ABC under pressure to sack presenter for Facebook comments
April 27, 2017
Image: Yassmin Abdel-Magied
Australia’s National Broadcaster, the ABC, is under mounting pressure to sack part time presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied, after she posted, then removed, a Facebook post that appeared to question the nations recognition of its war dead and service men and women on ANZAC Day. Say “Lest. We. Forget. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine..)” the post has been widely criticized with a petition calling on the ABC to sack her. The petition has now garnered more than 70,000 signatories.
Events took a turn for the personal on rival broadcaster, Sky News, when a guest (Lisa Oldfield) , also a reality television star, said this about the post:
“It wasn’t ignorant, she was just being a b****,” she said.
“At the end of the day I don’t like what she said. I was offended by what she said. But I still support her right to freedom of speech, and my right to be able to turn around and say lest we forget, Yassmin, that you are brown, you are Muslim and you are a girl, and that’s the only reason you have a job at the ABC.”
The comments come after One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson also weighed in saying that “She’s done her dash with most Australians who will never, never forget her comments,”
Over at Fairfax a commentator, Clementine Ford, has said Abdel Magied was right:
“absolutely f***ing correct”
“More than 8000 Australian and New Zealander men died throughout the eight months of the Gallipoli campaign, and the only thing they were left with at the end was the sense of a unified pride in their nations’ coming-of-age tale — because they had been sold the concrete lie that their sacrifice was necessary and that it meant something,” Ms Ford wrote on Facebook.
“Criticising war is honouring those who died on the battlefields of Gallipoli. Refusing to participate in the propaganda machine of ‘Aussie pride’ and war time antics is honouring the thousands of men who have been conscripted throughout Australian history against their will to fight where men in government would not.”
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