BY ANDREW BOLT
MELBOURNE, VIC. — There’s just one sane reaction to the decision to cancel the Adelaide Writers’ Week, after more than 180 authors and speakers walked out in support of Randa Abdel-Fattah.
Abdel-Fattah claims she was sacked as a speaker by the Adelaide Festival board because “she’s a Palestinian Muslim woman”, and it was an act of “anti-Palestinian racism” to “publicly link me to, and to associate me with the Bondi atrocity.”
In fact, she’s not Palestinian but Australian, born in Sydney to a Palestinian father and Egyptian mother. And she was sacked for being an inflammatory hater whose rhetoric now seems even more inexcusable after the Bondi massacre of Jews.
After all, she’s falsely accused Israel of genocide, denied Hamas was a terrorist group and decorated her Facebook profile with a picture of a Hamas terrorist in a hang-glider, like the ones which slaughtered Israelis at a music festival on October 7.
She also declared “Zionists” here “have no claim or right to cultural safety”, clapped along as Muslim children chanted “intifada, intifada” and posted a poster on Instagram of Dalaj Mugrabi which called her “one of the unstoppable Palestinian women who have inspired us”.
“Inspired” her? Mugrabi was one of the terrorists who in 1978 murdered 13 Jewish children on a bus.
That more than 180 Writers’ Week authors and guests have spoken in Abdel-Fattah’s support helps show why so many Jews now feel so threatened.
No, no, the boycotters cry. They’re not supporting Abdel-Fattah but free speech.
Really? For one, Abdel-Fattah is a hypocrite who two years ago signed a joint letter demanding the Adelaide Festival ban a Jewish writer, Thomas Friedman, who’d likened Hamas to a ‘trapdoor spider’ and Islamo-fascist Iran to a ‘parasitoid wasp’.
Two, Abdel-Fattah is free to speak in Adelaide any time she likes. The issue here is whether she should get a government-funded platform.
And three, free speech at this Writers’ Week? Ha! It’s instead a circle-jerk of the hard left.
It’s now ex-chief, Louise Adler, three years ago programmed eight pro-Palestinian activists and not one pro-Israel. One, Mohammed El-Kurd, claimed Israelis had an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood” and another said an American Jew murdered his on his way to an Israeli wedding was just “human garbage”.
No, this walkout is not about any principle. It’s our cultural elite picking a very sick side.
This op-ed was first published in the Herald Sun, January 15, 2026, page 21.
VicNews has republished this op-ed in the public interest. VicNews does not support the views of Andrew Bolt.
