You just had to factcheck the Palestinian?

Has there ever been another news program interviewee whose arguments and firmly held beliefs have been so almost instantly validated and verified?

That’s the question the tired, washed-up, old hacks who compile this column asked themselves after watching Nasser Mashni, president of the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network, on News Breakfast on Thursday discussing the pending ceasefire in Gaza.

After brilliantly describing the genocide that Israel has inflicted on Gaza since October 2023, Nasser Mashni spent the second half of his interview powerfully dissecting the vast discrepancy between how Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are reported in Australia.

Here’s some of what he had to say, explaining how, even then, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are not the only problems plaguing Australia.

“What about anti-Palestinian racism? You don’t have to be a Muslim to suffer anti-Palestinian racism. Many of our Jewish comrades suffer anti-Palestinian racism.

“The challenge we have in this country is the duplicity and the hypocrisy in the way my community and the supporters of my community are treated compared to how Australian Jews and their supporters are treated.

“The language, the disparity in language, the outrage we have over anti-semitic graffiti – unacceptable, the graffiti – but the outrage and the vehemence of our political establishment, our media, etc, pales to insignificance to the eight Palestinian babies that have frozen to death frozen to death Since Christmas.

“When we open our newspapers, see our TV screens and see the difference in language; that is what is destroying the social fabric of our society. we need to be treated equally.”

Powerful stuff. And can you BUGers out there guess what happened soon after the interview ended to prove him 100 per cent correct? And it was over this comment of his: “By accounts from Lancet, the most respected international medical journal on earth, up to a quarter of a million Palestinians have been killed in 466 days.”

Not long after the interview ended, Nasser Mashni was fact checked – well, is that’s the word for it – by co-presenter Emma Rebellato who felt it needed to be explained that Gazan authorities themselves had put the death toll over the past 16 months at 40,000 plus.

Who at the ABC ordered this “clarification” to read out? After an angry phone call from some Jewish lobby?

So one of our compilers crudely put it: “Who gives a fuck if Gaza says the official death count is around 44,000 – and most of them women and children. Does that somehow make what Israel has done there more okay; more excusable?”

“Would that fact check have been ordered if someone from a Jewish organisation has been in the interviewee chair?”

Exactly! Can someone at the ABC tells us if that has ever happened? Our guess is never.

The MGH does not give a toss as to whether Nasser Mashni has gilded the lily a tad in quoting Lancet’s tally as “up to a quarter of a million” innocent Palestinian people dead. He is yet to be proven wrong.

Furthermore, the most recent report our compilers could find from Lancet is a figure of more than 186,000 dead. So, one day, up to a quarter million dead could be accurate.

The Gazan figure is an official death count. Martyrs who could be identified and buried, either whole or in parts. As Nasser Mashni pointed out, it will take three years just to remove the rubble from an almost completely razed Gazan strip. Who knows how many tens of thousands of Palestinian bodies will be found.

So we repeat: who at Aunty ordered this factcheck commentary. Would that fact check have been deemed necessary if someone from a Jewish organisation has been in the interviewee chair and sanitised or distorted the events of October 7 in 2023 or offered pathetic and easily disputed reasons as to why Israel has killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians – used 80,000 tonnes of bombs to just-about raze an area about the size of one-and-a- third Stradbroke Islands – to protect its right to exist.

Can someone at the ABC tells us if that has ever happened?

Our guess remains resolute. NEVER!

***

Finally, our MGH teams were bemused by this item on The Guardian Australia‘s website.

All they can suggest is that someone at The Guardian needs to quickly find a dictionary and check the meanings of “question” and “answer”.

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