War of words overshadows dumped author’s apology
A Palestinian-Australian academic whose suspension from a prestigious writers’ festival sparked national outrage has said his words continue to be mischaracterized and used against him despite being invited back to the event.
The board that oversees Adelaide Writers’ Week apologized unreservedly to Randa Abdel-Fattah on Thursday after her January 8 exit sparked a mass boycott by speakers and writers and the event was cancelled.
He later became the first name announced for the 2027 squad.
However, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas refused to support the apology, remaining true to Dr Abdel-Fattah’s stance that he advocated against the cultural security of Zionists, including the Jewish people.
“I have never called for Jewish people not to have cultural security,” he said in his response to ABC radio on Friday.
“But political ideologies cannot use cultural security as a shield against criticism.
“I am truly tired of my words being deliberately, maliciously and falsely mischaracterized to portray me as an anti-Semite, even though I have never expressed any anti-Semitism.”
Dr. Malinauskas, who filed a defamation lawsuit against him for his comments comparing him to a terrorist sympathizer. Abdel-Fattah said he stood in solidarity with anti-Zionist Jews “as a Palestinian who feels the real-life effects of genocide in the name of Zionist ideology.”
Mr Malinauskas, Dr. He claimed that Abdel-Fattah was “advocating against the cultural security of people who believe in Zionism”, including Jews, and that he had a responsibility to warn him about this.
This included his role in the successful campaign to oust columnist Thomas Friedman from the 2024 event over his New York Times blog post comparing Middle Eastern countries to various insects and spiders.
The article called the United States an old lion and the Israeli leader a lemur.
“You can’t protest this (your dismissal) and then deny others the ability to express their views, which is the problem with Ms Abdel-Fattah’s attitude,” Mr Malinauskas told the ABC on Wednesday.
But the Palestinian-Australian author said no comparisons should be made.
“I truly reject the equivalence between Thomas Friedman and our principled response to his deeply racist article in which he used racial tropes of animals to describe people in the Middle East,” he said.
“It’s also a matter of not equating racist, harmful inflammatory speech with my speech as a Palestinian speaking out against genocide.”
Meanwhile, the industry is mourning the loss of Writers’ Week 2026, an offshoot of the Adelaide Festival and seen as the country’s largest and most respected literary festival.
“The flow-on effect of having all these people in town and Adelaide being the center of the book universe for a week is gone; I think that’s devastating for the book industry,” bookstore owner Angus Dillon told AAP.
British indie rock band Pulp announced overnight that they planned to join the Adelaide Festival boycott over Dr Abdel-Fattah’s sacking.
But a replacement of the festival board and Thursday’s apology and invitation from Dr Abdel-Fattah have led the “Ordinary People” band to honor their original plans to play on February 27.
“We want to make it absolutely clear that Pulp refuses to tolerate voices being silenced,” the band wrote on Instagram.
We hope that our free concert will be an opportunity for different communities to come together in peace and harmony.”
Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, British novelist Zadie Smith and popular Australian author Trent Dalton were among those withdrawing from Writers’ Week in solidarity with the academic.
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