Who’s not listening?

Karl du Fresne’s column (March 21) can be summarised as follows:

■ All right-thinking people think the same way I do.

■ The whole of New Zealand responded wonderfully to the mosque tragedy.

■ Some people are saying violence was inevitable, as a result of tolerance for racism and hate speech.

■ These people are just exploiting the situation in order to persuade us to get rid of freedom of speech.

■ Anyone who thinks hate speech should be banned wants to destroy freedom of speech.

■ The Islamic Women’s Council don’t know what they are talking about, and probably have a suspect agenda.

■ Islamic women being publicly abused doesn’t count. See point 2.

Compare this with the personal accounts of racist abuse experienced by Shabnam Dastgheib and Nureddin Abdurahman in the same edition.

We can’t express it better than du Fresne did himself: ‘‘Obviously, people like [du Fresne] weren’t listening. Or perhaps they ignore anything that doesn’t align with their preferred narrative of a society viewed internationally as

. . . peaceful, tolerant and respectful towards minority groups’’.

Joanna Tennant and Paul Bowden, Pinehaven