A board member of the Deer Valley Unified School District in Arizona is facing calls to resign after she performed a Nazi salute at a board meeting on Tuesday night.
State and local education associations and fellow board members are telling Kimberly Fisher to step down, after she appeared to give the salute at the end of a discussion about the date and time of an upcoming meeting.
“Heil, heil,” she appeared to say.
Fisher also posted a video to her personal Facebook page. “We have been living or operating under virtually a dictatorship for a long time and a manipulation,” she says in the video. She also calls the board president “some little dictator” and compares him to Cambodian dictator Pol Pot.
“All I could think of tonight was Hitler, so I said ‘heil’ or whatever,” she says in the video.
The Deer Valley Education Association demanded that Fisher, who has served on the district board since 2021, resign “before she does more harm to our students and the community at large.” It called her “unfit for public service.”
“Delivering a Nazi salute is an unacceptable endorsement of an ideology responsible for millions of deaths,” the Arizona Education Association stated. It too told Fisher to step down and apologize.
Arizona state representative Stephanie Simacek, a Democrat who sits on the district board with Fisher, stated that “what happened in that room was not a joke.”
“It was not a political statement or an expression of frustration,” she said. “It was a deliberate invocation of one of the most evil ideologies in human history on display in a building where our children come to learn.”
“This is what antisemitism looks like when people get comfortable,” she added. “This is what hatred looks like when it finds a seat at the table.”
The Center for Jewish Philanthropy of Greater Phoenix also decried Fisher’s actions.
“The use of Nazi language, imagery and symbolism is offensive and harmful,” it stated. “Such references carry the weight of the Holocaust and their invocation in any public setting reignites the real horrors committed by Nazi Germany and causes direct harm to the Jewish community, Holocaust survivors and other minority groups.”
