A walkout at a terrorism conference might have grabbed the headlines but what was simmering beneath it? David Williams reports
ANALYSIS: The tension in the room was palpable.
Christchurch Town Hall’s Limes Room came alive with shouts of “free Palestine!”, prompted by comments about a 2018 rally in Auckland supporting a designated terrorist entity – the military wing of Hezbollah.
Government officials and academics, assembled for a high-profile national hui on counter terrorism, watched on, stunned, as a minority of people stormed out.
(Abdur Razzaq, of the Federation of Islamic Associations, led the walkout. Asked if it was done in protest, he says the hui was supposed to be a safe venue, a place to focus on what unites us. “It was the wrong place to raise issues of Palestine and Israel.”)
As reported by 1 News, Al Noor Mosque (Masjid An-Nur) Imam Gamal Fouda said, as he exited: “This is racism against us.”
The topic being discussed by the panel was: “Addressing the causes: how can embracing community and diversity-focused approaches contribute to preventing and countering violent extremism.”
So, too, it’s worth discussing the root causes of yesterday’s walkout.
Leading up to comments by New Zealand Jewish Council’s Juliet Moses, tensions were already heightened. Not because of recent Middle East violence but because some in the Muslim community felt the conference was a closed shop. Big-wigs from the big city telling Christchurch – which experienced the country’s worst terrorist act – how they’re going to fix things.
These are officials some in the Muslim community have found difficult to secure meetings with. Some of them – like Andrew Kibblewhite, the former chief executive of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet – oversaw an intelligence system that, the Royal Commission into the attack said, inappropriately concentrated on Islamist extremist terrorism.
(Kibblewhite, now head of the Justice Ministry, will give today’s closing address.)
“It wasn’t what I was expecting or hoping,” Islamic Women’s Council national coordinator Aliya Danzeisen says of yesterday’s opening day.
This morning, before the conference’s second day starts in earnest, the council is holding a panel discussion ‘What hate feels like now’. Public servants have been told to attend.
The Muslim group pushed for a separate event on the fringes of the conference. In April, as the conference schedule was being assembled, the council put forward names to be considered for panels. One of its members, Anjum Rahman, will take part in a panel this morning. But despite being told panel members would be diverse and experts in their field, Muslim experts were largely overlooked, Danzeisen says.
“We were like, well, how is our voice going to be heard?”
Fouda told 1 News yesterday: “Christchurch Muslims are ignored in this conference – nobody’s talking from our community,”
Why was the hui, He Whenua Taurikura, convened?
Recommendation 16 of the Royal Commission was for an annual hui to be hosted by a new national intelligence and security agency “to bring together relevant central and local government agencies, communities, civil society, the private sector and researchers to create opportunities to build relationships and share understanding of countering violent extremism and terrorism”.
It’s now more than two years since the attacks, and six months since the Royal Commission’s report was released. It was a chance for the Government to reveal what it’s been working on, and progress on adopting the Royal Commission’s recommendations, including vital details about a push for greater social cohesion.
A more public-facing public service, including security agencies, could have listed its achievements in the past two years to address identified shortcomings. A willingness to be more transparent and, therefore, more accountable to those they serve. (To be fair, some agencies have done that.)
But the tone from the beginning was seen by some as defensive, and somewhat worrying.
Massey University terrorism expert Dr John Battersby said: “Terrorism is a rapidly morphing tactic which deliberately seeks to circumvent state responses to it, which aim also to exploit assumptions of safety and security in our society.”
Counter-terrorism is the use of limited resources to find detectable threats, he said, describing it as an aspiration. “No human endeavour can ever guarantee that terrorism will not occur, despite the expectation advanced by the media that security agencies can or should be able to guarantee this.”
Speaking of the 2019 shootings in Christchurch, Rebecca Kitteridge, director-general of the Security Intelligence Service, said there was a “realistic possibility” the terrorist’s action could inspire another “white identity extremist attack” in this country, most likely by an “extremist lone actor”.
(Danzeisen took that to mean another attack is inevitable. “Wouldn’t you think that you would be saying, ‘We are going to do the best we can under all the circumstances’?”)
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, appearing via video because of fog, acknowledged the 51 Shuhadah who died at the Al Noor and Linwood mosques in March 2019, calling them “loved and valued members of our society”. If they are to remain at the centre of the country’s response to March 15, and efforts to prevent another such attack, then, she said, “we have a lot of work to do”.
Ardern said the conference marked the first time in this country’s history, “we have come together openly, as part of a public conversation, to build an understanding of the research on radicalisation; to look at ways we can challenge hate-motivated extremist ideologies; and to facilitate a discussion about our priorities to address New Zealand’s terrorism and violent extremism issues”.
Not everything went smoothly, however. A conference-goer from the University of Canterbury criticised a Government-commissioned study by London’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue saying he was surprised by how little extremism it uncovered. “I know more than that personally.”
He says: “Your data is not showing, unfortunately, what the online extremism landscape in New Zealand is – it is showing how easy it is or not to collect data from the internet.”
To be fair, the next speaker wondered if the data was over-inflated. Discussion chair Jared Mullen, of the Department of Internal Affairs, said there were limitations to such research.
Victoria University of Wellington criminology lecturer Dr Sara Salman said social inclusion needs an economic component. “Cultural-social inclusion has been tried – we’ve seen it attempted in the United States. It doesn’t work. If people don’t feel economically secure they cannot feel a cultural investment in the country, and they cannot feel solidarity with those around them.”
On a panel about media – an industry which, like security agencies, seemed overly focused on the possibility of Islamic terrorism – Khairiah Rahman, a senior lecturer at Auckland University of Technology’s School of Communication Studies, raised issues of structural injustice, racism and discrimination. “It’s important that we do not lose sight of these issues in society because, until we address them, the social cohesion and understanding that we all seek will not happen.”
Newsroom’s observations at the hui were limited – we only attended the afternoon sessions. But we spoke with people who had attended the whole day, and they noted how few people who spoke were from the South Island, let alone from Christchurch’s Muslim community.
Certainly, some speakers hit the mark. Some agencies were clear about progress and the work yet to be done.
But much of what was said yesterday was in the abstract, or at an academic level, in an audience stacked with people who experienced terrorism directly. There seemed to be a strict adherence to prepared talking points, rather than allowing leeway to discuss important matters as they arose.
There didn’t appear to be much new information. Proposed changes to hate speech laws are yet to be implemented.
If one of this Government’s key aims over the last two years was to make this country safer, to ensure such an attack won’t happen again, it’s not clear, to some at least, what it is doing to achieve this.
Prime Minister Ardern said yesterday: “Today we come together to listen, to learn and to share – both our knowledge and our experiences.”
However, most of the listening was done by the survivors of the terror attack, and it’s unclear what was learned. The conference felt like something designed by those in Wellington, and imposed on Christchurch without much local input.
It would be easy to get demoralised. “We aren’t being listened to,” Danzeisen says.
Which brings us back to the walk-out.
The Jewish Council’s Moses, partner of Newsroom co-editor Mark Jennings, believes she’s been misrepresented by some people who thought she was criticising recent protests, attracting thousands of people, against Israeli airstrikes on Gaza. Moses says the point she was making in referring to the military wings of Hezbollah and Hamas is terrorism of all kinds needs to be condemned.
Before the next session began, there was a quick response by Muslim speakers. One of the respondents was Rashid Omar, who Newsroom reported on last August, when, in court, he faced the terrorist who killed his eldest son, Tariq.
Omar said yesterday: “We were invited here, to this hui, to discuss peace as Islam teaches us. We are coming here not to hear racism and racial comment about Muslims supporting terrorism. We are the ones who suffered from this terrorism.”
The silver lining is this episode gave a victim of the Christchurch massacre an impromptu chance to address a conference about counter terrorism and social inclusion that didn’t seem very inclusive.
* This story has been updated to clarify the walkout was not done in protest and comments from Abdur Razzaq.
