‘JUSTICE HAS NOT BEEN SERVED BY THE REPORT’: ISLAMIC WOMEN’S COUNCIL OF NZ

Tue 08 December 2020:

The Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand (IWCNZ) have said in a statement that “justice has not been done served by the report”, which they say was severely restricted by its terms of reference.

There was a lack of transparency under the guise of confidentiality and national security, the IWCNZ says. “There are multiple areas of evidence that have not been investigated, and questions raised by IWCNZ have been ignored.”

“We find it concerning that the Commissioners found systemic failures and an inappropriate concentration of resources towards Islamic terrorism, and yet state that these would not have made a difference to the terrorist being detected prior to the event.”.

In July, the Guardian reported that an Islamic women’s group had alerted police to a specific threat to mosques in the country planned for the day the Christchurch attacks occurred.

That detail is included in the submission to the inquiry made by the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand which said the police had “failed in not developing a national strategy to deal with threats against Muslims and mosques”.

Muslim community leaders said report shows ‘institutional prejudice and unconscious bias’ exist in government agencies

The imam of the Masjid An-Nur (Al Noor mosque), Gamal Fouda, the spokesman for the Muslim Association of Canterbury, Abdigani Ali, and general secretary of the Linwood Islamic Centre, Faisal Sayed, said in a statement:“We’ve known for a long time that the Muslim community has been targeted with hate speech and hate crimes – this report shows that we are right.” The leaders added that the report, “shows that institutional prejudice and unconscious bias exists in government agencies and that needs to change.”

“We asked for help. We knew we were vulnerable to such an attack. We did not know who, when, what, where or how. But we knew,” the Federation of the Islamic Associations of New Zealand said in a submission made public on Monday.

Its conclusion is based on the Islamic community’s own review of a decade of media reports, parliamentary speeches, public addresses, online forums and other sources.

The Islamic federation’s submission points to numerous examples of how New Zealand’s director-general of security, Rebecca Kitteridge, wrongly framed terrorism as a “Muslim issue” rather than seeing the community as potential victims.

The full report has just been published online here.

The foreword begins:

We start by acknowledging whānau of the 51 shuhada, and the survivors and witnesses of the 15 March 2019 terrorist attack and their whānau whose lives have been forever changed. Those attacked at the masjidain were New Zealanders who had gathered together in peaceful prayer. The terrorist murdered 51 people and attempted to murder a further 40 people. His brutal actions were deplorable and incomprehensible.

The report’s recommendations (in full here) fall under four themes: