Condolences are going out to the Muslim community in New Zealand from persons of all religions around the world. The Sun joins in the condolences heart and soul. The death toll in the attacks on two mosques in Christchurch stands at 49 persons. They perished in a hail of gunfire from a self-described “racist” and “ethno-nationalist eco-fascist” who filmed the slaughter for the Internet.

In scale these murders remind us of the attacks of Palm Sunday, 2017, in Egypt, where 44 persons perished in bombings of two Coptic Christian congregations. And we can but imagine their impact on the Islamic community in New Zealand. We know the attack on Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh will be mourned for generations, for as long as Jews live in America.

Attacks on supplicants in places of worship evoke, at least to us, a special horror. Those who are at prayer are at their most humble and vulnerable moments. The exercise of religion is the first freedom marked in our own Rights Bill. Nothing done by minority extremists acting in the name of Islam need give pause to decent people the world over from condoling with New Zealanders of all religions grieving in the wake of these terrible killings.