Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 2:53 pm on 14 March 2018.
Thank you for that response. It was tricky whether to ask this question, because, of course, you raise awareness of the fact that these people exist and that they have such hate in their souls. I think the best response has been the Love a Muslim day on 3 April, which has been promoted to oppose the Punish a Muslim day. In my response, I said that I love a Muslim every day as I recently married my long-standing partner. I think it's important that we get ourselves immersed in these cultures as opposed to paying them lip service.
What I want to ask you as a Government is how we can ensure that community cohesion is real and is genuine. I believe that there is much more that we can be doing. We had an open day at the mosques recently here in Wales, which was a good start, but I'm thinking that we need to really get to grips with the hatred that exists, mostly online, and in our communities, with misinformation being passed around about what it is to be Muslim, and how we can target this in Wales in the most positive possible way, because I think that, with positivity, we can ensure that this message gets across. Some people may say that these types of messages are patronising, but I don't think, if we genuinely believe as Assembly Members that we want to create a positive community cohesion strategy here in Wales, that that's something that we cannot do.
So, can you exemplify to us how you are going about that, how AMs in their everyday working lives can be positive in outlining that, and how we can get to grips with tackling these types of attitudes robustly to make sure that they are not said again and that they are not acceptable forms of abuse?