The wounds are fresh although our dead have been laid to rest five years now.

We will never forget the day when Muslims were targeted and massacred at two places of worship in Aotearoa.

Our loved ones, including women and children, were murdered execution-style with a semi-automatic weapon.

In the same year, that type of weapon was banned. But now there is talk of reintroducing its accessibility to anyone with a licence. Have we not learnt?

Muslims must recount the cost of allowing such ownership to those who did not have to bury their dead like we did. But will you listen?

The Muslim story in Aotearoa is one of struggle. It is about striving for our own security and belongingness without losing our identities.

It is about a rootedness of diverse Muslim communities in Aotearoa and a call to end the ongoing marginalisation and indifference to “others” like us – the Uyghurs, Palestinians, Rohingya, etc.

But Islamophobia is rife and so normalised in news and popular culture that negative Muslim narratives, which are often fake, have fuelled hate rhetoric and led to personal attacks.

Take the Christchurch terrorist who referenced unfounded news claiming that one of the mosques he attacked was a place of terrorism-training.

We know of too many stories, too frequently told, of discrimination framed in casual comments and the same old negative assumptions.

In her study of Islamophobic stereotypes and creating awareness through design, Aakifa Chida traced the journey of othering from fear of Muslims to genocide.

In her work, Chida highlights the common biased rhetoric in New Zealand to be insinuations of terror links and non-Muslims’ surprise at Muslim civility.

The road that extremists take from hate to mass murder is a proven one. Ideologies that support this must be called out and extinguished.

Muslims in New Zealand have been working with government departments on several fronts since 15 March 2019 to ensure the Christchurch tragedy, born out of hatred, does not happen again.

FIANZ (The Federation of Islamic Association of New Zealand) have produced evidence-based research to highlight a history of hate rhetoric, misrepresentation of and indifference to Islam and Muslims by western media, government departments and segments of society.

Muslims in professional capacities have formed a body and taken up consultative roles to advise on the Islamic perspective on matters such as education, social cohesion, countering terrorism and violent extremism.

But in any socially harmonious relationship, everyone must care to make it work. Everyone can help by reporting discriminatory acts, whether experienced as a victim or witness.

‘See it, say it’ is a good start to address hate and harassment. While explicit discriminatory actions are easy to call out, the implicit ones are harder, more entrenched, complex and perplexing.

There is a fundamental issue that every organisation needs to address – supportive actions based on genuine intention rather than tokenism.

There is no culture of inclusivity without self-reflection and acknowledgement of our own biases. The absence of this can be seen in the actions we take.

The Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) highlighted factors that contributed to the Christchurch attacks yet all but two of those did not make the recommendations – media and government (Security Intelligence Service). These groups were quietly absolved of guilt by their removal from the recommendations.

Failure to mitigate attack

The first conference (He Whenua Taurikura – A country at peace) was held in June 2020 to address the issues raised in the RCI recommendations. The meeting included a media panel, but this turned out to be a show of what the media was doing right rather than an acknowledgement of what media had done to propound hate and bias against Muslims.

Also absent was a genuine reflection by the Security Intelligence Service about their failure to mitigate an attack from a white supremacist terrorist and what steps were being taken to prevent this.

The conference had a show of inclusivity but failed to respect the victims of the attack and their post-trauma experience. Some survivors and bereaved families were given the stage before the actual conference, with their sharing time chopped into some minutes before and just after breakfast.

Muslim organisations such as FAIR (Foundation Against Islamophobia and Racism) called out the biased actions at this first conference including insinuations by a speaker on the terrorism panel that Muslims in New Zealand support terrorism. It remains unclear why this person who was not a terrorism expert was included in the panel. She claimed to represent the Jewish community but a spokesperson for the national Jewish community said they were “horrified” and rejected that she represented them.

The second conference in 2022 shifted the focus from the Christchurch Muslim victims and unresolved issues affecting Muslims in New Zealand to all issues faced and nature of the conference worked against the purpose of the counter-terrorism discussions in two ways.

First, the introduction of multiple narratives detracted from the focus to follow through on actions discussed in the previous conference. Focus was removed from addressing issues and concerns by actual survivors of a terrorist attack in New Zealand – the Muslim communities.

Second, and surprisingly, media was not welcomed. The tough conversations at the conference did not get any airtime. It was later learned that selected outlets were allowed access to some sessions, which undermined the role of media as a transmitter for public information and a check on power.

Overall, there was a sense of disappointment among Muslim participants at the conference. Aliya Danzeisen, a founding member of the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand (IWCNZ) raised the question of failed deradicalisation by the Government’s Department of Corrections in the case of the LynnMall attack.

Danzeisen disclosed that she was unaware of any change since the Royal Commission in terms of addressing radicalisation despite sitting in the corrections forum for the Muslim community.

Conference cancelled

The third conference planned for 5 and 6 December 2023 was abruptly “postponed” a fortnight before the event with an apology and assurance that it was a “difficult decision” but necessary as “many of our communities are focussed on domestic and international events”. We are told that in the current climate, it was not possible to have focused discussions on countering terrorism and violent extremism.

On Friday, 5 April 2024, a spokesperson for DPMC informed participants that the conference was cancelled. We are told that the context has not changed and it would not be possible to “focus on the important conversations”. Participants were comforted that the authorities would “continue to look for opportunities to encourage an open national dialogue about countering terrorism and violent extremism.”

But with the access of semi-automatic firearms back on the cards and the hate speech law abandoned, there is a clear detachment from the findings and recommendations of the Royal Commission Inquiry into the Christchurch mosque massacres.

Where are the “important conversations” when a law that protects a community from being targeted with hate speech is shut down?

The postponement of the counter terrorism conference was due to the Israel-Palestine conflict that had escalated into a frenzy of bombardments resulting in the largest death counts of Palestinians, especially women and children, and journalists on the ground. Enough evidence had been documented by journalists and international aid workers to show the brutal genocidal intent by Israel.

Still, it took the death of seven international aid workers from the World Central Kitchen for international governments to call out the senseless killings. The workers were killed by an Israeli airstrike despite following a route approved for humanitarian aid. This time there was no Hamas justification but an admission of error for the “tragedy” which “won’t happen again”.

The unthinkable and inhuman monstrosity towards other humans with such callous disregard happened only because those who support politics of discrimination refuse to see where such treatment would lead.

Racism and discrimination are insidious negative values that influence behaviour in a deeply rooted unconscious way. They have a way of making ignorance and indifference to the “other” (outsider) groups seem natural and non-offensive.

Take the organisers of a school event at a university in Auckland. Three weeks into the semester, the school decided to hold a pizza evening for staff and students on what would probably be the first day of Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month.

When alerted that Muslim staff and students would not be able to join the gathering, the organiser graciously apologised and assured future inclusion but the event went ahead nonetheless and intentionally excluded Muslim participation.

Of course we are expected to be grateful that an apology was issued and that such missed opportunities were to be expected. After all, people at the fringes of society must learn to be excluded sometimes and know their place.

A colleague had even asked me what could be done if an organisation wanted to hold such foodfest gatherings during Ramadan and still require the presence of Muslims – you know – “to be inclusive”.
This reminds me of yet another colleague who thought that gifting alcohol (a bottle of wine, the school’s standard gift for all invited guest speakers) to a practising Muslim was okay since it’s not cheap and that we could always give it to someone else who drinks.

What can we say to these “inclusive” acts? The invitation and gift are useless because the giver knows it’s tokenism, insincere and lacks goodwill.

These passive-aggressive tendencies show a deep-seated inability to acknowledge the significance of another cultural worldview and an inclination towards a normative rejection and exclusion of Muslims.

When all terrorists are not created equal

A new hearing was scheduled to review the coronial inquiry two years ago into the death of Ahamed Samsudeen, the mentally unstable LynnMall attacker in September 2021.

It is unclear why this hearing was called except that public interest surrounds police handling of the tragic attack. Samsudeen was under surveillance and had been observed by the Department of Corrections. The department had reported that Samsudeen was unreceptive to offers of mental health support but “there have been complaints that the official narrative of what happened to him had been selective”.

The police argument for the “tactical option” to kill Samsudeen was supported by the “overwhelming sense, and need, for urgency” and that "time could well have cost lives.”
Yet in the Christchurch attack the terrorist was safely apprehended.

Why would internal security forces gun down a mentally disturbed brown man who had randomly attacked seven people with a knife while they safely apprehended a white terrorist who had massacred 51 peaceful worshippers with a semi-automatic weapon?

Coronial inquiries are called when there is sufficient public interest and questions raised about an occurrence of national interest.

Five years on, the recommendations for the coronial inquest into the Christchurch attacks are yet to be revealed. It’s been a long wait for families of victims to learn the truth of what happened and find some form of closure.

In her reflections of what happened, Lianne Dalziel, the mayor of Christchurch at the time of the tragedy, said that “If we are to learn from this, and we must, we need to understand how all the systems operated together on that day” and that findings from the coronial inquest can provide this lesson.

We have only recently learnt that the Christchurch terrorist had the support of an online community of like-minded extremists. He was no lone wolf and the threat of a recurrence of that fateful day five years ago is real.

What can we do to prevent this? Government, media, and social movements that support inclusivity and the human right to co-exist peacefully must lead the way by first addressing the tough and necessary self-critical questions.

Leaders advocating for peace, social justice and cohesion must call out the bias and negative stereotypes of others in their ranks and address them appropriately. In a journal article, I discussed the merits of genuine engagement as opposed to tokenism, issues management and cultural competence as areas for improvement in both government and media.

Until the upper echelons of society and those in positions of power do something to weed out the normalised casual discrimination of Muslims, we must continue to deal with hate rhetoric, identity misconceptions, tokenism and indifference.

Khairiah A Rahman is Senior Lecturer at the School of Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology. She is a founding member of the Asia Pacific Media Network and of Muslim Media Watch. Khairiah is part of FIANZ’s Think Tank and serves on the advisory team at the Centre for Research Excellence (Te Whenua Taurikura) for Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism. Khairiah is also the Assistant Editor of Pacific Journalism Review and has served on Meta’s Aotearoa News Innovation Advisory Group.