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Australia’s top Palestinian spokesman has advocated for the destruction of the Israeli state and claimed the world’s power structures “all focus upon Zionism”.
Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni made the remarks, which were criticised by a prominent extremism expert, at various times over this year and last year on radio station 3CR.
Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni co-hosts the community radio program Palestine Remembered.Credit: Justin McManus
Mashni, a property developer and donor to the Greens, has helped organise pro-Palestine rallies since Israel began its brutal siege of Gaza that Hamas authorities say has killed more than 10,000 people, prompting alarm from the United Nations and increasing concern from Israeli partners.
This month Mashni met with Foreign Minister Penny Wong as well as Labor MP Ged Kearney, and is the most prominent Australian civil society activist for the Palestinian cause.
On his radio show in July last year, Mashni said: “The power structures that exist in the world all focus upon Zionism.
“Israel is the domino. Israel falls over, not just the Middle East – South America, the Africans, the world is a far better place once we destroy Western imperialist control of the world.”
“The liberation of Earth starts with the first domino, and that’s the overcoming and the decolonisation of Palestine and the ending of Zionism.”
In a March conversation on what Mashni called the Zionist lobby’s “grooming” of Australian politicians, Mashni – who last year opposed the Australian government’s listing of Hamas as a terrorist group – referred to what he said was the “antisemitic myth”.
“Do you think that we hate Jews just because they’re Jews?” he said. “I wouldn’t care if they were Buddhist, Sikhs, Christians, Muslims. If you take my house, I’m going to hate you.”
“How you celebrate God is removed from the fact that you denied me my home, killed my father, raped my mother, stole my orchards and business.”
Following a recent protest in Sydney at which demonstrators chanted “gas the Jews”, Mashni said the chants were “unconfirmed” but the reports suggested “really horrible antisemitic stuff and there should be absolute condemnation of those chants”.
In response to this story, Mashni defended his radio statements but did not answer specific questions.
He argued it should not be controversial to point out that Israel was an outpost of imperialism, or to advocate against Zionism which he said should “indeed fall over” because it “values and privileges Jewish life while destroying Palestinian lives”.
“It should go without saying that throughout history those who are oppressed have hated their oppressors, not because of what they are but because of what they do,” he said in a written statement.
“To suggest that antisemitism is the motivating factor behind Palestinian actions, whether they are violent attacks or peaceful protests, is to buy into an illusion about the situation that exists between the river and the sea.”
Deakin University Associate Professor Josh Roose, an expert in political and religious violent extremism, said Mashni’s comments on Zionism compared to those in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the book detailing a fabricated plot of Zionist world domination that has served as a rationale for antisemitism.
“It’s laden with the same conspiratorial underpinning that posits Jewish people as all-powerful and as wielding power behind the scenes,” he said.
Roose, who has spent years focusing on Islamophobia, has more recently taken an interest in antisemitism, which he said had surged across the far-left and far-right in the past decade.
He said the Holocaust and murder of 6 million Jews, and the antisemitism that underpinned it, was the key catalyst for the creation of the Israeli state.
“Critique of the state of Israel in a political sense due to its actions, particularly under the Netanyahu government, is perfectly legitimate. But the critique of Israel’s right to exist crosses a pretty clear line into antisemitism.”
The day after Hamas’ attack, in which 1400 Israelis were killed and about 200 kidnapped, Mashni released a statement that did not condemn the killings. Instead, it said Gazans had “broken through the walls” and the assault was a “clear result” of Israel’s escalating violence towards Palestinians, particularly in the West Bank.
Israel’s right-wing government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has responded to the terrorist attack by pounding the Gaza Strip and killing more than 10,000 people, according to figures from the Hamas-run Health Ministry.
Mashni co-hosts the program Palestine Remembered with a man who said “karma is a bitch” after Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack, which the co-host said was an example of Hamas “fighting back”.
Several guests on Mashni’s program have compared Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, including one who compared Israeli civilians upon whom violence was committed to plain-clothed Nazi soldiers on a day off. The show has also hosted members of a group called Samidoun, which is banned in Germany after its supporters celebrated the October 7 attacks.
Melbourne’s 3CR radio has featured anti-Zionist voices for decades, for which it earned the tag of “the voice of terrorism” by The Bulletin magazine in 1978, a moniker the group rejected.
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