Ahmed Zaoui

A meeting was held in Wellington last night to support convicted terrorist and refugee status seeker Ahmed Zaoui. I resisted the urge to pop in on the way home after seeing the new Don Brash puppet get unveiled at the Backbencher.

Comparing Zaoui’s situation to Zimbabwe is stupid and insulting but that is what one expects of Gregory Fortuin. Whether one likes it or not Zaoui has been convicted of terrorist crimes in two fellow OECD countries – Belgium and France. Now those convictions may be shonky, but at the very least they require us to be very very cautious.

The Government’s handling of this issue has been appalling, and not at all helped by the SIS losing tapes, but that doesn’t mean their decisions have been wrong. In fact former Opposition Leader Bill English who used to sit on Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee took the unusual step of saying he thought the Government has made the right decisions with regards to Zaoui. There was no benefit to him in going out of the way to say this, so people may want to reflect that there is more to this issue than the media reports.