OPINION – Juliet Moses on STUFF: Last week, Auckland mayoral candidate John Tamihere caused outrage when he uttered the Nazi salutation “sieg heil” in a debate with Mayor Phil Goff.
Tamihere claims his point was that Goff is like Hitler because he purports to dictate what speech is acceptable for Aucklanders to hear. And, of course, the principle of free speech means that Tamihere is entitled to employ Nazi terminology in making that point, just as the public is entitled to judge him for it.
It’s ironic that, in the same week that Goff’s Epsom billboard was defaced with the word “Jew”, he was also compared to Hitler, who wasn’t a big fan of Jews and oversaw the murder of six million of them.
Whoops, apologies for mentioning that. As a Labour MP in 2008, Tamihere said he was ” sick and tired of hearing how many Jews got gassed”. Another irony is that Tamihere happily invokes the Nazi regime for political point-scoring, but has a gutsful when the pesky matter of an industrial-scale genocide arises…
Read Juliet Moses’ full opinion piece on STUFF here.
