The cruel irony was not lost on me. It was all the more painful in fact as the shooting happened only a week after we returned from our visit to New Zealand in 2019.

I had already drafted a post on the New Zealand itineraries of some of my friends, which were planned in minute detail and crammed full of ‘sights’. Their biggest mistake, and that of most first-time visitors to New Zealand, was trying to see too much. I cautioned that they’d miss out on the very essence of New Zealand. The spirit of an easy-going, trusting people in a tiny country, tucked away in the South Pacific Ocean below Australia that is farther yet, also much closer to the paradisiac island state for which it is perceived.

Then a gun massacre happened and that innocence and carefreeness were abruptly taken from them, as my Mum wrote to me the day after. This massacre, ironically, drives home my point about the unique spirit of the Kiwis and New Zealand much better than a post on crammed itineraries ever could have.

I grew up in Nelson, on the northwest of the South Island. Nelson is a multicultural, open immigrant city. Considering New Zealand is an immigrant country, Nelson being multicultural is not surprising. Yet I have always felt that the city attracted a particularly diverse crowd from all over the place, especially Europe. That hodge-podge of nationalities and cultures fostered a welcoming environment for yet more immigrants.

Nowadays, the word ‘immigrant’ has an almost toxic connotation. For some, it conjures up terror, economic hardship for locals, and an enemy stereotype reinforced by distorted one-sided media coverage. More than anything else though, it is ignorance that, not surprisingly, fosters insecurity and fear.

Take Germany for example. While in Western Germany 26.5% of the population has a migrant background, it’s in Eastern Germany, where this percentage is only 6.8%, that the nationalist movement in the country is strongest. In places that have yet to welcome their first immigrant, more people appear receptive to angry, xenophobic rhetoric warning of a supposed invasion.

Nelson in 1998, when we arrived, was the very opposite. Reflecting back, I believed this ready acceptance of immigrants did not distinguish between skin colour, religion, country of origin, and ethnic background.

After the massacre, I wondered if things had changed in the past fifteen years, or if I, as a white, Pākehā immigrant, who didn’t experience racism myself, had been blind to it in the five years I lived in the country. New Zealand is a very ethnically diverse place but does have very strict immigration policies, and since only a few people make the cut, the fear in the population of being overrun by foreigners is probably less prevalent. Yet there has been and still is racism in this country, I’m now more aware, in particular towards Asian, Māori and Pacific peoples.

I wonder if despite the racial prejudice towards the indigenous population as well as immigrants, most New Zealander still genuinely value diversity. Considering the compassion and love this small country just showed in the face of loss and pain inflicted on its Muslim community, it’s difficult to think otherwise.

This racially motivated terror attack on two mosques in Christchurch left 50 people dead. It was the deadliest mass shooting in New Zealand history and shocked the small nation to its core.

The rest of the world was equally appalled, most of us anyway. While my brother with many other doctors rushed to the hospital to care for the wounded, a video of the massacre, filmed with the mass murder’s go pro went viral. It appears there are some very sick people, who will watch and spread first-hand footage of murder and hateful, extreme-right propaganda. Short of committing the massacre oneself, I can think of nothing more shameful and deeply inhumane.

Many leaders of state ‘strongly condemned’ this act of terrorism. They always do. It drives me mad at times that heinous crimes are condemned only in words – the ever-same words – and not action. It shows passivity and indifference.
New Zealand instead vividly demonstrated that ‘they [the Muslim community] are us’.

Prime Minister J. Ardern denied the avowed neo-Nazi some of the publicity and attention he sought by refusing to speak his name. Kiwis rallied around their Muslim community for support, women donned headscarves in solidarity with the victims, the Muslim call to prayer was broadcast nationwide, and almost instantly parliament banned most semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles.

These actions may still only offer very little consolation to the victim’s loved ones, but seem more sincere than pious platitudes about ‘our thoughts and prayers’.

Tens of thousands have signed two petitions calling for J. Ardern to be nominated for the Nobel Prize. Whether or not her actions are worthy of this prize, I can think of no leader or country that in recent history opposed racist hate crimes collectively and publicly, and embraced their Muslim communities the way New Zealand did then.

In 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s call to give hundreds of thousands of refugees – the majority of them Muslims – shelter, won her accolades abroad but not so at home. She lost party leadership and will not seek re-election in September this year.

Admittedly the situation was a little different. Almost two million asylum-seekers have entered Germany since 2015, and there’s no doubt the country was ill-prepared for this onrush and still struggles with integration. Still, considering the circumstances, Merkel’s call was one of compassion and humanity and it is a great disappointment that so few Germans support this acknowledgement of Germany’s responsibility owed to its difficult past to do better.

New Zealand, on the other hand, wants “to give nothing to racism” and everything for a country in which prejudice and discrimination cannot flourish.