‘Australia and Israel share two things in common … being a shithole, racist, settler colony …’ Nasser Mashni, president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN)
Fanatical Nasser Mashni and his Labor Party sponsor
Australia’s #1 Hamas Fan
Timothy Cootes, QUADRANT, Sep 11 2024
Nasser Mashni, president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN), has been impossible to avoid of late. His irruption into public debate began at about the same time as Hamas’ pogrom, when many journalists got into the habit of including a comment from Mashni in their copy. Since then, he’s become a regular interviewee on the national broadcaster and a talented demagogue at the podium at the weekly pro-Palestine rallies across our capital cities.
Unsurprisingly, he was quoted just about everywhere in the wash-up from Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s call for a pause on Gazan refugees. Words like “shameful” and “racist” have received quite a workout in APAN’s press releases in the last week or so, though it should be noted that those were some of the milder rebukes.
Before Mashni made his acquaintance with the broader Australian public, he was better known to the Victorian justice system. In 1991, a 22-year-old Mashni was convicted for kidnapping a child, whom he beat and locked in the boot of a car. According to the Herald Sun, he then drove his victim to an empty paddock, where he expressed a keen interest in breaking the child’s legs. Since that day out and his subsequent conviction, Nasser Mashni’s moral outlook, I would argue, hasn’t really improved all that much. On October 7, he was busy ‘liking’ social media posts that praised and justified the massacre, though, to be fair, that was hardly unusual among the activist and intellectual Left.
Mashni has distinguished himself from his co-thinkers, however, in a number of ways. His anti-Israel fulminations, for example, could rival in intensity those of just about any Hamas spokesperson, I suspect. “Israel has to cease to exist,” he told one interviewer recently. On his own radio show, he wobbled into conspiracy theory, railing against the world’s “power structures that all focus upon Zionism”. The solution, as usual, came in his demand for “the decolonisation of Palestine and the ending of Zionism.” He avoided specifics as to what that process might look like for Israelis, though his listeners probably didn’t have to think about it for very long.
After all, his preferred strategies aren’t exactly difficult to glean. Mashni and APAN are unconvinced of the prevailing view that Hamas is a terrorist organisation in the first place. He gets particularly huffy when his media interlocutors inquire as to whether he has a stern word to say about the terror army at all. Journalists really should resile from such a line of inquiry, as Mashni has always been rather ecumenical in his admiration for different factions of Islamists. When terrorists of Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Brigades escaped from an Israeli prison in 2022, Mashni was quick to glorify them as “heroes”.