What does the Maori national vanguard have to do to get mainstream attention? Recognition in university publications, redneck radio talk and the Anglican Church will only get you so far.
How do you crack the mass media? The enemy there is the liberal sensitivity to anything that might arouse racial antagonism.
You could go so far as to make a mainstream myth turn real - set up a paramilitary training camp deep in the Ureweras - and wait for the police to swoop on it. You could have Tame Iti arrested and refused bail in mysterious hearings, attended by lawyers Annette Sykes and Moana Jackson.
And still the news reports and commentary would tread delicately around what was going on. You would see John Campbell chide foreign newspapers for headline references to a Maori camp and Maori guns. "The police haven't said that," he sniffed. "There were members of other races there". What can you do?
Maori nationhood, which doesn't mean "taking over New Zealand" as Pita Sharples pretends to think, has been trying to assert itself on public consciousness for many decades now and still is not much better known here than Islamic nationalism was to the world a decade ago.
Whatever was happening in the Ureweras - serious plans or a shadow play - blame George Bush.
Suppose he'd been content to go into Afghanistan, remove its religious regime, destroy the al Qaeda camps and scatter the survivors to the four winds. If he'd let 9/ll rest there, we would not have spent the past six years worrying about a war on a phantom.
We would not have treated the occasional atrocity in Western cities or tourist resorts as further evidence of an evil network at work. Acts of "terrorism" would have been seen as they were before 2001 - isolated outrages committed sometimes by organised national separation movements, sometimes by alienated loons acting alone or together to achieve some sick significance.
More importantly, perhaps, we would not have let malcontents know how far they might advance their cause by staging some random act of destruction, even in a society as easy-going as New Zealand.
Destruction of some physical emblem is the worst I can believe of whatever the police have been watching in the Ureweras.
Despite the cache of weapons they collected in their raids this week, it is nearly impossible to believe anyone in this country would plan to kill for a political cause.
It is easier to believe a police terrorism operation has been infected by the climate of the times. But they had been watching people in balaclavas in the bush for some time and something made them move now.
I suspect Tame Iti is glad they did. He is a master of the fearsome gesture and knows how to exploit a needless prosecution such as that brought against him at the urging of National MPs for shooting the flag during a Tuhoe welcome to the Waitangi Tribunal.
Maori nationalists have plenty of scope for provocative destruction without seriously endangering human life. They discovered that much on One Tree Hill. The chainsaw taken to Auckland's landmark might not bear too much comparison to the attack on New York's twin towers, but the motive was exactly the same. Mike Smith wanted to hurt a community and he did.
When a community has been hurt it asks itself why. The question is rhetorical. It knows the reason, it wants to reject it as justification. The violent don't seek justification, only recognition.
How zealots of every cause must envy the success of Osama bin Laden. With one operation he began a sequence of events that has let his mission define this decade.
Who would have imagined that we would spend the first part of the 21st century coming to grips with a religious cause the West last met in the Middle Ages?
It is a fair bet that bin Laden has done nothing since 2001 except hide in the wilds of Pakistan, buying safety from the hill tribes and enjoying reports that reach him of America's agony in Iraq and his hero status among young Muslims everywhere.
He has had astonishing luck. He could not have imagined the United States would be so unhinged by the hurt that it would invade an Arab Islamic heartland.
But blow up a big enough target and you can't predict how far the pieces will fall. A single, carefully planned, well co-ordinated destructive act has made the world take notice of a deeply unwelcome aspiration.
On a lesser scale, might such an act end a country's wilful blindness to an aspirant nation within? I suspect the Urewera campers thought so.
