Andrew Bolt: Why is our government giving the soft touch to Jewish hatred?

Hatred of Jews is running so dangerously wild in this country, isn’t it time the ABC and the Albanese government stopped giving a platform to people like Nasser Mashni?

The ABC’s Q&A program on Monday was the latest to give a platform to “Mr Palestine” – the softly spoken Nasser Mashni – who used his time to again paint Israeli Jews as the evil persecutors of Palestinians.

Palestinians like, well, his dead old dad.

“I’m an accidental Australian,” he told host Patricia Karvelas. “My father was ethnically cleansed by Jewish terror gangs in the late 40s. Israel hadn’t even begun to exist yet. 1948. He was ethnically cleansed before that.”

Wow. But, oops, how true is that story? And isn’t it time – with Jew-hatred running so dangerously wild in this country – that the ABC and the Albanese government stopped platforming people like Mashni, head of the Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network?

Yes, Mashni has been promoted even by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who foolishly posted on Instagram a picture of herself with Mashni offering her “deepest condolences … following the devastating explosion at the Gaza City Hospital”, which she falsely implied had been bombed by Israel. In fact, the hospital’s car park was hit by a Palestinian rocket.

I’m not saying Jewish militias didn’t hunt Mashni’s father – maybe they did – but this supposed “ethnic cleansing” doesn’t seem to be the whole story at all, despite what Mashni might believe.

Mashni has been promoted even by Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Picture: Instragram

In fact, the full truth might explain Mashni’s refusal on Monday to condemn the Hamas terrorist group that runs Gaza and started this war by slaughtering 1200 Jews in an orgy of rape, torture and beheadings.

Mashni’s father, Shaher Hussein El-Mashni, was actually born in 1926 in Deir Dibwan in what was then Jordan. Deir Dibwan to this day remains a Palestinian town in the West Bank, not Israel, under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

ASIO has removed documents from his publicly available records, but a eulogy written for him in 2007 in the Green Left gives many clues to what El-Mashni was up to back in Jordan.

It says he joined the Palestinian Resistance around the time Israel was created in 1948 and fighting for its life against an invasion by Arab armies.

Says the Green Left: “He knew if he was captured he would spend the rest of his life in an Israeli prison. During this time he continued his political activity, only to be jailed in Al Jafr prison by the Jordanian regime.”

Yes, the Jordanians jailed him, not the Israelis.

El-Mashni then moved to Lebanon, and in 1960 to Australia, after a friend, his sponsor, got him permission to emigrate by claiming he was actually fleeing Muslim intolerance, not Jews: “He is a convert to Christianity from Mohammedanism. As a result of which he was driven from his home and country of Jordan to Lebanon, and has suffered cruelty, imprisonment and torture.”

Or was that a lie?

Pushed repeatedly, Mashni has offered another excuse for Hamas: ‘It is not about Hamas. Israel has a Palestinian problem, not a Hamas problem’. Picture: AFP

Once in Australia, El-Mashni helped form the Australian wing of the Fatah movement of terrorist Yasser Arafat, and at his funeral tributes were read out from the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, and Ismail Haniyeh, now head of Hamas.

Yes, the head of Hamas, the terrorist group which started this war.

All this might help to explain something that clearly surprised Karvelas when she asked Mashni on Monday: did he condemn Hamas and its slaughter of the Jews?

Mashni refused: “What I have a challenge with is the condemning Hamas here immediately makes everything about the 7th October.”

He also failed to demand Hamas release 249 Jewish hostages it took that day, many of them children. That’s when he talked instead about his picked-on father.

Pushed repeatedly, he offered another excuse for Hamas: “It is not about Hamas. Israel has a Palestinian problem, not a Hamas problem.”

His family history may also explain something else about this smooth man.

Nasser Mashni bobs up often on TV speaking earnestly of peace, but in front of baying anti-Israel protesters in Melbourne has led chants of “from the river to the sea”, generally understood as a call for the destruction of all Israel, from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.

Mashni says that’s just how critics hear it, but it is also a Hamas battle cry.

What’s more, Mashni last year also tweeted that six Islamic Jihad terrorists who escaped from an Israeli prison were “Palestinian hero’s” (sic).

Those “heroes” included terrorists who’d planned suicide bombings and shot an Israeli teenager in the head.

So why is Mashni treated by the media as the reasonable face of the Palestinian cause?

Why does our Foreign Minister give him face time, and why did federal Labor MP Ged Kearney also post a picture of herself with him, thanking him “for sharing your stories with me”?

Enough.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Why is our government giving the soft touch to Jewish hatred?