Labor senator Sam Dastyari has been racially heckled by a group of people calling themselves “patriots” and “working class” men at a Melbourne pub.
“You terrorist, you little monkey!” one of the men shouts at the Labor backbencher, after a camera is thrust in his face.
“Why don’t you go back to Iran, you terrorist,” he continues.
Footage of the incident was posted on the Facebook page of the group, Patriot Blue.
When Dastyari called them racist, they asked him: "What race is Islam?"
The SMH strongly condemns the incident, saying when men like this are able to openly hunt a Muslim man in a public bar, the claim that Australia is not racist is clearly rubbish.
It says the attack on Dastyari was marinating in Australian-ness - the beery, blokey, hostile masculinity of the perpetrators.
The paper argues that racism and racist abuse is still very Australian, and if we want to stamp it out, few things have greater moral force than Australian law which strongly condemns it.
