The Christchurch mosque terror attacks happened only three weeks before I began to write this chapter, on Friday, 15 March 2019. It is still impossible to think about that day without fresh, crushing sorrow. It is the aching realisation that fifty-one human beings, from all walks of life, were murdered together because they were seen as an amorphous inhuman mass. They were seen as different.
For me, the realisation comes afresh each day. As you do after all of life’s tragedies, you wake up each morning feeling normal for a minute, then you remember. There is unspeakable hurt in knowing that this happened here.
For those of us who know that we, too, are seen as ‘different’, the grief itself is different. It is the grief of knowing that our families, our foods and our skin colour are not normal enough. That we are not seen as human enough. We already knew we were not enough to be included in all sorts of ways in our daily lives. People told us that. They screamed it at us from cars, in the playground, online. They tore us down if we rose. But now that knowledge is inescapable. Now, we know they may also kill us. With the grief of the whole nation comes something else. For us, besides the grief, there is now a daily terror.
This was a tragedy that befell people who had already suffered, who were already a little isolated, already overcoming the challenges of rebuilding lives, reclaiming humanity, and feeling safe. It happened in a city that had already suffered unimaginable trauma. It happened here in Aotearoa, where, though the prejudice that underpinned it was known to different communities to different extents for centuries, the magnitude of carnage was a shock to us all.
We all felt its impact, right around the country. We all felt that heartache. But it is important to acknowledge that the target of the attack was a minority group, mostly targeted for their religion, but also because they were seen as outsiders, foreign, and unwelcome. It is that which hurt the affected communities most. Members of the Muslim community, the refugee community, migrants of colour and tangata whenua raised their voices in the aftermath of the attack, all as communities affected by prejudice. The hurt of being dehumanised for your innate difference is what this tragedy brought to light.
The images that marked our collective consciousness that day were of unthinkable violence. The medics described a river of blood. We know the weapons used were military-style semiautomatics, designed to maximise harm, both death and grotesque injury. We each remember certain victims’ stories — those we heard first; those who reminded us of the children in our lives because of their ages, their smiles; those who made us think of our own grandparents; those who fought back; those who saved loved ones. The violence was immense and indiscriminate of youth or age, precisely because the murderer did not see his victims as individuals, as human enough. His purpose was to cause terror for the whole targeted community. And he has. It is that feeling of sorrow and very real fear that came flooding to me in messages from migrant and Muslim communities almost immediately after the news broke out.
For me, there was also an immediate sense of guilt. Survivor’s guilt. I’ve seen those threats. Threats of gun violence; calls for me to be taken down, attacked, silenced, put in my place. Calls for rape. Calls for death. I’ve carried a panic alarm for half my life as an MP. I have fought back against the hate. I have called out racism. I have even highlighted it. I have sat in a place of privilege and relative power while I tore down the sad, angry haters online. I thought that was the right thing to do. I didn’t realise that may be a call to arms.
Yes, I was scared sometimes. But as much as I knew the hate existed here, that it had risen up against me because I was different — suspected of being Muslim based on my race — I didn’t see the carnage coming. When it did come, I wondered why it wasn’t me. I thought maybe it should have been me. I had stuck my neck out. I was brazen. I wasn’t content to be ‘ethnic’ quietly in the corner. It should have been me, because I am not a three-year-old little boy, I am not an elderly man finally living a restful life, I am not a newlywed looking to start my life in a city far away from violence. None of those victims had invited a clash with a racist terrorist, but maybe I had.
Living through this atrocity as a ‘refugee MP’ — a member of at least one affected, targeted community — very quickly felt like an existential crisis. I’ve been replaying it over and over in my mind in minute detail ever since. Part of the reason I keep repeating the minutiae of the day in my head is that the reactions of the people around me were so divergent and telling. Each minute was a moment in the history of this tragedy and a struggle to shape its legacy that is still being formed today.
I’m still trying hard to process the emotions of the day, but also the politics. At the time of writing, some of what I experienced that weekend remain live social issues, embodiments of the challenges and the changes we need to make at a macro level, as a nation. As a Green MP, I hold every portfolio that was immediately relevant to the attack: Justice, Police, Human Rights, Immigration and Refugees, Security and Intelligence. I was literally in a position to lead that work as a representative of a devastated community. But how does one person shift a tide of understanding? How does one even begin that work?
First, our institutions and leadership need to value community voices. That was already missing. That was why we as a nation missed the signs of danger.
The beginning and end of it for me was the community begging me for a voice, knowing that for the first time in our political history they had representation in their House of Representatives.
The first I knew of the terror attack was when I had stopped on Ponsonby Road for a coffee between work events. It was a gorgeous day and it was glorious to be home in Auckland for it. I was scrolling Twitter while the coffee arrived. The tweet I saw linked to an article that only talked about gunshots being fired at a mosque. It was shared by a friend who had recently moved back to New Zealand from London, saying she had come back ‘to get away from this shit’. It took me a minute to consolidate her caption with the headline. I read it a few times over — ‘a shooting in a mosque’ — but . . . here. I scrolled through the article, silently pleading for there not to be any deaths. Maybe it was a scare tactic, or the terrorist was stopped before he could hurt anyone.
I knew it was a high-pressure day at our office. It was the day after our party co-leader James Shaw had been punched on the street in an unprovoked attack. It was also the day of the school climate strikes. Thousands of beautiful, hopeful, young people were striking all over New Zealand for action on climate change, and we were focused on supporting them.
Soon there was a second report and it confirmed ambulances at the scene. People were hurt. I needed to put out a message, as spokesperson on both the Justice and Human Rights portfolios, given it was fairly clear, no matter the extent of harm, that this was likely a hate crime aimed at the Muslim community.
As I began to interact with the bureaucracy of government and parliament that day, I realised that establishment institutions are not only ignorant of minority issues, they are actively resistant to engaging with them. I realised over the next hours and days that as women and minorities, our struggle to be heard, to have resources supporting our issues in politics, let alone our voices, is still very real. Representation does not come with the mere election of a ‘representative’. This was still an institution peopled with those who did not understand the value of a marginalised community’s voice, even when that community was under physical attack. If ever I was unsure that this is a live challenge in my work, that day it was made very clear.
The type of questions that came back over the day as I put a statement together, in solidarity with my community and with the victims, and in condemnation of the hate and terror, and fought to put it out were surprising. The bureaucracy didn’t seem to get it. They wondered why I would comment on this, since politicians don’t comment on every crime. Was I only interested because this happened in a mosque?
For me, the issue was one of ensuring the targeted community didn’t feel alone. Just as we speak out loudly when the rainbow community is attacked, as we have done since the dehumanising attacks against the trans community became more organised in 2018, the cries of support and condemnation are vital in sustaining marginalised groups when they are under siege. I was surprised at the suggestion that I, in particular, may be biased in prioritising this issue, presumably because I share ethnic and refugee identity with some of the victim group. I would have thought that could only be a good thing, when a representative speaks.
Accustomed to explaining things to vexed institutions whose routine is interrupted with the inconvenient truth of minority perspectives, I explained what a hate crime is. I consciously kept my tone calm and a little, almost inappropriately, upbeat, to avoid being accused of being overemotional. I kept it technical. I started from the beginning, as we often must, to prove, again and again, that our issues exist and they matter. I said when crime targets a community based on their race, religion, gender, or some other discriminatory identifier, it is more serious than an ordinary crime. The victims extend beyond those directly affected, given the aim is to scare and demean that entire community. That made this a politicised crime, different than a usual act of individual violence. It would be the same if a church or synagogue was targeted, indeed if a gay nightclub or women’s space had been. ‘This is likely an act of terror,’ I said again and again that day, and it felt like words would form part of the battleground for some time.
It seemed like the extent of the tragedy was not really felt — maybe couldn’t be felt — by anyone outside the targeted group. Thankfully, that feeling was very much quashed by night’s end. The relief that came when we heard Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern say, so resolutely, that it was an act of terror was great. But at that moment, it felt like to ‘them’, this was any other day, while we were contending with how life would now be forever changed. Would hijabi women still feel safe enough to leave home with a head covering? Would young Sikh men be safe on the bus late at night? Would our grandparents be okay alone out there in their national dress? The effect of a shooting borne of xenophobia is immediate for the targeted people. We didn’t need to wait for the body count to know this was a fork in the road. For me, it felt like the rest of New Zealand might just shrug and change the channel. It was important that we didn’t, important that we never do. To listen to an affected community is to continue listening.
Still maintaining my surreal calm to accommodate the apparently unmoved world around me, I sat back down in front of my now-cold coffee.
Members of different affected groups began reaching out to me in droves. It was the Muslim community, but also a cross-section of the migrant communities who knew full well that we were all targets when the threat was white supremacy. Refugee groups were asking for details, asking how they could reach their people in Christchurch. It transpired in the wake of the attack that the refugee community there had become isolated from institutional support since refugee resettlement services were wound up after the 2011 earthquake. They sent messages of love. They shared their fears. They wanted me to share our fears out there in public. I said I would as soon as I could. They asked for guidance from someone they saw in a position of power from their community. How can we keep safe? I didn’t know, but I knew we needed to keep calm. With despair, people were saying, ‘We were worried this would happen.’ I began the work of responding with words of comfort. But their fears were real. I couldn’t tell them otherwise. We affirmed each other. We shared our stories of the warning signs, in a safe space away from the public eye, where it still felt nothing much was wrong.
Then, news came that a second mosque had been attacked, at first passed on privately to me by messages from Jan Logie, who called me from Christchurch. She wanted me to know it was serious, but that we didn’t have all the facts yet. She told me to brace myself. She asked me if I was okay.
As I was still staring at the phone in my hand, digesting the harrowing implications of those messages, I got another call from a friend in our office. He asked, ‘Are you on your own?’ He wanted me to call someone to come be with me, as more news was coming. He paused a lot during that call, trying to keep his voice steady. He was trying to negotiate a tone that was serious without causing me alarm. I realised he didn’t want to tell me outright that I may be in danger or that this was going to get emotionally rough for me, but that’s why he was calling.
Suddenly, more and more people were in touch to see if I was okay. Some staff, my friends, members of the public. It hadn’t sunk in yet that I might be any more affected by the horror unfolding than anyone else sitting afar reading the news. But I quickly realised that people knew the threats I get. They had thought of me in part because they were scared for me. They saw me as a potential target of what might be a series of attacks. For now, that was a possibility I needed to push away.
I stepped outside onto the sunny Ponsonby sidewalk, among the Friday afternoon crowd avoiding work, laughing and chatting about the weekend. That morning, I had been writing the second chapter of this book about my childhood in Iran. I had been writing about the oppressions imposed by the Islamic regime. My mind raced through what I had been writing, searching for what might be taken as demeaning of Muslims as a group. I find it so hard to exhibit deference to any religion that it was very possible my words were capable of affirming general anti-Muslim sentiment. The Iranian experience of having religion forced upon us by a violent regime that purports to enforce Sharia makes it too easy to frame all opposition to that regime’s brutality as opposition to Islam. As someone who can be seen as ‘rescued’ from her culture, it was important to me to give no fuel to that kind of prejudice.
I remembered Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch parliamentarian and former refugee, whose ongoing campaign for Islamic women’s rights sometimes manifested in condemnation of the religion and its practitioners. That rhetoric often doesn’t feel like it has the effect of lifting Muslim women to a place of gender equity, a movement they themselves are well capable of leading. Instead it validates hatred and exclusion, antithetical to lasting progress within any culture. For many years, she was the only refugee I knew who had risen to prominence in Western politics. For all those years, I wished she hadn’t used her platform in a way that in part legitimised white nationalist rhetoric. Now I was in a position where I had to choose my words carefully, as a matter of fairness but also public safety.
Fifty-one innocent people had just been gunned down, far away from the ‘Muslim world’, because they were seen as representatives of a dark abyss that had become the portrayal of their culture. In fact, they represented very different cultures. Among the worshippers at each mosque were groups from Africa, Asia, and that ominous construct called ‘the Middle East’. They practised their religion in diverse ways even within their small community. Some women wore the hijab, others didn’t. Some were highly educated ‘career women’, while others were stay-at-home mums. Some men wore beards to express their faith, others didn’t. It was words, images, and media headlines about ‘jihadi brides’, ‘the War on Terror’, and ‘threats to our freedom’, with no counterbalance, that had done this to them. Their real stories — of motherhood, of their research projects, of the young soccer star who coached women’s football in the community — had not been told. Just as Anjum Rahman and others from the Islamic Women’s Council, who had sounded the alarm about hate speech and hate crimes for the past five years, they had not been heard. The responsibility now was to humanise a vulnerable, targeted community. That is why I needed to speak.
Finally, I went back into the café, packed my things to leave. I closed my laptop. Looked back to see if I had everything. Very slowly, with the feeling that my mind may not be all there, I walked back out onto the bright footpath. The warm sunlight felt ill-matched to the emotions of the day, and I didn’t get far on my walk home. I crouched down near a bus stop and put my face in my hands. The grief finally poured out.
I was near Prego, a bustling restaurant, and people finishing long boozy Friday lunches were spilling out onto the pavement. I could hear a group of women talking and smoking out front. It was a strange relief to find they were talking about the attack. One of them was in a panic, telling the others that her sister was in Christchurch. That the schools were under lockdown and she was trying to find out if everyone was okay. At least by now, people in Auckland were becoming aware. I realised I had been staring up at the women — probably somewhat unsettling coming from a crouched, weeping figure on the footpath. I got up and kept walking.
Guy got in touch to see where I was and said he was on his way home. I was walking down a side street to avoid freaking out the public again, and I could barely breathe. He told me to wait there for him, but I didn’t want to stop walking.
By the time I got home, nine people were confirmed dead. Already, this was unthinkable.
Things changed markedly with the death toll. It was clear to me, and — thankfully — to our Prime Minister, that this was a devastating tragedy for Aotearoa. And she did say it.
My focus turned to keeping in close touch with others whose voices needed to be amplified. I knew some columnists would be going out with articles about the attack over the next day or two and I asked whether they could push for voices who were on social media speaking from that all-important lived experience. They were Muslim voices; women of colour speaking about the daily abuse; Māori, very quickly and astutely speaking about the thread of racial supremacy woven into the very foundation of our nation. It wasn’t about blame, but if we didn’t hear those voices now, we were in real danger of ignoring them forever as the narrative of this atrocity solidified. It would be a lost opportunity for essential change. It felt unbearably urgent.
My solace came by way of a phone call from Marama. I had been calling her all afternoon, but she had been in meetings. I didn’t want to call James, given he was in hospital coping with his own violent assault. Marama’s voice was out of breath,
She said, ‘Wherever you are right now, I will come to you and we will record a video message together and we will post it tonight on our own channels. I promise you, you will get to speak.’ The relief I felt was profound and I started crying again. She got it.
We huddled around the kitchen table at Ricardo’s house, a halfway point between my and Marama’s houses in South Auckland. Marama wanted to speak as tangata whenua, as an indigenous woman both inherently understanding racism and able to welcome migrants now experiencing that prejudice into her ancestral homeland. In fact, the connection between Māori and migrants of colour would be strengthened exponentially in the coming days. The point would be made again and again that colonisation was the start of white supremacy here. An iteration of that old ideology had killed the mosque victims, but it was a continuum of the systematic racism that decimated Māori first.
I was angry by then, on behalf of a community who had tried to raise the alarm. In different ways. we had tried to have those hard conversations about the rise of violent racism. I knew that hate had been allowed to fester and grow, because it was too uncomfortable to talk about racism and extremism while some of us lived it.
I remembered making the hate speech video in response to Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux’s New Zealand speaking tour six months before, asking that we de-platform white nationalism. We weren’t talking about locking anyone up, just asking that the words which call our humanity to question maybe shouldn’t be put on national TV and mic-ed up in town halls. That was because famous racists were coming here. It was a global phenomenon and we were clearly not immune. I remembered the absolute barrage of abuse that came with it. It came from around the world. It was organised.
I remembered my maiden speech telling the House that every time politicians and media personalities scapegoated minorities, we felt that hate out in the streets. I told them then, eighteen months ago, about the calls for gun violence against me as a refugee, assumed Muslim. The narrative of racism and hate speech that underpinned this atrocity could not be lost.
But I also knew that — on that night — I needed to signal it gently, because this was a time for grief.
One thing I knew I had to do, from the very start — what I had been fighting for all day — was to call this an act of terror borne of white supremacy. Words were important. The grief of that day became part of years-long grief at our dehumanisation, which came with our portrayal as terrorists. That word ‘terrorist’ was central to our suffering as Middle Easterners, as anyone of a race or region suspected of being Muslim, and in particular for the Muslim community across the globe. I hadn’t heard the word ‘terrorist’ used to describe the attacker yet that day. It needed to be said, because it was the truth.
When we are the victims of bombs that decimate entire cities, when our wedding parties are massacred, when a generation of our children are maimed, those acts are almost never described as ‘terror’. Mass murder in the West by Westerners — like the shootings in public places and schools in the United States — has rarely been recognised as terror. Shootings by white supremacists at synagogues, at gay clubs, are not charged as terror by police. The very real and ongoing lived horrors of colonisation of indigenous peoples — from mass incarceration to the forcible removal of generations of children from their families — is not counted as terror. In fact, just about every mainstream Western war film focuses on the humanising stories of an invading force, unless that film is about World War II. Where are the films about the young Vietnamese lives ripped apart, their friendships destroyed by war? Where are the stories of complex Iraqi or Afghani lives, filled with individual personalities, hopes, and dreams, ripped apart by US–European invasion? None of these phenomena are as universally and clearly condemned as to warrant the instant use of the word ‘terror’. That matters.
The weight of that label is not just rhetoric to me, to us, because it is the very vehicle that delivers and justifies violence against us, and did so on 15 March 2019. To unashamedly call a Pākehā man a ‘terrorist’ when he commits a quintessential act of terror is only fair. It is one way to move forward toward a world where Muslim lives matter. Aotearoa did that, but at that moment we weren’t sure if it would happen yet.
The video was done in a few minutes. We sat on the grass in Ricardo’s backyard in the last of the waning sun. We sent love to the victims and acknowledged that there was a broader community deliberately terrorised by this act of violence. I noted the fear, pain, and valid anger being felt by those affected and ended by promising that we would have the hard conversations arising from what had befallen our nation that day.
Putting out that statement seems trivial now, but to us it was everything. It was the start of a series of statements we made off the mainstream grid that weekend.
From Ricardo’s, I went to the offices of a radio station covering the shootings. I had been called in to do an interview about the attack. The interview never happened, but, as I waited, sitting in the middle of the newsroom facing a huge TV screen, the broadcast team came to a standstill for our Prime Minister’s first press conference since the attack. I remember that speech so vividly that I still relive moments from it at will.
I remember when she first uttered the death toll. It was palpably difficult for her to utter that number. None of us knew it yet. The Prime Minister said the word ‘forty-nine’. The number would rise to fifty the next day and fifty-one in the following weeks. A deluge of hot tears silently poured down my cheeks. Each breath was a struggle to take. People started taking notes for stories with wild urgency. They were screaming facts. ‘Three are arrested?’ ‘He’s definitely from Australia?’ ‘How many did she say were injured?’
Then back to silence, and the Prime Minister spoke the word ‘terror’. That signalled a thoughtful government response. That showed it was already different than the darkly comedic response to mass shootings we would usually have heard by now elsewhere. That was a good moment.
She also said, from the very first statement, with defiance, ‘I tell you now, our gun laws are going to change.’ We didn’t know it yet, but that would be a uniting call in our parliament and across New Zealand. Within five days, a seventy-thousand-strong petition was presented on parliament’s steps, calling on us to ban military-style semi-automatics. A small group of us in the Green caucus, me as Justice portfolio holder, together with our ministers James Shaw and Eugenie Sage, and Chlöe Swarbrick who went on to the special select committee for gun law reform, pored over the urgent cabinet papers that came through in the week that followed. Our political team were sending analyses late into the night as we all processed the technical information on guns we never had prior cause to know. In twenty-three days, we passed the first of the gun-control laws banning most military-style semi-automatics, as the world cheered us on. Another moment of lasting good.
But on the night, the defining message of our Prime Minister’s statement, for most people watching, was all in the line in reference to the victims of the terror attack, ‘They are us.’ Those were the operative words that kept the country calm. It signalled the unity we would at least strive to live by in the wake of that attack. That soon proved a challenge.
In the immediate hours and days after the initial message from the Prime Minister, it was apparent that her words were received differently by different communities. From communities of colour (and those who work more broadly on race equity), there was fear that in reassuring the nation that the act of terror ‘is not us’, the message would allow us to move on without deeper reflection. The status quo would feel absolved. They would take from the message what they needed, an identity disassociated from whatever underpinned the extremist attack. We would get to write off the terrorist as Australian. The cause of violence, like its human instrument, was and is to some extent, even now, pitched as entirely foreign. Within that narrative, all New Zealanders, not just the targeted community, were victims. But if racism and Islamophobia drove the terrorist, that simplistic takeaway was disturbing to the communities living the everyday reality of those ideologies in New Zealand. It was a problem if we let that continue.
In those first hours and in her position as Prime Minister, Jacinda couldn’t add the complexity of racism and xenophobia to her message. There were grave and very live security threats to consider. The uncomfortable truths were too much to process all at once in the context of already unthinkable violence.
My dad, who sank into a distressed state that weekend, found great comfort in the Prime Minister’s message. He saw it as one that would guard against reprisal acts. Like my dad, many in the broader targeted communities — including migrants of colour across the ethnic spectrum — did want to move forward with a uniting message, without raising deeper issues, without showing anger, lest we be blamed somehow for the violence. They were grateful for the invite, finally, to be included in the society they were already part of. This was a contrast to the activist voices in those same communities, but it was the response from a significant segment, the silent majority within our groups.
It was what came in mainstream media soon after Jacinda’s words, prioritising Pākehā commentators, that risked erasing the real causes of this attack. Apart from the immediate terror victims speaking to their victimhood, the voices with mass media platforms were only expressing shock that it had happened at all. The narrative of shock was scary, because we had heard it before. ‘New Zealand is not racist’ was a powerful identity point that erased our experiences of daily racism in order to comfort the status quo. Of course, there was no need to say that New Zealand is racist, only to hear that racism exists here and must be fixed to keep us safe. For that, we needed the truth and the details of our experiences to be included in the dominant narrative. I know that acknowledging the existence of societal racism — and indeed white supremacy — within our community and history is difficult. Pākehā may feel attacked by the truth, that this terrorist was driven in part to protect their supremacy, at least was militarised by the belief in that supremacy. It didn’t for a minute mean they were responsible for the attack, but might mean a need to actively dismantle the belief system that had allowed it. It might mean they shouldn’t have made that joke about the ‘towel heads’. It might mean they shouldn’t have listened to their favourite shock jock scream each morning about refugee criminals or immigrants in Kmart not looking like ‘Kiwis’. I believe we can be jolted to that point of change, which had to begin by making space for the affected community’s voices to detail their own plight, frame their own tragedy.
The night of the attacks, after Jacinda’s press conference, I sat waiting for an hour or so in the radio offices, listening as regional and local politicians and MPs from across the political spectrum made comment, all Pākehā. Each expressed shock. Some said they didn’t believe white nationalism or even racism existed in Christchurch. It was breathtaking to hear that local Pākehā politicians were unaware of the issue on the night of a mass targeted killing of Muslim migrants.
As the programme moved on to interviewing a transport blogger who was being asked to comment on a loud noise heard in downtown Auckland, I knew I had been well and truly bumped. I also knew I had a group of friends — all women of colour — distraught and desperate for support, waiting for me in the backyard at the restaurant Coco’s Cantina. I excused myself and said I was available anytime by phone. That phone call never came.
I walked into Coco’s, fell into Ghazaleh’s arms. Our group talked and cried for hours. We retold our stories of degradation and race attacks throughout our childhoods, in academia, in our relationships. We talked about the responses of the media. We talked about getting our voices out. I told them what had happened to me that day. Did representation mean much if we weren’t seen or heard? Was my election a meaningless token? It felt suffocating, but at least we had this safe space. A space to be sad, but also angry and critical without fear of being marked too emotional, too demanding.
The following day, voices within migrant communities went to work on social media, amending the narrative to include mentions of white supremacy. A strong chorus of Māori voices also immediately rose to chronicle race-based violence in present-day New Zealand, directly connected with the brutality of our colonial past.
The narrative of denial centred around the needs of the status quo, which minority communities were well versed in servicing. That is why the largely silent majorities within our communities, our elders, were most comfortable just falling in line. They had learned long ago that avoiding disunity, which they saw as a threat to our safety, was better than fighting for equality. But the catalyst of the mosque massacres meant that others within those communities, joined by tangata whenua, would not be silenced.
As always, it wasn’t that the marginalised were voiceless. It was sadly that, even in this moment, they remained largely excluded from mainstream broadcasts.
On Saturday, the day after the atrocity, we gathered at the mass vigil in Auckland. I didn’t have a speech prepared, nor did I have any messaging notes from Wellington, but I was ready to speak.
The vigil was truly life-affirming. All of us there will remember it for the rest of our lives. We will be forever grateful to have had each other, grateful to the thousands of strangers who came just to wrap our arms around each other across our grieving nation. We were alive and filled with love, and — away from social media and the loudest voices on the airways — we were good.
It was the most densely packed gathering I had ever seen in Aotea Square, which quickly proved far too small to hold the thousands pouring in. People spilled over onto Queen Street and down the side lanes of the Town Hall. The sun beat down fiercely over the full two hours. We all sat at attention, packing in tighter as yet more people arrived. The communal sorrow fused with so much deep, genuine love was laid bare. It meant everything. It is what we all carry with us still.
We listened first to powerful, emotional speeches from migrant women, an elderly Hindu gentleman who had lost a lifelong Muslim friend in the terror attack, then a dozen politicians from across parliament and Auckland Council. As I waited my turn, I realised only Mayor Phil Goff had mentioned racism by name. He had banned racists from speaking in Auckland’s public venues the previous year, citing the measure as a public safety necessity, and felt rightly vindicated. Other politicians, the parliamentarians, didn’t touch it. They spoke of grief and unity. It certainly was exceptional to have representatives from both Labour and National parties there together speaking of unity. But the political speeches stood in contrast to the initial words of the ethnic community leaders. Those leaders spoke of the change they needed to feel safe. They called for unity rather than declared it. If they celebrated unity, it was the unity coming about now, with the commitment by the people on the ground, to change. It was unity that was possible now because we had come together to name the dark problems, and to solve them. But first we did have to name them.
Marama and I spoke last of all the political speakers. We went onto the stage together, and Marama spoke first, while I stood behind her. She is always an impassioned speaker in front of crowds and in protests. She spoke as tangata whenua sending love and manaakitanga to the Muslim and migrant communities, and in that short speech touched on some dark complex issues about security and identity. She said:
Manaaki and tika — caring for each other in a way that is just and right is what we should be upholding with every inch of ourselves. Upholding my mana, my dignity, is connected to upholding your mana, your dignity . . .
We will not minimalise this racism and bigotry. We will not ignore that you, your sons and daughters, have been the targets of our surveillance rather than our protection.
We will connect the dots so that people understand that we have to own our nation’s historic and modern racism and violence. We will continue having the hard conversations. We will continue to hold up your loving, peaceful families and communities for who you really are. We will continue to celebrate your histories and your stories. We will grieve not just because you are one of us, but because you are you.
She was the first to recall that security agencies, who the Prime Minister had already signalled had failed to monitor the likes of the Christchurch terrorist, had been spying on Māori and Muslims in New Zealand for years. Her words were rousing. The crowd applause felt different than that received by the speakers before her.
It was now my turn. I felt a sense of calm that came with finally having the space to speak. Looking over the crowd, only then did I realise how vast we were as a group. I was angry and I didn’t mask it. My arms were either spread open or on my hips for much of my speech, though those aren’t natural gestures for me. I was speaking with a voice I had never heard myself use, and without inhibition. It felt like my work had all been building to this.
This is what I said, without the pauses for tears, the audible anger, the aching grief:
E nga mana, e nga reo, e nga karangatanga maha. Tena tatou katoa.
Our nation’s heart is broken. My heart is broken today.
But from the bottom of my Kiwi, refugee, migrant heart, I want to thank you. Thank you for being on the right side of history today. It matters. It matters to our community.
We are hurt. We are in shock. And we are scared.
They want us dead. Our nanas, our granddads, our mums and dads, our little kids. We learned that on Friday for sure, but, for some of us, that hate that led to the violence yesterday in Christchurch, we’ve felt it out there on the street for years.
That hate . . . that isn’t the New Zealand that welcomed me, but it is New Zealand today. It’s part of who we are, and we have to fix that, starting by acknowledging that we have to fix it.
We owe them the truth. This was terrorism. It was an act of terror. And it was an act of terror committed by white supremacists. It was an act of terror that had been planned for some time by white supremacists. The killer had the words ‘UN Migration Compact’ written on his gun.
I know that every time I walk into a room or onto the stage, I do that as a refugee, as the first refugee MP in New Zealand, as a woman of colour, as a woman from the so-called ‘Muslim world’.
From the moment I said I was going to stand as a candidate, from the moment I said I might be someone who might deserve to take part in the democracy here, I’ve been receiving the hate and violence online. I remember that they said, ‘It’s time to load our shotguns’ when I announced my candidacy.
I receive all of your love. I do. And it helps so much, but I do want to acknowledge that there’s also the hate and it always has been there. I said it in my maiden speech and I want to say it again here today. We have to hold people to account. From the trolls on the internet, right up to the people who sit in the House of Representatives with me, or on our TV screens. Every time they use the politics of hate and division and xenophobia, we have to hold them to account.
Because we feel it out there on the street. We can’t shed our skin, so they have to stop and we have to stop them.
Every time they weaponise the concept of ‘free speech’ to lie about us, to scapegoat us, we know where that ends. We learned it on Friday, and history has shown us time and again how atrocity begins with cheap opportunistic hate speech against minorities. It has to stop in New Zealand, now.
I do want to say that the fact that you are all here today makes me believe that we will stop them. The fact that you are here today speaks to the strength and the goodness of New Zealand’s values. I thank you.
I walked down from that makeshift stage to a flood of warm hugs and tears and shared truths. It took a long time for us to leave, even after all the other speeches were done and the vigil was over. There were so many conversations and embraces to share.
What made the words unstoppable was the rage emerging beneath my grief, which for me came from knowing that politicians — my colleagues — had also fuelled what came to pass that Friday. Rumours had emerged about the words ‘UN Migration Compact’ on the terrorist’s gun. The debate about the innocuous UN Migration Compact had been cynically waged in the months leading to the attack. This was a non-binding agreement between nations to cooperate in devising strategies to address global migration, including to acknowledge the vulnerabilities of migrants and uphold their human rights. The Compact opens by reaffirming the sovereignty of every state party, and preserves their right to formulate national immigration policy.
A coordinated campaign of fear and conspiracy theories about the Compact was started online by European right-wing extremists, described by New Zealand’s own security agencies as ‘neo-Nazi’ groups. They spread deliberate mistruths that the Compact would mean open borders and that the UN would set our immigration numbers, and often shared fake-news stories of violence and chaos caused by migrants. In New Zealand, as in other nations, sadly, these mistruths were picked up and pushed hard by mainstream politicians. It is impossible to say with certainty whether National Party MPs sharing those lines were ever aware of its origin in neo-Nazi propaganda, or if they read the Compact’s opening affirmation of state sovereignty over immigration policy, or indeed if they knew the difference between binding and non-binding UN instruments. But we know that politicians have a duty of care. We must all admit that when we rile fear about migration and affirm xenophobia, the most visible migrant communities, migrants of colour, pay for our political gains. This time, they paid with their lives. I could not, and will not, leave that unsaid.
The days that followed were a haze of gathering in different places to speak and hold people. What was extraordinary was that, through this tragedy, so many of us across the nation, for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, felt the same things at the same time. It may have been hard before to imagine the pain that comes with being subject to racism, but I think there was a bond formed in that shared grief, which gives us a little more understanding about each other’s experiences. It’s what will give us the impetus to stand up against the hate even when we are not the immediate victims. Because now, we know the hurt as a nation.
Then parliament sat. Something truly incredible happened. An interfaith group of religious leaders walked in with the Speaker. They were representatives of the Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu, Rātana, Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian faiths and churches. The visual spectacle of their robes and adornments would ordinarily be an uncomfortable sight in that secular place of law making. I flinched for a moment with my deep-seated allergy to mixing religion in state apparatus. But on that day, I was overwhelmed with gratitude that we as a House were strong enough to bring our communities together in that breathtaking act of unity in the face of prejudice. In fact, to open the session a traditional Islamic prayer was first delivered by the imam Nizam ul haq Thanvi. I hadn’t heard it in so long. I stood weeping, for everything it meant to the victims who gathered together to hear it last Friday, for everything it had meant in Iran, because a violent regime had perverted it. It was meaningful as an opening of the doors of our House of Representatives to New Zealand’s Muslim community, so excluded from mainstream institutions such as this that there was no Muslim MP among us to help with the preparations when the Speaker had inquired. So I wept again, in public, at work, uncontrollably. That prayer was followed by our usual parliamentary prayer delivered first in te reo Māori by Labour MP and Assistant Speaker Adrian Rurawhe and then in English by National MP and Deputy Speaker Anne Tolley.
That day I finally got to thank the Prime Minister, through tears, for her leadership when the House rose that day. We hugged, shaking a little, and I passed on my dad’s words of thanks. It meant a lot to me personally that my little distressed dad at home had found so much solace in her words.
The work ahead for me, from that day on, has been to hold people to account for riling hate against minorities.
I wrote to the Police Minister Stuart Nash, asking for police training material on unconscious racial bias. We had already talked a lot about the need to overcome race bias in policing as it applies to Māori and Pasifika peoples, as it was something I had worked on as a lawyer in the only case ever where the Court of Appeal found racial bias in search and seizure. It was time to ensure white supremacist extremism was firmly on the agenda in law enforcement.
I also wrote to the Minister of Justice Andrew Little, who happens to hold responsibility for security and intelligence agencies, asking for the same, and to meet. I wanted to renew my call for a review of our hate speech laws, which had been recommended by the Human Rights Commission in 2016. He was still in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity and — like me — held most of the relevant portfolios facing reform. Still, he made the time to meet, and we did so shortly afterward. I told him that as much I believe implementing hate-speech protections is necessary — in fact, it had been a central focus of my work for at least a year — I didn’t want to lead on it.
The truth is, I was scared. I knew now that this would be a call to arms for all the usual groups, the ones that felt white supremacy was worth defending. I knew what vile abuse would pour out. It had done so in 2018 when I first began speaking out about the dangers of targeted hate speech. Even the experts from the Human Rights Commission who had authored the 2016 paper calling for the review became the target of online abuse. They had their identities revealed by so-called ‘free speech’ campaigners in right-wing blogs, whose readers then launched threats against them. These were the same blogs, the same abusers, that attacked me daily.
Andrew listened and reassured me that he intended to lead on that work. A review was underway, being conducted by the Human Rights Commission and the Ministry of Justice. I couldn’t express the relief in knowing I didn’t have to do this alone, because I wouldn’t have been safe.
Then the minister, in a low voice tinged with something betraying sadness, said, ‘I realise with the privilege that comes with being a Pākehā man, maybe I have tolerated far too much on behalf of other people who were harmed by [hate speech].’
In the end, it didn’t matter that the minister, the Ministry of Justice, and the Human Rights Commission were leading this work. I did become a target. I was the only one called ‘a threat to freedom in this country’ by an alt-right politician. The message apparently sounds different and deserving of extremist reactions when the messenger is a refugee girl.
I remain scared for myself and my family, precisely because I believe hate speech is a weapon that leads to very real violence against people like me. I remember Jo Cox. I remember her every day. I remember that she was killed while politicians deliberately fanned the flames of hate for votes. Hysteria soared. Red-faced and angry, people shook fists, and yelled obscenities. White nationalism took over mainstream life in Britain. They scapegoated a terrified, marginalised community, my community. Jo Cox was killed because she sat with us. Her battle cry was to find commonality. She was killed for her solidarity.
I am scared because the rhetoric of Brexit, the rise of nationalism in Europe, and Trump screeching alarms against migrant hordes — or ‘animals’, as he calls us — at the border has already leeched into the dark corners of New Zealand’s own racist underbelly. Every Muslim woman walking down the street in a hijab feels that fear. Every Sikh dad dropping his kids at school in the wake of the Christchurch attack knows they may be targets for even looking Muslim.
So I clutch my panic button. Double check that it’s charged. I pause when I leave the house. Pause before I walk out into the dark, cool night air as I leave parliament. Pause each time I step out onto a podium. I scan the audience for anyone who looks out of place, for lone men, for bulges under jackets. I don’t want to feel this way and I try to push those thoughts away. Sometimes, it’s impossible to look away from the hate when it is aimed at you. It’s impossible to forget that people don’t want us — want me — here. They hate me because of my story, because of that dazed journey out of Iran, because of the violent Islamic regime I was born under, because of the war funded by the US. We are different. Because of our delicious aromatic foods, because of our dark brows and black hair, because my first language is the ancient, strange Farsi. They don’t want us here. They don’t care that I am not Muslim, any more than the terrorist cared whether the Muslim victims of his rage were ever a threat to him or his ‘way of life’. They weren’t. This is about race and xenophobia.
The challenge for New Zealand, now that we know what dangerous prejudice lurks in the shadows of our beautiful island nation, is to be brave. We have newly committed to unity and equality. Now, we must acknowledge some hard truths. We need to hear and accept the hurt of the dispossessed without judgement. The marginalised can’t do it alone. We need everyone to listen to the lived experience of systemic unfairness, of abuse, without the urge to absolve ourselves of blame. Then, we need to actively change what needs to be changed to make our world fair. If that means regulating hate speech to protect the rights of us all to engage freely in discourse, to protect free speech itself, that is a hard and complex conversation we can have together.
For me, beyond legal change sits cultural change. It comes with naming what and who needs to be named, then imagining a world where that prejudice holds no power. This means making space at our decision-making tables, in our Houses of Representatives, for those who are not yet represented equally, whether women or other historically marginalised groups. It means changing the structures that allow discrimination wherever they occur — in media, academics, politics, or science. It means resourcing and prioritising our participation and representation at every level of those institutions. Extinguishing prejudice means we get to tell our own stories in the media and in arts. We get to be journalists, screenwriters, directors, and funding managers, in every arena of that portrayal, rather than only ‘diverse characters’ where others allow us in. It means we are the researchers, determining the terms of study, designing programmes, teaching courses across every area of study. It means we stand and win seats in elections, at every level of governance, public and corporate. More than that, it means political parties and movements prioritise our participation at the grassroots, in their campaign committees, in their executives, as fundraisers and staff in equal shares, so that politics is geared to reaching and serving our people equally. We need to change the way politics, business, and every institute of power is shaped because diversity is how good decisions are made to begin with.
As the ever-wise Moana Jackson said, ‘Nothing is ever unchangeable.’ We have never, in our nation’s living memory, existed without systemic racism and prejudice, but we are capable of doing so. As Iranians continue to protest for democracy, as women and minorities the world over continue to fight against millennia of oppression, we will fight for what we have never seen but know is possible. As the most marginalised people, women from migrant, refugee, and indigenous backgrounds, rise to positions of power for the very first time, I think a revolution is already underway. I believe Aotearoa can sit at the forefront of that change, because I have already seen so much good in our nation’s core. This is already a place where a nine-year-old girl, a refugee, from the so-called ‘Muslim world’, can grow up to one day enter parliament. That means a lot at this moment in global politics.
I took seriously the responsibility to speak in parliament, once I could, for the first time after one of the worst acts of race violence in living memory, our first deadly act of Islamophobic terror. This was my speech to the House on 20 March 2019, calling for a different kind of politics:
A-salaam-alaikum.
Our nation’s heart is broken. My heart is broken today.
Five days on, as the wound is still fresh, as it is still bleeding, we have comfort in all the love, all over our country. As we wrapped our arms around the survivors at mosques, gathered and held each other at vigils, held our little ones a little tighter as we remembered that little Mucad Ibrahim at three years old was one of the victims on Friday.
The city of Dunedin ran out of flowers on Saturday. They were all at the mosque.
That is the New Zealand which welcomed me and my family when we fled oppression, the risk of torture, after we had lived through war. I will never forget that love as a nine-year-old girl coming down that escalator in Auckland Airport with my frightened parents.
And I want to thank every single New Zealander who held true to our values of love and inclusion this week. You are on the right side of history. It matters to our frightened communities.
I will never forget that a Syrian refugee family were among the victims of this terror attack. Like my family, they escaped the unthinkable and found freedom here. They came here to be safe. They died in Christchurch, New Zealand.
We owe those victims the truth. This was terrorism. It was committed by white supremacists. Planned at length without police interference. Because white supremacy was not seen as a pressing threat, though the Muslim victims had been.
The gun he used had the words ‘UN Migration Compact’ written on the butt — next to the chilling ‘Welcome to hell, refugees’.
Although the man who committed the terror happened not to be born here, the ideology that lead to this atrocity existed here . . . the communities have been telling us it exists for years. They say they have reported hate crimes for years.
I know it as my daily truth, as a politician perceived to be Muslim, known to be a refugee. I’ve spoken about the threats I receive, of gun violence, death threats, calls for shotguns to be loaded. Every minority in New Zealand knows this truth. We have to stop and listen to them. We can’t afford to turn a blind eye. We can’t pretend this was an aberration from Australia. That would be irresponsible.
The truth is that this is a global phenomenon.
It began with hate speech, allowed to spread here online. We know that hate speech begets atrocity and we are behind in protecting against that.
The truth is that we, as politicians — and I mean on both sides of this House — are also responsible.
There sit among us those who have for years fanned the flames of division in here and out there. Blamed migrants for our housing crisis. There sit among us here those who deliberately spread hysteria about the UN Migration Compact.
We’ve pandered to the gratuitous racism by shock jocks on breakfast TV to raise our own profiles.
No one here is directly responsible for what happened in Christchurch. We are all horrified. But we are now all on notice. We have to change the way we do politics here.
Our most vulnerable communities are hurt. We are scared. They want us dead.
The people at those incredible vigils are watching. They will hold us to account. Their acts of love, their resolve, is the standard we have to hold ourselves to from now on.
The world is watching. We have to get this right. We have to demonstrate to the rest of the world that love, peace, and compassion is a far stronger force than the forces of hate and division. We must be brave as we have the hard conversations we need to have as a country. We must shine the light into the shadows of racism and hatred that exist in pockets of our society. We must weave the incredible outpouring of love for our Muslim and migrant communities that we have seen over the last few days into the enduring fabric of our society.
We have to do this for all the families who have had the lives of loved ones taken from them. We have to do this for little Muscad Ibrahim.
Kia hora te marino.
May peace be widespread.
Kia whakapapa pounamu te moana.
May the ocean become like pounamu.
Aroha atu, aroha mai.
Give love, receive love.
Tātou ia tātou katoa.
Let us show respect for one another.