Online Islamophobia increased 18-fold in Australia following Christchurch terrorist attack
Monday, 14 March 2022
Hate is being allowed to “fester and grow” in New Zealand, three years after the mosque terror attack, says Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon.
His comments were made just hours before a new Australian study revealed an 18-fold increase in online Islamophobic abuse immediately after the 2019 attack on two Christchurch mosques.
Report chief investigator Dr Derya Iner said that in the hours after An Nur and Linwood masjids were attacked on March 15, 2019, and in the two weeks following, “the ecosystem that socialised [the terrorist] became hyper-visible online”.
Hate rhetoric online escalated from threats telling Muslims to “go home” before the Christchurch shooting, to a 28 per cent increase in examples of blatant threats of mass killing or civil war, Iner said.
An increase in hate had also been seen in Aotearoa said Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand (IWCNZ) national coordinator Aliya Danzeisen. “We’ve seen an increase here, and we’ve felt it.”
She said people were more vocal at a time when legislation failed to protect vulnerable communities.
Commissioner Foon said the government's failure to strengthen hate speech legislation had allowed hate to “fester and grow”.
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Iner warned New Zealand and other governments to stop underestimating the impact of online hate particularly after the global copycat events following the Christchurch attack.
“Don’t treat online as an isolated, cyber, hypothetical, only-thought discourse. It is real. People behind the screen are real. They live that ideology.”
Of the 247 incidents reported to the Islamophobia Register Australia (IRA) between January 2018 and December 2019 – cited in the study to analyse the pre and post-Christchurch massacre period – offline abuse also increased four-fold.
Threats to kill Muslims made up 25 per cent of online incident reports before March 15, 2019, and that increased to 42 per cent after. Overall threats of mass killing or civil war towards the Muslim community increased from 25 per cent before, to 52 per cent after.
The study has prompted the Australian Muslim Advocacy Network to call for its government to strengthen legislation, after New South Wales and federal Governments last month voted against it.
Among the online incidents in the study, after the Christchurch attack an Australian nurse posted on social media claiming that Muslims slaughtered people from other religions, “now they know how it feels [and] hopefully this is a wakeup call for them to start acting civilised”.
It created fear among Muslims in the region the nurse’s hospital was located, about the care they would receive if needing treatment.
It was an example of online abuse working “hand in hand” with offline reality.
“Maybe that person lives in the same city, or the same neighbourhood.”
Online hatred could socialise individuals towards physical world violence, and offline violence can spark more violence online – as seen after the Christchurch attack.
Danzeisen said the study results “aren’t surprising”.
Many people thought the depth of hate was largely virtual, but there was a flow on to real life.
“This is so close to home. It shows what the terrorist was involved in and where he was at and what happened immediately after in some environments he was existing in.”
It pointed to how security and intelligence agencies should have been more on top of what was to come.
As the Islamic Women’s Council told the Royal Commission Inquiry into the attack, it was public knowledge that there was widespread dissemination of Islamophobia and encouragement to anti-Islamic actions, primarily online.
Some actions were likely to have breached the Human Rights Act, “but for the fact the omission of religion had been a problem since the inception of the legislation”.
The group called for an amendment to the Act to include religious and ethical beliefs.
“There are several communities that are just left to defend themselves instead of having the law representative of them,” Danzeisen said.
Foon said in a statement on Monday he was “disappointed with the slow response” to the implementation of what was a Royal Commission of Inquiry recommendation after the March 15 terror attacks.
He said he had written to all the ministers involved, with mixed responses and only some replying.
“If I, as a Commissioner tasked with following up these matters, cannot get a response, what hope is there for our concerned communities?”
There were promises to review hate speech, “but now the Government seems to be stating it is politically too hard to deal with”.
The Commissioner’s comments come after Minister of Justice Kris Faafoi told Newshub over the weekend that care needed to be taken on hate speech legislation because it could “inflame the very issue that we are trying to fix”.'we also don't want to inflame the very issue that we are trying to fix here'.
Danzeisen said the comment was “offensive”, given the Muslim community had been telling them all along that anti-Islam rhetoric existed long before the March 15 attack, and before hate speech legislation discussions began.
The Christchurch Call had made a start on preventing people viewing future attacks online, but more needed to be done to prevent the attacks themselves, starting from monitoring online activity, she said.