Published: 13 January 2026
Last updated: 15 January 2026
Espousing your morals and ideas and living your life in alignment with them are two very different concepts.
Everyone wants to believe they are living a life of good decisions and moral fortitude, but in reality, there are lots of temptations that get in the way; sweet schadenfreude, the deliciousness of revenge, the hunger of greed, the power of ego, the pull of power or ambition and the list goes on.
Ultimately, it can be hard work to be the best person you can be, and I think in some respects, it should be.
Some of the most central tenets of social justice include centring lived experience, not talking over people who have skin in the game, recognising and listening when other people try to explain their identity and applying the same standards and humanity to all people, rather than engaging in selective judgement of who is deserving.
The left has been guilty of widespread hypocrisy over these values since October 7. I’ve watched the “rules of engagement” broken repeatedly by people I had previously called friends and colleagues and lost respect for so many people I previously admired.
Nowhere has this hypocrisy been more evident than in the work and writing of Randa Abdel-Fattah.
It therefore gives me not one iota of pleasure to write that pulling Randa Abdel-Fattah from the program of the Adelaide Writers' Week – and the way in which it was done – was a mistake.
She calls for the recognition of the humanity of her own people, while simultaneously dehumanising others
Comments15
Alan17 January at 01:08 am
Adelaide Writers Week is almost entirely a tax-payer funded event. The view that a tax-payer funded event must support views that traumatize or vilify specific groups is simply wrong. Good governance requires that public funds are not used to marginalize the very taxpayers who provided the money. Expressed another way, freedom of speech prevents the government from jailing a writer for their views. It does not mandate that the government must pay for their hotel, flight, and stage.
Furthermore, writers, of all people, must realize that “speech” is not simply a harmless exchange of words, but a powerful tool that can cause tangible harm. The government and the AWW board have a “duty of care” to ensure that the festival doesn’t become a platform for vilification. If a festival is funded by the public, it must serve the entire public.
Habeeb Marouf15 January at 03:11 pm
‘Randa repeatedly describes Australia as “a settler colony on stolen land”’ – where is the distortion in that? —– that Australia is a settler colony on stolen land is historical fact and also the core of gthe statement at the foot of this web page: “The Jewish Independent acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country throughout Australia”. It’s illuminating that you are able to maintain this schismatic thinking, as it explains the failure to see the direct parallel between Aboriginal experience of settler colonial erasure and replacement with that of the Palestinians at the hands of European Zionists.
Pat15 January at 09:22 am
If I could write like this, this is exactly what I would have written. The tragedy of our time is the death of debate. We cancel people we don’t agree with instead of challenging them in open fora. The Adelaide Festival is not a mass rally, it is a contained space. Abhorrent as her views are she should have been allowed to express them and made to defend them by people using facts and reason instead of hysteria and hatred.
Guy15 January at 06:07 am
Free speech is about whether someone should be jailed for what they say. An invitation to a prestigious literary festival is something entirely different – a statement that someone is an honourable person who respects others and has something of literary value to say. Whether or not Abdel-Fattah, Neonazis, and the like belong in jail, they absolutely do not deserve an invitation to a literary festival.
Alison Bevege15 January at 01:31 am
The problem wasn’t that Randa Abdel-Fattah was cancelled. The problem was that she was invited in the first place, and that her novels are on the school curriculum to turn children to an Islamist narrative. There are other writers.
The Adelaide Writers Festival, if it invited her at all, should have sandwiched Randa on a panel between Harris Sultan, Avi Yemini and Rukshan Fernando. You are too apologetic towards this Muslim Brotherhood sympathiser. She herself had no problem signing petitions designed to deplatform ex-Muslim academic Ayaan Hirsi Ali and songbird Deborah Conway.
She silences criticism of Islam and the bad behaviour of jihadis as “racist”.
Randa repeatedly describes Australia as “a settler colony on stolen land” which is the exact same way she describes Israel: a claim so distorted as to be functionally false. She changed her Facebook profile picture to a Hamas paraglider on October 8, 2023, then claimed she didn’t know the death toll then.
Hamas (Muslim Brotherhood) wants to eradicate Jews and replace Israel with an Islamic state, as they say in their founding charter. The Arab Muslims are using the misery of their “Palestinian” brothers and sisters to do this. Stop helping them.
PM14 January at 09:44 pm
Your article is analytically and ethically weak — not because of its political position, but because of how the argument is constructed.
You repeatedly place Randa Abdel-Fattah’s name alongside communal trauma and security anxiety while formally denying any causal link. That is a recognised rhetorical device (apophasis): it allows suspicion to be created without ever being argued. The reader is left with an atmosphere of danger rather than a case that can be tested or debated.
The same pattern appears in the use of terms such as “cultural sensitivity,” “community harm,” and “free-speech hypocrisy.” These operate as condensation symbols — they compress complex institutional and political questions into emotionally primed judgments, doing rhetorical work that evidence should be doing.
Most concerning is the way criticism of Zionism is rhetorically collapsed into hostility toward Jewish people. That is not simply an ambiguity; it changes a political position into a moral transgression, which makes serious disagreement look like ethical failure.
If Abdel-Fattah has crossed a line into antisemitism, that should be shown with her words and explained. If her participation creates real harm, the causal pathway should be set out. Without that, the piece reads less like analysis and more like polemic.
Habeeb Marouf14 January at 08:26 am
Joseph, we are used to attempts at invoking historical Jewish suffering (primarily at the hands of Europeans please note) to deflect from the present issue of Zionist structural violence and injustice against Palestinians. I refer you to the many anti-Zionist Jews who put this far better than I, starting with Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim, noting also a quote from Louise Adler, who frames Jewish suffering correctly.
“Many Jewish supporters of peace have argued that it is precisely because of our own long history of oppression and discrimination that we must stand with the Palestinian people and support their right to self-determination. I have come to the point where I think differently. It is not because of my own history that I have declared myself to be an ally of the struggle of Palestinian people, it is because as human beings injustice and inequality demand that we all care.”
See Adler here: https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/louise-adler-to-be-silent-is-to-enable-violence/
Your own history should not determine your moral lens.
As I said earlier, an honest examination of the issue collapses the debate firmly on the side of the humanist, and, by extension, in favour of the Palestinians’ moral claim.
Larry Stillman14 January at 04:34 am
She should not have been cancelled, but her views should be openly challenged. There now even less chance than ever of that happening. I blogged this.
“Her ideas are challenging and disturbing. Soldarity politics which offers no nuance, no empathy to the other’s dilemmas and circumstances is cruel. Saying things like “expressions of Zionist fragility expose a calculated, purposeful strategy of insisting on the status of victim” is generalizing, conspiratorial and cruel, even to me, a post-Zionist who has been engaged against Zionist extremism in decades.
Ruth Riegler in a recent critique of Max Blumenthal and others (… argued that some people on the left start to echo the “same Islamophobic rhetoric used by the far right” and are “like Tucker Carlson to mock evidence, relativise cruelty, and treat victims and their testimony as worthless”. It’s also in the same vein as some Zionist rhetoric. I think the same is going on here.
Her views offer no out, no solution, just anger, rage and more confrontation.
My full piece at https://tinyurl.com/5462pkbx
David Mayes14 January at 03:38 am
Freedom of speech and artistic freedom are just ideas, they are not moral absolutes. In this case the AWW crew (the executive and the allied writers who withdrew) are using these ideas as fig leaves to disguise their calculated power play which in effect asserts “as a collective we own this festival and we will use it as our platform to engineer our political objectives.”
I applaud Malinauskis for confronting the power play head on – let them blow up the AWW 2026. At least it opens up the possibility that AWW 2027 won’t be dominated by the same obsessively antizionist literary mafia.
Joseph Silver13 January at 11:58 pm
Habeeb Maouf – your remarks are based on the lies and misinformation that have been part and parcel of the faked Palestinian narrative. You set yourself up as having a claim to the high moral ground and use that trope as an anti-Zionist battering stick. The Jews have known trials and tribulations for thousands of years and know from experience how our enemies speak. We will not be asphyxiated by your self-righteous contrived morality that tries to smother us with false justifications.
Barbara Swartz13 January at 10:40 pm
Removing Ms Abdel Fattah from the program at a sensitive time so close to the Bondi massacre seems a compassionate decision to me.
Lynda Ben-Menashe13 January at 08:56 pm
Couldn’t agree more. NCJWA questioned how feminist progressives could stand in complete and unqualified solidarity with someone who has expressed such abhorrent denialism about the sexual violence on October 7.
Eli13 January at 06:50 pm
Unfortunately these festivals are long ceased to be genuine “forums for conversation and debate”. My experience is that there is a tremendous amount of group think by those who attend these forums, and there is very little diversity of opinion.
Habeeb Maouf13 January at 05:15 pm
Sorry, but if Oderberg were genuinely committed to the fairness in debate and freedom of speech she espouses she would recognise that the debate is necessarily one-sided in favour of the Palestinians…. because that is how it ineluctably emerges when the truth is told. To put it in perspective, any debate between a Nazi and a humanist, conducted fairly and freely, instantly collapses in favour of the humanist.
Oderberg centres process over substance, procedure over moral consideration. Her structural principle treats free speech as a formal, symmetrical right, equally applicable to all participants. She insists on fairness in debate and equal application of rules withuot accounting for the moral or power asymmetry inherent in the Palestinians’ settler-colonial struggle, otherwise refered to as the Israel/Palestine conflict.
By doing this, she is being classically Zionist, even if she does not intend it: she engages in deflection and derails the debate onto tracks that are inconsequential to justice and freedom.
Of course, she has every right to express these views. But let’s be clear about what she is saying, and the structural and moral consequences of her approach.
Simon Tedeschi13 January at 04:02 am
Nothing brings people together like a shared commitment to free speech, immediately followed by a spreadsheet.