Adelaide Festival pulls Palestinian-Australian writer from Writers’ Week program
The festival board said, “it would not be culturally sensitive” for her to appear “so soon after Bondi”.
The Adelaide Festival has pulled Palestinian-Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from the Adelaide Writers’ Week program, citing concerns about “cultural sensitivity” after 15 people were killed in the Bondi shootings last month.
In a statement, the Adelaide Festival board said: “Whilst we do not suggest in any way that Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s or her writings have any connection with the tragedy at Bondi, given her past statements we have formed the view that it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time so soon after Bondi.”
Palestinian-Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah.Credit: Tom Toby
It continued: “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.”
Abdel-Fattah had been programmed to speak about her new book, Discipline.
Responding to the news via a statement, the Sydney-based Macquarie University academic said “this is a blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship and a despicable attempt to associate me with the Bondi massacre”.
“What makes this so egregiously racist is that the AF board has stripped me of my humanity and agency, reducing me to an object onto which others can project their racist fears and smears. The Board’s reasoning suggests that my mere presence is ‘culturally insensitive’; that I, a Palestinian who had nothing to do with the Bondi atrocity, am somehow a trigger for those in mourning and that I should therefore be persona non-grata in cultural circles...”
As previously reported by this masthead, concerns were raised with Bendigo Writers Festival ahead of Abdel-Fattah’s scheduled appearance last year over her previous social media commentary by lobby group 5A. It referenced a series of posts from Abdel-Fattah, including ones it asserted had said Jews had “no claim to cultural safety” and that institutions that considered “fragile feelings of Zionists” were “abhorrent”.
