The New Zealand Jewish Council is hitting out at the Mongrel Mob after a video surfaced of lifetime member Harry Tam saying "sieg heil" - a victory salute used by Nazis at political rallies.
The video, which was shared by the National Party on Wednesday, shows Tam speaking to a group of Mongrel Mob members about voting. He also uses the offensive phrase several times despite the Mongrel Mob Kingdom vowing to stop using it after the Christchurch terror attacks.
Spokesperson for the New Zealand Jewish Council Juliet Moses condemned Tam's comments on Friday.
"The Jewish Council is very disturbed to see the video of Harry Tam chanting the infamous Nazi salutation 'sieg heil'.
"Our community includes many people who lost members of their family in the Holocaust (some of those people are survivors themselves), worldwide the Jewish population is not yet back to pre-Holocaust levels, and we are enduring a resurgence in Nazi and white supremacist ideology, all of which makes this distressing," she said.
Moses said the video should be disturbing to all Kiwis, not just Jewish people.
"It is hard to imagine why people, who themselves have presumably experienced racism and know something of the evil ideology that term represents and conjures, would chant this but it would suggest they do not have a vision of our country and values that are aligned with the Government's."
Labour MP Michael Wood also condemned Tam but wouldn't rule out continuing to fund a Mongrel Mob run meth rehabilitation programme.
"That's appalling if he said that. Anyone who makes that kind of comment should be condemned," Wood told The AM Show on Friday.
"Here is where we deal with the challenges of dealing with people on meth and other serious drugs. Sometimes to get to those people and to help them, you might need to work with some people who aren't exactly the upstanding paragons of virtue that you ideally would.
"The reality of this programme is it's a programme that's worked. It's got people off meth, 100 percent of people who have gone through it in the trial were drug-free at the end of it."
Two weeks ago Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced $2.75 million would be given from the Proceeds of Crime seized by police to the Kahukura programme, run by Hard2Reach, which aims to address drug-seeking behaviour through a live-in marae in Waipawa.
The move has been heavily criticised by The National Party who called it a "sick joke" in June.
