The Adelaide Writers Festival

Juliet Moses writes at Quillette:

The furore surrounding the storied Adelaide Writers Festival, the longest-running and largest literary festival in Australia and one that receives significant taxpayer funding, has made international headlines. Our drama ostensibly begins when the Festival’s board disinvites Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, an Australian writer with Palestinian heritage. 

Its climax sees a cultural stampede of 180 writers escaping the inferno of ignominy engulfing the Festival, before its smouldering wreckage collapses. Well-known names elbowing their way through the flames include Zadie Smith, Trent Dalton, Roisín O’Donnell and perhaps most high-profile of all, New Zealand’s former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern, who was to be promoting her memoir A Different Kind of Power.   

So who is Randa Abdel-Fattah?

While Abdel-Fattah has been an activist for some time (in 2021 she spoke on a panel with Hamas’s “head of international relations”), she has earned notoriety since 7 October 2023. She has repeatedly glorified that day’s Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel, while simultaneously denying its mass sexual violence. The next day she changed her Facebook banner to a paraglider (of the sort that was utilised by Hamas in the attack on the Nova music festival, at which 378 mostly young partygoers were slaughtered); and has said the attack gave her a glimmer of hope. On the day itself she mocked terrified young people fleeing the Nova festival and wrote about “all the Zionists staying up tonight hammering out… coloniser cries victim op eds.” There is footage of her teaching young children chants of “intifada”—no doubt inspired by UNRWA schools’  pedagogy that it is never too early to indoctrinate children into eliminationist hatred. She explicitly hopes for the eradication of the “murderous Zionist colony” and that “every last Zionist” will “never know a second’s peace.”

So you can see why organisers may have felt that having her speak just a few weeks about Jews were slaughter at Bondi Beach was a bad idea. Someone who celebrates the slaughter of Jewish civilians in Israel is part of the problem, not the solution.

Now you may make the case that on free speech grounds she should not have been disinvited (which I tend to agree with). You could argue that it is important to have a wide variety of views at such festivals. Well the problem there is Abdel-Fattah herself has tried to cancel numerous other people:

Abdel-Fattah has previously stated that “Zionists” should be made to feel culturally unsafe, and, fair dinkum, took part in the doxxing of 600 Jewish Australian academics and creatives on a Whatsapp group.  She campaigned to have Thomas Friedman, a Jewish Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist (and strident critic of Israel’s current government), removed from the Festival’s 2024 slate. (He says he was subsequently mysteriously cancelled over “timing.”) She also campaigned to have Deborah Conway, a renowned Jewish Australian singer-songwriter, deplatformed from a Perth festival, and led a boycott of a 2022 Sydney arts festival after it received $20,000 in funding from the Israeli embassy for presenting a dancework created by an Israeli choreographer. And she signed a petition to ban Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born ex-Muslim activist against Islamism, from touring Australia.   

So basically the view of the Adelaide Writers Festival now is that it is hideous to not invite a speaker who has celebrated the slaughter of Israeli civilians, but its is repugnant to have Pulitzer Prize winning journalists who are Jewish speak.

One of the critics of Abdel-Fattah participating has been South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas who said:

Mr Malinauskas at a press conference last week in which he asked reporters to imagine if a “far-right Zionist walked into a Sydney mosque and murdered 15 people”.

“Can you imagine that as premier of this state I would actively support a far-right Zionist going to Writers’ Week and speaking hateful rhetoric towards Islamic people?” he said.

“Of course I wouldn’t but the reverse has happened in this instance and I’m not going to support that either and I think that’s a reasonable position for me to have. It’s a view that I believe.”

Abdel-Fattah is now threatening the Premier with defamation. I sincerely hope she proceeds, as the court case would be wonderful.

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