People may rant in our liberal democracy, even when they’re wrong

Many Australians who have little knowledge of the complexities and nuances of history are seizing on a cartoon version of the Israel-Palestine conflict to express their discontent with aspects of our own society. To protect ourselves and all the migrants who have sought a better life in Australia, away from the old wars of home, this version needs to be challenged. We must not import the systems that many new Australians were fleeing.

Last week, America, always a pioneer of the absurd, produced a new fad: young people who’d read Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America”, which attempted to justify the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, decided that maybe bin Laden had a point. Not about individual criticisms of America, mind you. It’s easy to criticise America, and bin Laden occasionally hit the mark. But no, they decided that just because he makes a couple of valid points, he was in some way justified in flying planes into tall buildings full of civilians, who died.

Patricia Karvelas with the Q+A panel last Monday night (from left): Mark Leibler, Dave Sharma, Francesca Albanese, Tim Watts and Nasser Mashni.Credit: ABC

The TikTok-led craze highlights a greater problem we’re grappling with: the less informed a take is, the better it fits on X. And before you know it (and believe me we’re close) anything that can’t be thought in 280 characters won’t be thought at all.

This reductionist tendency is why an attempt at “deplatforming” a prominent Palestinian leader last week was so misguided. In a letter addressed to the ABC managing director, the heads of two Jewish councils demanded that Nasser Mashni, president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, be uninvited from the talk show Q+A.

As I posted on X when the calls were reported, it is dangerous to deplatform people in Mashni’s position of leadership. He needed to be questioned robustly and given a chance to show us who he is, as did his fellow panelists. That requires long-form discussions. In a liberal democracy, we don’t hang people, but we do give them enough metaphorical rope.

Over the past couple of years, Mashni has called for the destruction of Israel on radio, saying: “The liberation of Earth starts with the first domino, and that’s the overcoming and the decolonisation of Palestine and the ending of Zionism.”

On Q+A, host Patricia Karvelas pressed him on whether Hamas is a terrorist organisation. And even as pictures of the brutal attacks are beamed around the world (by Hamas itself) and Israeli babies, children and old people are held hostage, Mashni repeatedly dodged. Then, despite having previously agreed that “unconfirmed” chants of pro-Palestine protestors in Sydney after the Hamas attacks and before Israel retaliated suggested some “really horrible antisemitic stuff”, he rejected the accusation by fellow panelist Mark Leibler, national chairman of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, that the protests were celebratory.

(For the record, I went along to observe the protest as the Opera House was lit up for the dead Israelis, and I personally heard the chant of “f--- the Jews” and witnessed celebration in the crowd. I also saw people who solemnly lit candles for the dead, some who prayed, and of course many who chanted controversial slogans.)

Had Mashni been denied the appearance, we would have been deprived of this insight into his character. We would also have missed hearing him describe his sadness over family suffering in Gaza and the loss felt by his father in 1948, as Leibler, defending the Israeli response, sat by.

It was a good decision by the ABC to host a show on a topic as fraught as this without a live studio audience, as silences can be revealing and cheering can be misinterpreted. Opponents laying out arguments face-to-face is powerful.

Too powerful for many people on social media, who viewed the questioning of Mashni as an affront. The Islamic Council of Victoria sent an open letter to the ABC managing director, blaming Karvelas for not “pulling up” Mark Leibler when he made the “incendiary, racist, and vilifying” claim that “if Israel didn’t have a strong state, then the fate of the Jews who lived in Israel would be exactly what happened on 7 October”.

In fact, in the course of the discussion, Mashni had the opportunity to respond to the claim himself, but instead chose to repeat a formula that Palestinians are “killed, blamed and smeared”. It is a shame he did not tackle the statement more directly. If there was one great fault to be sheeted home to the program, it was that it was about an hour short of enough rope.

The next day, co-panellist Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, appeared at the National Press Club and got plenty more rope. She used it to indulge in the hyperbole that, on Q+A, Mashni had faced an “execution squad”. Of course, the clip has caused swooning among her fans on the socials, as it’s a perfectly social-sized idea.

And how many of her social media fans have read anything substantial on the topic at hand? I asked, and about half a dozen were able to name authors or titles they’d read on what is possibly the most long-running and complex conflict of history, reaching back into the cradle of at least one of our dominant religions.

So let’s make it social simple: the only reason people can indulge in absurd takes is that others who reads books are sticking up for their right to speak freely.

But we need to stop taking our liberal democracy for granted. The good news is, for us, fighting for it doesn’t mean picking up a gun, but a book.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director strategy and policy at award-winning campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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