Australia’s obsession with a handful of people who waved Hezbollah flags at protests on the weekend expose a wider problem.
Nasser Mashni
As Israel expands its bloody campaign of settler-colonial violence into Lebanon, intensifying its year-long genocide in Palestine, Australia’s political and media establishments are fixated on what they deem a more pressing concern: a handful of flags flown by a minority at the weekend’s solidarity protests.
This theatrical obsession with flags serves as a convenient distraction for those who have spent the past year searching for ways to divert attention from the genocidal brutality of one of our key allies. And from Australia’s complicity in it.
By fixating on these symbols, our leaders sidestep the uncomfortable conversations about whether Australia is fulfilling its international obligations to prevent genocide and hold accountable those responsible for the most heinous human rights abuses.
Politicians and the media only talk about demonstrations when they want to whip up racist division.
And even after a year of ongoing protest against Israel’s genocide, there is a disturbing hesitancy among leaders and mainstream journalists alike to engage with their content or legitimate demands.
The fact that these flags have drawn more vocal condemnation than Israel’s indiscriminate killings of Palestinian and Lebanese men, women, and children, and its wiping out of entire family lines, also reveals a stark truth: Arab lives are deemed expendable.
The racism is glaringly obvious, for all to see.
Calls from figures like Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, now echoed by the government and some independent politicians, to cancel the visas of and/or prosecute those flying these flags, even as the AFP insists this is not an “arrestable offence,” are nothing short of racist dog-whistling.
This scapegoating feeds into a broader culture of fear and hatred of Arabs and Muslims, as anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia reach alarming levels.
It is a national disgrace that it has become easier to condemn a flag than to confront the violent reality of a rogue state intent on annihilating a population. We must rise above the superficial and sensationalist narratives and engage with the truth: Palestinian lives, Lebanese lives, Arab lives are as precious as any others. They deserve respect.
Nasser Mashni is from the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network
Yours truly,
Nasser Mashni
President
Australia Palestine Advocacy Network
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I acknowledge and pay respect to the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation whose land I live and work upon. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.