There will be many things the newly freed and exuberant people of Iran will want to ask when (and if) their mullah overlords flee and someone switches the internet, which is currently blacked out across the country, back on.
But you can guarantee one topic that will be low on their list of urgent questions, if it’s there at all, is: will Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah be appearing at Adelaide Writers Week next month?
A superficial view of these two issues would suggest they are related, even almost identical. Across Iran, people, especially women, are rising up against an oppressive, censorious regime, and winning. With Donald Trump now indicating he might put a rocket up the mullahs, it looks likely that the people have finally toppled their theocratic overlords, after 47 years of oppression. (It’s not a foregone conclusion, though; the mullahs suppressed a similar movement in 2009, with a little help from Barack Obama.)
Abdel-Fattah is fighting — and winning — against what she also sees as a corrupt, oppressive regime in Adelaide. The collective response to her being dropped from the AWW program less than a week ago has been the arts industry’s equivalent of thousands of protesters flooding the streets of Iran. More than 70 other writers have publicly — some might say ostentatiously — declared they too will not appear at AWW as long as Abdel-Fattah’s invitation remains withdrawn. And today it emerged that three directors and the chairman of the Adelaide Festival board, which oversees AWW, have also sensationally resigned.
But that is where the similarities end. Dig a little deeper and you soon realise that Abdel-Fattah is almost as censorious against Jews as the mullahs are against their own people.
Last year, she signed a letter ordering the board to drop pro-Israel writer Thomas Friedman. In March 2024, she said, “If you are a Zionist, you have no claim or right to cultural safety.”
She is also a big fan of Hamas, the mullahs’ proxies in Gaza’s war against Israel. On the day after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, she changed her social media profile picture to the terrorists descending into Israel on paragliders. And she recently taught children at a Palestinian protest to chant “intifada” and “From the river to the sea” when they really should have been having naps and bugging their parents to switch on Thomas the Tank Engine.
The Adelaide festival board ordered Abdel-Fattah to be dropped because her appearance at AWW would be seen by some people as not “culturally sensitive” so soon after two gunmen with similar sympathies to hers killed 15 Jews at Bondi. Hardly an unreasonable decision under the circumstances.
But like the mullahs gunning down protesters in Iran, Abdel-Fattah’s supporters doubled down on her initial indignation, flooding their social-media feeds with more sanctimonious self-justification than a Somalian in Minnesota explaining why there are no kids in his government funded daycare centre.
Historian Henry Reynolds wrote — through his lawyers, no less — that he was experiencing a “high degree of disappointment and concern” and henceforth “specifically reserves his rights to air his concerns through other available fora, including the media.” If that didn’t make the festival board drop their cafe lattes, nothing will.
“Every single person involved in this shameful decision and statement is a repugnant disgrace,” Lebanese-Turkish Muslim poet Omar Sakr said with more tautology than poetry.
Expat has-been Kathy Lette said she was “heartened that so many writers are taking a stand for free speech together. Clearly, the pen is mightier than the Board.”
Actually, it’s not. There is only one thing more absurd than a person who stands up for free speech by withdrawing themselves from a speaking engagement, and that is a writer who doesn’t find the irony of it absolutely hilarious.
And here’s another irony, asked by a gorgeous young Iranian woman on X: “Why are lefties, who are the loudest pro-Gaza voices, completely silent when it comes to Iran? Well, the answer is simple because the truth exposes the lie.” Iranian suffering does not fit their agenda, but Gazan suffering does. I recommend you listen to her short explanation about why this is so — it makes the brouhaha in Adelaide seem not just trivial, but deluded as well. Not one of the above writers who are so obsessed with Abdel-Fattah’s free speech rights in free and prosperous Australia has said a word about the brave people standing up to armed soldiers in Iran.
The most common argument against the Iranian uprising among Western leftists is that it’s just a US-Israeli psy-op. American journalist Ana Kasparian tried trotting it out on Piers Morgan’s show, and was belted out of the park by the far more passionate and sane Iranian exile, and sworn enemy of the mullahs, Masih Alinejad.
The most astonishing, and somewhat depressing, revelation, however, is that mere days after removing the shackles of theocracy, Iranians have revealed just how freakin cool they are, especially in comparison to Abdel-Fattah and her gang of mono-tonal whiners. A band of hipsters performed a decent rendition of The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army on the streets of Tehran. Some anonymous editor produced a video of the protests that makes you wish you could be there with them (although the murder of thousands of protesters is of course not included). Iranians jammed the streets making noise in the blacked-out darkness under the headline, “This isn’t a Taylor Swift concert”. And a young woman practiced her cocktail-shaking skills in front of the Azadi Tower in Freedom Square, Tehran, with the caption, “Party on you, drinks are on us.” It’s almost like the “crazy casbah jive” that the Clash sang about in Rock the Casbah in 1982 was prophetic.
On top of that, it’s now becoming increasingly clear, since the veils have been coming off, how hot Iranian women are. I’m no longer in my twenties or single, but if I was either of those today I’d be booking a one-way ticket to Iran right now to open up a jazz bar and try my luck.
We might just be witnessing a tectonic cultural shift. More than a century after the Bell Epoque defined the modern form of stylish narcissism in Europe, and 60 years after baby boomers turned “style” into a ubiquitous phenomenon, we in the West seem to have almost exhausted what’s left of what was once our abundant aesthetic inheritance.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 gave the psycho mullahs a solid base, which enabled them to sponsor so many terrorism gangs and random acts of terror that they often threatened the West’s hegemony and, it now seems in hindsight, drained our cultural energy. Just watching the exuberance, optimism and style of Iranians now reminds me of how little of any of those things we have left.
