Antisemitism in Adelaide
From his deckchair, Joe reflects on the conflagration of Adelaide Writers' Week.
One of the tasks I've been working through in this summer holiday is consuming a large volume of Michael Lewis podcasts (including his fantastic conversation with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal for the 10-year anniversary of their cult podcast Acquired) plus reading Lewis's latest book, Who Is Government?
That's because on February 28, I had been scheduled to interview Lewis at the Adelaide Writers' Week. That was until the festival triggered a writer and sponsor boycott, the resignation of its director and its entire board (bar one) and its own cancellation by disinviting the now-famous Randa Abdel-Fattah over her vile past remarks about Jews (sorry, 'Zionists') and her apparent celebration of the October 7, 2023 massacre of 800 civilians in Israel.[[The day after Hamas fighters invaded Israel (including by paraglider) and slaughtered 800 civilians, including 40 children, Abdel-Fattah changed her Facebook profile picture to an image of a Palestinian paraglider. Conversely, how many Australian Jews did you see openly celebrating the deaths of Palestinian civilians in the subsequent Gaza war?]]
Virtually the entire writing fraternity rose up in defence of Abdel-Fattah's trammelled freedom of speech, whereas I'm only wondering how she was invited in the first place.
The answer, of course, is that these festivals have become a hotbed of such feral views, where perfectly legitimate abhorrence of Benjamin Netanyahu's government of Israel has metastasised into completely improper antagonism towards the Jewish diaspora.
