Australia’s #1 Hamas Fan

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”.

Mashni was even more obsequious with Leila Khaled when they shared a panel at Ecosocialism 2024. In the presence of the militant and plane hijacker — his “personal hero” — Mashni looked like a giddy fanboy. That’s probably why he let his guard slip a little, admitting to feeling “energised” by, among other things, “the guerrilla army that has withstood for nine months.” In the same breath, he also told the audience, to maniacal cheering, that the state of Israel would be ended in their lifetimes.

Due to word-count limits, it would be difficult to mention every terrorist that Mashni has applauded, but any abridged list ought to include Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas assassinated in Tehran. Mashni had nothing but kind words and tributes for Haniyeh, whom he depicted as a peacemaker and an advocate for a ceasefire and a two-state solution. That’s the same Haniyeh, by the way, whose main problem with October 7 was that it didn’t kill enough Jews; therefore, it would have to be repeated again and again.

Mashni’s outrage about Haniyeh’s death can be set against his reaction to the execution of six Israeli hostages in the Gaza tunnels. When that news broke of that slaughter, Mashni exhorted his Twitter followers not to believe it, surmising that the Zionists were up to their usual mendacious tricks. Of course, Hamas, with their psychopathic boasting and taunting of the dead hostages’ families, would later confirm all the details. Mashni, though, remains unembarrassed by his misjudgement. Viewers of his many TV appearances might wonder if he is removed only by a distance of years from the lowlife and moral defective who threatened to break a child’s limbs in the Victorian countryside.

Going forward, it looks as if APAN’s president will discover new ways to make a pest of himself. He has just urged his supporters to “vote for Palestine at the next election”, meaning that a candidate’s commitment to Gaza would become the litmus test for electoral suitability. It’s yet another example of how anti-Israel fanaticism can derange our politics; the Middle East conflict ought to remain foreign to your local council’s policy, though Mashni and the Greens would prioritise it over bin collection.

I can’t imagine too many Australian voters will enlist in the cause, however. That brings us back to Peter Dutton and his preference for a moratorium on Gazan refugees in the absence of scrupulous vetting. Despite the media’s hyperventilating and name-calling, a majority of the Australian public agrees with the Opposition Leader and his call for prudence. I wonder how much that has to do with the newfound prominence of Hamas cheerleaders among the Palestine activist movement. We already have a surfeit of terror apologists and anti-semites, the thinking may go, so why would we actively risk recruiting any more?

Perhaps, in this way, Nasser Mashni has provided an ironic community service. His life and career in Australia, a nation he loathes, work to prove Dutton’s point: character tests on Palestinian entrants are important matters after all.