I don’t support cancelling writers at writers’ festivals. But Randa Abdel-Fattah, cancelled by the Adelaide Writers Festival, does.
In February 2024, Abdel-Fattah urged the board of the same Adelaide Writers Festival to cancel an invitation to Jewish New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman, and he was subsequently cancelled.
In 2023, she also circulated a doxing list that incited ‘cancel culture’ against 600 Australian Jewish writers and artists.
Her general ‘cancel culture’ posts include, ‘it is the duty… to ensure that every space that Zionists enter is culturally unsafe for them’ and, ‘if you are a Zionist, you have no right to cultural safety’.
And she is suing the South Australian premier for his ‘free speech’ opinion on her likely festival impact a short time after the Bondi massacre.
And she’s stated there was an agenda to use the Bondi massacre to manipulate people against Palestinians.
But I’m sure that she would advocate that free speech is upheld at the next writers’ festival with, say, the inclusion of Salman Rushdie, or perhaps a release of a new Australian Charlie Hebdo English version.
And to broaden the issues we have with free speech, perhaps she might push to include a festival talk by, say, Sydney’s controversial Assyrian Christian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel who experienced a livestreamed attempt on his life for comments perceived to insult Mohammad.
Abdel-Fattah beats her chest for free speech for her, but not for other festival writers, or Jews, or others whose opinions she opposes. She has also denied that Hamas raped girls in their October 7, 2023 attack.
According the SMH on October 8, 2023 ‘she updated her social media profile picture to that of a paraglider (one of the ways Hamas escaped the Israeli enclosure around the enclave). The parachute was in the colours of a Palestinian flag.’
It is good to know where people stand, including that, apparently from Mandy’s Soapbox, Abdel-Fattah is ‘elect me’ Mandy’s new pin-up girl.
John Lazarus, Byron Bay
• Regarding Randa Abdel-Fattah’s comment that Zionists had no right to cultural safety, she told The Guardian she makes the distinction between Zionism as a political ideology and the culture of Jewish people. She said, ‘You can be a Zionist and not be Jewish; you can be a Jewish person and be anti-Zionist.’ She said Zionism is a ‘settler colonialism’ ideology which originated in Europe and argued for, and replaced, the majority Indigenous population in Palestine. ‘You cannot use Zionism as an excuse to shield you from critique – it is a political ideology that should be subjected to the same critiques that we subject any political ideology to. [It’s a] political ideology carrying out a genocide in real time,’ she said. – letters ed
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