Legislating to stop hate speech. Using a "hecklers' veto" to run Posie Parker out of town. Victories against hate. Job done.

I've done my share.

My student comrades were on a high after we heckled and shut down a National Front meeting outside our UK Labour Party conference in the 1980s.

We didn't change minds. Just the venue.

Shutting down people who are hateful feels right. But counter-intuitively, banning hateful words is not the best way to stop the hate.

Nadine Strossen is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. She hates Nazis.

She hates them more than she loves free speech. Over coffee, she told me her mission is to get rid of the hate, not the speech.

She has spent decades looking at hate speech through history, and found no evidence that banning it reduces hate. As the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an author and a law professor, she would know.

New Zealand's draft hate speech legislation has been put in the freezer, for now.

Extending the Human Rights Act to cover hate speech against religion and politics was a well-intentioned response to the Christchurch shooting. But it is bad law.

The first red flag was the Government's inability to define hate speech. "You know it when you see it," the former prime minister said.

You don't know it when you see it.

One person's hate speech is another's just cause.

Words cannot define precisely enough what is a subjective concept.

"Hate is an emotion after all," says Strossen.

"No two thinking people can possibly agree on what is hateful and what is not."

Every argument today to justify censoring white supremacist speech was made by defenders of slavery to ban abolitionist speakers.

She quotes the slavers arguing that the words of abolitionists "libelled the South and inflicted emotional injury", and were "emotionally upsetting and traumatising".

Laws were duly passed to "reduce the harm".

More recently, some US politicians denounced Black Lives Matter and "defund the police" advocacy as hate speech against white people and police officers.

It is impossible to write anti-speech codes that cannot be twisted.

Worse still, hate speech legislation distracts from more effective ways of countering hate.

A swastika sprayed on a Jewish school is vandalism.

Burning a cross on someone's front lawn is an illegal threat.

Planning mass murder in Christchurch was already illegal in 2019, if only our secret services had been paying attention.

Pre-Hitler Germany had anti-hate laws.

They didn't stop Hitler.

They turned Nazi prisoners into martyrs while robbing others of their free speech.

Exiled German students tried to get Mein Kampf translated into English to warn the world of Hitler's plans, but failed.

The book was banned.

There are better ways to counter offensive speech than running the likes of Posie Parker out of the country. Continue reading

• Josie Pagani is a commentator on current affairs and a regular contributor to Stuff. She works in geopolitics, aid and development, and governance.

The two Catholic women who do not wish to be named reached out to Cathnews after reading an article in the NZ Herald about four neo-Nazis identifying as traditional Catholics at the Posie Parker rally last Saturday.

They say they feel aggrieved because their faith has no relationship to what the neo-Nazis stand for.

"Antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia and Islamophobia have nothing to do with the 10 Commandments, nor the Beatitudes," one said.

"The Gospels and Jesus Christ are positive guides to good living," said the other.

As traditional Catholics in a Synodal Church, they want to make a stand and distance themselves from the suggestion in the article.

Before the rally in Auckland, the four neo-Nazis had covered their faces with skull masks and were pictured flashing Nazi salutes.

They wore symbols of the Azov Battalion - a far-right ultra-nationalist regiment of the Ukrainian military - and an American far right group called the Boogaloo Boys.

Although British activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker, calls neo-Nazis "abhorrent", her rallies seem to attract them.

There were several far-right groups among the 150-200 people who showed up to support her Let Women Speak event. They included right-wing populists, Christian fundamentalists and a selection of neo-Nazis.

Paparoa is a body of researchers focusing on Aotearoa-New Zealand's extremist organisations. They are also concerned the emerging so-called traditional Catholic neo-Nazi group promotes extreme antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia and Islamophobia.

The Paparoa researchers say also among the far-right protesters at the rally was Sam Brittenden. He's a member of the white nationalist group Action Zealandia.

In 2020 Brittenden allegedly made an unproven threat against the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch. He was previously found guilty of disorderly behaviour for making anti-Muslim slurs while a student at the University of Otago.

Researcher Byron Clark says the far-right individuals were mostly on the fringes of the rally.

While most Parker supporters aren't on the far-right, Clark says the far-right sees them as a group they can find an audience with.

Transphobia had become a large part of the far-right's ideology, he says.

"They see it as a kind of deviation from the ideal of a straight, cisgender white person, in the same way they see homosexuality and disability as being deviated from this ideal.

"It's become prominent because it's still something of a more socially-acceptable prejudice, more so than racism, so they can use this as the thin edge of the wedge to gain an audience among the more mainstream conservative crowd."

After around 2,000 protestors drowned out Parker's and she abandoned her tour, citing safety concerns.

Source

• NZ Herald