At this rate, any housewife who has ever expertly composed a shopping list, or council ranger who has written a professionally prosaic parking ticket, will be able to name their price to fill the program at the Adelaide Writers’ Week, which is due to start on February 27.
In case you hadn’t noticed, all the headline acts have in the past two days removed themselves from the event in the greatest gesture of literary groupthink since Jospeh Stalin established the Union of Soviet Writers in 1932. Large parts of the AWW website have been shut down while the organisers scramble to rewrite the program.
The reason they stormed the exits is that one of their colleagues, Randa Abdel-Fattah, had been removed from the program by the AWW board because it “would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time”.
And which unprecedented time would that be? The board wanted to explain, but struggled to, er, find the words:
“As an organisation and as people, we have been shocked and saddened by the tragic events at Bondi. We have been further saddened by the national grief and the significant heightening of both community tensions and the community debate.
“In this shared time of both mourning and reflection, we have spent the last weeks commencing a review across our current and planned operations and interactions through the lens of the current national community context and the role of Adelaide Festival in promoting community cohesion.”
By “tragic events at Bondi”, they mean the murder of 15 people and serious injuries caused to 40 others by two gunmen allegedly acting according to their Muslim faith, the worst act of terror in Australian history and the worst against Jews anywhere in the world for more than two years. The board was deliberately avoiding having to express even the slightest anger that this has happened; rather, it’s all terribly inconvenient, don’t you agree?
And by “promoting community cohesion”, they mean ridding the AWW program of anybody whose alliance with the Islamic and Palestinian cause might be seen as similar to those allegedly espoused by the gunmen. To not exclude such writers would potentially be seen as awfully insensitive, especially with some of the victims still recovering in hospital and others’ corpses barely fresh in the ground.
Abdel-Fattah certainly fits that definition. Her obsession with the destruction of Israel and her own moral implacability goes back long before the Bondi attack.
On 8 October 2023, for example, Abdel-Fattah changed her social media profile image to a picture of Hamas terrorists descending into Israel on paragliders the previous day, their parachutes decorated as the Palestinian flag.
Her zealotry doesn’t stop there, either. She is an academic at Macquarie University in Sydney, which she says is “named after a genocidal coloniser”. This justifies in her mind “bending the rules” in applications for research grants, of which she has so far clocked up more than $1.2 million.
And she taught kids to chant “intifada” and “from the river to the sea” during a protest at Sydney University. This is usually dismissed as lefty exuberance, but, again, one needs to exercise just a little discretion in this unprecedented time.
Her indignation about being dropped from this year’s AWW program is imbued with the sort of self-importance you’d normally only expect from a celebrity caught shopping at K-mart. “The cancellation of my appearance at AWW reflects the normalisation of anti-Palestinian racism by public institutions,” she said. How the Australian public and the entire benighted Middle East will ever recover from this catastrophic setback is just too overwhelming for even Abdel-Fattah to contemplate.
Interestingly, she exercised a similar type of self-regard when she sought to achieve the exact opposite outcome last year. She and nine other writers campaigned for the AWW to drop pro-Israel writer Thomas Friedman. “If you are a Zionist you have no claim or right to cultural safety,” she said.
Hypocrisy is only for little people to worry about, obviously. Who needs consistency of ideas or principles when you can just be consistently obnoxious instead?
Abdel-Fattah’s sheep-like followers are no better. All of them have posted pretentious screeds about the sanctity of free speech, a concept none of them cared about five years ago when far more fearless people were being silenced for disputing the Covid lockdowns and the “safe and effective” vaccines. Those dissenters have since been proven right, an outcome that Abdel-Fattah and her fans are unlikely to experience any time soon, if ever.
Richard Denniss, of the leftist Australia Institute, is one of them. Referring to the AWW’s apologetic statement tentatively explaining the delicacy of its decision, he said with passive-aggressive condescension: “To be clear, I have no idea how to define or measure what is ‘culturally sensitive’.”
Oh, you don’t have to look far to find that, mate. The Australia Institute’s own website “recognises the ancestral connections and custodianship of Traditional Owners throughout Australia. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders past and present.” So cultural! So sensitive!
All this confected outrage is happening while ordinary people in Iran are rising up against real censorship imposed by theocratic overlords, and the British government is considering banning X (which is now being copied by none other than Anthony Albanese).
But you don’t even need the irony of more seismic events involving actual censorship to illustrate the pointlessness of a “writers festival”. Writers who love writing are too busy writing to waste time in panel discussions in front of audiences full of halfwits. And readers who love reading are, likewise, too busy reading to listen to a vain “writer” spout platitudes in real time.
Very rarely does anybody who attends a “writers festival” have anything but a passing interest in good writing or literature. In the end, it doesn’t matter who turns up at Adelaide. It’s all a massive wank anyway.
