I see John Minto is up to his old tricks again. He has organised a “protest” of less than a dozen people to demonstrate outside of the ASB Classic tennis tournament. Only this was not a peaceful protest, this was a Minto special. Armed with megaphones, they proceeded to make unmitigated nuisances of themselves by loudly chanting their nonsense over their megaphones, thereby making it both hard to play and hard to enjoy the tennis played inside. Absurdly Minto compares this pathetic demonstration to the demonstrations against the Springbok tours. I suspect there were more than 10 people at the anti-apartheid demonstrations.
Yesterday’s man fighting yesterday’s battles with yesterday’s tools. Very sad.
I have seen some comments that suggest that the police have no right to interfere in these demonstrations – that this is suppression of freedom of speech. I beg to differ. Freedom of speech is not the same thing as being an irritating prat and the police actually have a duty to remove and arrest those people making a public nuisance of themselves. It is called disorderly assembly and it is illegal. Considering the police eventually only arrested one person (who simply would not stop), I think they were more than restrained in their conduct.
Let me be clear. Minto et al have a perfect right to protest and a perfect right to send letters to Shahar Peer, the Israeli tennis player. What they don’t have is a right to be disruptive. When a protest becomes a public nuisance or protestors deface property, they have moved away from expressing their opinion and wandered into the realm of criminality.
No amount of self-righteousness will then protect them from the police.
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Jan 7 10 2:25 pm
Yes, just what I was trying to say – you can’t just slap the “protest” label on something then declare that you have an unassailable right to do it.
scrubone´s last blog ..Let’s be consistent now…