An Australian senator was called a “monkey” and a “terrorist” by racist bullies who posted footage of their abuse online.
Labor deputy whip Sam Dastyari, who represents the state of New South Wales, was with Labor MP Tim Watts and other friends in a Melbourne pub on Wednesday when the incident occurred.
Dastyari was approached by three men, later identified as members of far-right nationalist group Patriot Blue, as he ordered drinks at the bar
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“Have another drink mate, is it halal certified?” one of them said. Dastyari is from a Muslim family but describes himself as non-religious and drinks alcohol, The Guardian reports.
Patriot Blue founder Neil Erikson, who filmed the confrontation, is heard telling the senator, ”why don't you go back to Iran, you terrorist?”
Another of the men taunted him: “You terrorist. You little monkey.”
The group continued to harass Dastyari as he returned to his table, despite the senator asking them to leave him alone. “I think you guys are a bunch of racists,” he says at one point in the exchange. “You are embarrassing yourself.”
Erikson later denied that the word “monkey” was intended to have racial connotations, despite its history as a term of racial abuse. “Monkey can mean 1,000 different things, it's a stretch to believe it was racist,” he wrote on Facebook, the Daily Mail reports.
In a tweet posted shortly after the incident, Dastyari - who arrived in Australia from Iran aged four - described his harassers as “cowardly white nationalists”.
Fellow politicians and ordinary Australians rallied around Dastyari on social media, including opposition leader Bill Shorten, who branded his assailants “idiots”:
Conservative political commentator Paul Murray said that, regardless of political differences, the behaviour inflicted on Dastyari was “un-Australian”:
In a follow-up interview on Channel 10 news programme The Project, Dastyari said that he believed that xenophobia and racism were on the rise in Australia
“It is definitely getting worse,” he said. “There is a rise in extremism in this country.”
However, there was also a moment of humour in the otherwise hostile encounter.
In response to one of Dastyari’s harassers denying they were racist by demanding “what race is Islam?”, fellow parliamentarian Watts shot back: “What race is dickhead?”
The risposte caused widespread mirth on Twitter, where Dastyari applauded Watts as an example of the “true” Australian character:
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