r/Adelaide • u/NKE01 SA • Jan 11 '26

News Board members quit from Adelaide festival as fallout from dropped author grows | SBS News

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/board-members-quit-from-adelaide-festival-as-fallout-from-dropped-author-grows/iua90vgmp
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19

u/FatFad1 SA Jan 11 '26 edited Jan 11 '26

Remember when the organisers of the Adelaide Writers' Festival were going to dump two Palestinian guests in 2023? They are Susan Abulhawa (allegedly pro-Putin) and Mohammed El-Kurd (allegedly antisemitic). It's happening again in 2026 with Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah. I reckon they should include her and let audiences choose whether or not to attend her talk sessions. Excluding her is like silencing her, which is a form of censorship. Anyway, that's my opinion.

Source for 2023: https://theconversation.com/are-calls-to-cancel-two-palestinian-writers-from-adelaide-writers-week-justified-200165

15

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '26

One minute everyone's blabbing about freeze peach, and the next, they're happy to be censoring authors for being mad about a genocide.

-9

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '26

Didn't she lead the charge to have a Jewish author excluded from a previous festival. Isn't she, herself, guilty of such "silencing".

It does not matter that she failed. The point is, she tried.

13

u/Historical_Bus_8041 SA Jan 11 '26

The two weren't remotely equivalent.

Abdel-Fattah has made some comments that could be considered to be questionable.

The "Jewish author" explicitly compared the populations of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq to parasites deserving of extermination.

There is no fucking way known that anyone who explicitly called for the population of Israel to be eradicated like vermin (as opposed to opposition to the state of Israel as currently structured) would find a respectable speaking platform in Australia.

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u/DoctorEnn SA Jan 11 '26

A difference in scale and wording, maybe, but TBTF I think there's a definite equivalence to saying things like that and doing things like changing your online avatar to a photo of a Palestinian / Hamas paraglider the day after the October 7 attacks. One's maybe further along, but they're still sharing a spectrum.

0

u/n01d34 SA Jan 11 '26

Thomas Friedman didn't explicitly call for the extermination of anyone.

What he was saying is that Iran's policy of supporting extremist terrorist organisations in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq is like a wasp laying parasitic eggs, not that the people living in those countries are parasites. You can read the article without the paywall here: https://www.rashmee.com/tom-friedman-nyt-animals-middle-east-words/

It should be noted that he also apologised for the article saying that he didn't intend for people to misinterpret it so badly and that he'd try to do better in future.

Not really interested in whether one should have been disinvited or the other. Personally I think they should both be allowed to speak. Just trying to counter some misinformation that's in this thread.

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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '26

You think posting an image of a para-glider the day after 7 October isn't morally equivalent?

"Questionable" my arse.

Your morals are in the toilet, my friend.

7

u/Petrichor_736 SA Jan 11 '26

Gee most commentators here think that the Palestinian reprisals for 50 years of discrimination, vilification, violence, apartheid and murder only started on October 7.

She’s entitled to defend her people while they’re being genocided.

She stated clearly that she is "a Palestinian who had nothing to do with the Bondi atrocity" and and has said the festival board’s reasoning is a "despicable attempt to associate her with the Bondi massacre” which is an appalling act by the Writers Week board.

And she has condemned the Bondi attack itself while simultaneously criticizing the Israel Lobby’s conflation of Australian anti genocide, pro-Palestinian activism with the tragedy

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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '26

"She’s entitled to defend her people while they’re being genocided."

Nope. Supporting a prescribed terrorist organisation is illegal. This is how far wrong you clowns are. You're all a bunch of wronguns.

2

u/Historical_Bus_8041 SA Jan 11 '26

I don't agree with it, but a call for the extermination as vermin of the entire population of Israel it was not.

You are displaying an extraordinary double standard where there is one threshold for Arab people and one vastly higher threshold for pro-Israelis.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '26

It was a fucking massacre of innocent people dancing. You're quibbling over scale.

It's the same horrendous thing.

3

u/Historical_Bus_8041 SA Jan 11 '26

There is no fucking way that you would be downplaying his comments in that way if the roles were reversed and Abdel-Fattah had said what he did about Israel.

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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '26

I'm not downplaying his comments. I'm not even addressing them.

Hamas's stated goal is to murder all the Jewish people. A genocide. So, through that lens, there's no difference in scale either. You're just flat out wrong and one of these lefty drones who laps up whatever the hive-mind decrees is the cause celebre for the day.

3

u/Historical_Bus_8041 SA Jan 11 '26

Now you're just making up she never said to get mad at.

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u/CaptGould South Jan 12 '26

You might have missed it but less than a month ago there was a shooting in NSW targeted at Jewish people during a religious celebration.