<\/p>\n
The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, says he will not apologise to the Muslim community after police disrupted a group of men praying<\/a> during a Sydney protest against the visiting Israeli president, Isaac Herzog.<\/p>\n Muslim groups including the Lebanese Muslim Association (LMA) and the Australian Federal Imams Council (Afic) have called on the premier and the NSW police commissioner, Mal Lanyon, to issue a public apology.<\/p>\n Lanyon has apologised only \u201cfor any offence that may have been taken\u201d after police dragged away people praying outside Sydney\u2019s Town Hall on Monday evening.<\/p>\n The sheikh leading the prayer<\/a> described the police behaviour as \u201cunhinged and aggressive\u201d.<\/p>\n The Australian National Imam\u2019s Council (Anic) confirmed Lanyon had contacted it to apologise, but LMA and Afic said they had not been contacted. Asked on Thursday if he would apologise, Minns said: \u201cLook, I won\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t do that in an antagonistic way, but I think the circumstances are important, and I genuinely believe \u2026 that NSW police, their leadership, their regular officers, would never, ever have disrupted a prayer service, or individual Australians who were exercising their religion unless it was in the middle of a riot,\u201d he told reporters.<\/p>\n Bilal Rauf, a barrister and senior advisor to Anic, described Lanyon\u2019s apology as \u201cvery qualified\u201d, telling the ABC it was \u201cnot really directed at what occurred\u201d.<\/p>\n Rauf said thousands of people from different backgrounds and faith communities had rallied on Monday \u201cto express their concern about the visit of the president and, of course, the unfolding genocide in Gaza\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are there to express that peacefully, and yet they are met with that level of seemingly disproportionate use of force to stifle, curb, and prevent the expression of that opposition,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s very troubling, and it needs to be looked at.\u201d<\/p>\n Lanyon on Thursday told the ABC he had apologised, \u201cbut it needs to be put in context, what you can see is the police that had been confronted were moving forward to disperse everyone\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe [the police] have an excellent working relationship now with the Muslim community,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The commissioner has insisted that clashes began when officers started moving on protesters after they attempted to march to state parliament in contravention of anti-protest laws rushed through after the Biondi beach terror attack that killed 15 people at a Hanukah festival.<\/p>\n Lanyon denied on ABC radio any suggestion that police moved to break up the protest because an event attended by Herzog at the nearby International Convention Centre (ICC) was ending at that time.<\/p>\n <\/gu-island><\/p>\n Minns said he had had \u201clots of conversations in the last couple of days with members of the Islamic community\u201d. The premier said the minister for social services, Jihad Dib, who is Muslim, had called \u201chalf of Sydney in the last 48 hours\u201d.<\/p>\n In a post on social media on Tuesday, Dib said he was \u201cdeeply distressed\u201d by footage showing police disrupting prayers. Dib said he\u2019d had \u201cdirect conversations\u201d with Minns and Lanyon about the incident.<\/p>\n \u201cThe scenes were confronting and they never should have happened,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n Minns said Dib had \u201csaid things I don\u2019t agree with\u201d, referring to the post.<\/p>\n \u201cBut he\u2019s approaching the situation from the perspective of trying to make it better and repair the relationships,\u201d the premier said. Dib was contacted for comment.<\/p>\n Despite videos showing police punching protesters, the premier has rejected calls for an independent inquiry \u2013 including from members of his government \u2013 into the force\u2019s response on Monday night.<\/p>\n The upper house Greens member Sue Higginson referred the police\u2019s conduct to the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission.<\/p>\n Human Rights Watch (HRW) said this week that videos it had verified showed police \u201cviolently dispersing people kneeling in prayer\u201d.<\/p>\n It said the state government should \u201cinvestigate the alleged use of excessive force by police and appropriately discipline or prosecute those responsible\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe NSW authorities\u2019 adoption and use of unnecessary restrictions on legitimate protest doesn\u2019t increase safety, but opens the door to abuse,<\/a>\u201d HRW researcher Annabel Hennessy said.<\/p>\n Labor MLC Stephen Lawrence, who attended the rally, has said any investigation should also examine the political and legislative context.<\/p>\n Lawrence has said \u201cmajor events\u201d powers unsuccessfully challenged<\/a> by Monday\u2019s protest organisers, alongside the public assembly restriction declaration (Pard) made using laws rushed through after Bondi, had created a \u201cpressure cooker\u201d for police and protesters.<\/p>\n \u201cThis incident seems to me to have been a consequence of laws and then a declaration by the police commissioner that prevented those protest organisers going to the supreme court potentially and getting authorisation to march to parliament,\u201d he told the ABC on Thursday.<\/p>\n \u201cRather, the laws that we passed in late December meant that that effectively was in the hands of the police commissioner. People tend to accept court decisions<\/a> in the way that they wouldn\u2019t necessarily accept police decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked on the ABC if all officers were recording footage using body-worn cameras, Lanyon said the \u201cvast majority, I\u2019m sure, did.\u201d But the commissioner would not commit to making it public.<\/p>\n \u201cThe footage is definitely available, we will review it, it is not ordinarily made public,\u201d Lanyon said.<\/p>\n LMA and Afic were part of a coalition of groups calling for Lanyon to resign over the prayer incident. Lanyon\u2019s tenure, since his controversial appointment<\/a>, has included the Bondi massacre, the worst terrorist attack on Australian soil, and multiple confrontations<\/a> between police and pro-Palestine protesters.<\/p>\n Asked on Thursday if Lanyon should resign, Minns said: \u201cNo, I\u2019m so grateful he\u2019s in the job.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re all in an incredibly difficult situation \u2026 and I think the kind of bearing and leadership that he\u2019s brought to the job as police commissioner is exactly what we need right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Lanyon was contacted for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #NSW #premier #wont #apologise #Muslims #police #grab #men #praying #rally #Isaac #Herzog #Bondi #beach #terror #attack<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The New South Wales premier, C… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21021,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21020"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}