New Zealand PM urges students to join hands against extremism
Wednesday 20/March/2019 - 05:13 PM
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gave a
simple but strong message to Christchurch high school students who lost two of
their schoolmates in Friday’s mosque shooting, the BBC reported.
Jacinda Ardern
"Remember the victims, celebrate their stories — and don’t dwell on the person who took their lives," she said.
Cashmere High School is located less than a 15-minute drive away from both the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Center, where 50 Muslim worshipers were killed by a white supremacist during Friday prayers on March 15.
Ardern visited the grief-stricken school, with students performing a haka dance of welcome as she entered the gym to speak.
“One of the messages that I want to share with our young people in particular: it’s OK to grieve,” Ardern told some 200 students who gathered to hear her speak. “It’s OK to ask for help even if you weren’t directly affected.
“These images that people are seeing, they are really, really difficult to process.”
The school lost two of its students in the attack: 14-year-old Sayyad Milne and 15-year-old Hamza Mustafa.
Hamza’s 13-year-old brother Zaed suffered gunshot wounds to the leg.
Tariq Omar, a former Cashmere High School student from 2008 to 2012, was also among those who died in the attack, the school’s principal said.
Ardern asked the students if they had seen material on social media that made them uncomfortable, and most of them raised their hands.
She promised the students swift action on social media as well as gun control.
Ardern then told the students that no single individual has the power to exterminate racism and that all New Zealanders had an important role to play.
“We don’t let racism exist because racism breeds extremism. It breeds some of the things that we, unfortunately, have had visited upon New Zealand,” she said.
“So this is my request. I alone cannot get rid of those things by myself. I need help from every single one of us.
“So if we want to feel like we are doing something to make a difference, show those outpourings of love, gather together… but also let New Zealand be a place where there is no tolerance for racism, ever.”
