'Who is anyone to tell me what it means to be Australian?' Abdel-Magied hits back
Besieged ABC presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied insists she was treated unfairly over her controversial Anzac Day Facebook post.
The 26-year-old endured immediate backlash when she told Australians to spare a thought for those on Manus Island and Syria, rather than the Anzacs.
“Lest We Forget (Manus. Nauru. Syria. Palestine),” Ms Abdel-Magied wrote on Facebook before quickly amending the post.
After a petition was made to have her sacked from the ABC, the Muslim activist told students at a Sydney Writers Festival workshop that she had been unfairly labelled “Un-Australian”.
“Who is anyone to tell me what it means to be Australian?” she said.
“I posted an apology very quickly afterwards, but one of our senior cabinet members said ‘Well Yassmin is un-Australian for saying this’.
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“Then somebody asked well, another dude wrote a whole article about how Anzac Day is problematic, what do you think about that…Why is he allowed to say what he thinks and I’m not — I don’t know.”
Speaking at a student session called “Mono or Multicultured” Ms Abdel-Magied said she had belittled her background growing up as a way of fitting in and minimalising the damage when others insulted her.
“I’m a brown chick that grew up in Queensland, and all through growing up I became really good at terrorist jokes and jokes about brown people because that was the way I dealt with people trying to make me an outsider — it was a way of taking back power,” she said.
“There are much more appropriate ways of doing that, though, because what that actually does is reinforce the problem rather than challenge it."
