Editorial comment – No place for terrorism

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People leave after prayers at the site of Friday’s shooting, outside the Linwood Mosque, in Christchurch, New Zealand March 18, 2019. REUTERS/Edgar Su

THE Pesh Imam of the Maunatul Islam Association of Fiji, Alim Muhiyideen Shah Faizi had no qualms about his message in the wake of the terror killings in Christchurch on Friday last week.

There is no place for violence, terrorism or killing in the name of religion!

The Islamic cleric made the comment yesterday while preparing to travel to New Zealand to participate in the burial rites of Peshawar Imam of the Fiji Muslim League’s Lautoka Jame, Masjid Hafiz Musa Patel.

Mr Patel was one of 50 people allegedly gunned down in the horrific shooting at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand on Friday.

As NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern moved to tighten national gun laws following what has been tagged the world’s second worst peacetime shooting massacre in history, Deputy NZ PM Winston Peters spoke about how the world, for Kiwis, had changed forever.

“At 1pm on the 15th of March our world changed forever, and so will our gun laws,” he was quoted saying in NZ media.

The NZ experience has tugged at the heartstrings of many Fijians. It is difficult to comprehend the fact that innocent people were ruthlessly gunned down in places of worship.

Tales of heroism have started to filter through from the minutes that changed the way many people will now view terrorism in our part of the world. The global face of terrorism has encroached into our region.

Steve Braunias an author and a senior writer at the New Zealand Herald wrote a powerful piece for the New York Times a few days ago.

In an article headlined “Kiwis experience an attack that ‘feels imported’”, he wrote about the Kiwi experience from the perspective of the average man on the street.

The sub head for the article read, “Even our haven at the end of the Earth couldn’t escape the global forces of hate”.

It was an apt reminder of where we are in the global community, and sounds a warning about the reach of hatred and terrorism.

To get his message through, he falls back on the relevance of the thought processes that contribute to making New Zealand what it is for Kiwis.

“We’re a long way from anyplace, and that’s the point of New Zealand: We like it like that. We’re lucky here. We’re out of the picture. We’re too distant and obscure for terror cells to bother infiltrating. We’re all good.”

The killings on Friday though tore at the very heart of what would have been a perceived innocence attached to how we take things for granted in the Pacific.

The mosque killings, he wrote, were something new, something off the chart.

It was an organised, planned, slaughter on a large scale, of the innocent. In his manifesto, the gunman revealed that he was inspired by Norway mass killer Anders Behring Breivik and that an attack in NZ would show that nowhere in the world was safe. That raises the issue of how prepared our police force is to handle such an incident.

Do we have the capability that was displayed by the New Zealand police, which went into action with its armed units to bring about a semblance of order as soon as possible?

Our challenge though as Fijians has to be unity, and how we must be united in the face of adversity.

We must stay united to protect our way of life, and everything that is close to our hearts.

We live in a country that is special for many reasons.

There is no place for terrorism.

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