It is a safe bet that few readers or writers of Spectator Australia have derived much value from the millions of taxpayer dollars lavished on Australian writers’ festivals over the years. This week, however, Adelaide Writers’ Week delivered explosive entertainment.

It began with the disinvitation of Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah (RAF for short). RAF herself has no difficulty disinviting other writers. In 2024, she signed an open letter demanding the removal of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman – who happens to be Jewish – from the Adelaide Writers’ Week. The signatories objected to Friedman’s use of animal metaphors to describe Middle Eastern groups, denouncing this as dehumanising Nazi language.

What they omitted was that the groups Friedman described as pests were all terrorists. Iran – the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism – resembled a ‘parasitoid’ wasp that injected its eggs – terror cells – into Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, creating Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas and Kataib militias that eat their host countries from the inside. He likened the United States (under Biden) to an ageing lion no longer feared; Hamas to a trapdoor spider; and Netanyahu to a sifaka lemur, hopping sideways and waving its arms to suggest movement without making much progress.

The festival committee ignored the demand, but Friedman withdrew for ‘scheduling reasons’. A polite excuse perhaps to avoid a confrontation with ten pro-Palestinian women activists on the warpath.

RAF’s horror at ‘dehumanising language’ doesn’t extend to her own rhetoric. She refers to Israeli Zionists as ‘demons’. Hypocrisy – and antisemitism – are not bugs in contemporary arts culture; they’re features.

Her refusal to condemn Hamas speaks to something deeper and more disturbing. Asked on television whether she regarded Hamas as terrorists, RAF replied: ‘I don’t see them as a terrorist organisation.’ Hamas is proscribed under Australian law. To launder it of its terrorist barbarity is to provide it with moral and material support. As an academic, RAF occupies a position of influence over students who could be radicalised by such statements.

She is far from alone. More than 3,600 people signed an open letter protesting when Creative Australia rescinded its appointment of Khaled Sabsabi to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Sabsabi’s portrait of Hassan Nasrallah – the terrorist leader of Hezbollah – haloed in saintly golden light, is sickening to anyone familiar with Hezbollah’s bombings, kidnappings and rocket attacks against civilians.

Worse, some of the same figures who cried censorship – including Sabsabi – called for the deplatforming of the Israeli Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale and the cancellation of Israel’s representative, Ruth Patir.

Similarly, RAF and many of those protesting her cancellation signed an open letter demanding the removal of Jewish musician Deborah Conway from the 2024 Perth Festival’s Literature and Ideas for daring to challenge the Hamas narrative of the Gaza war.

RAF was not sanguine about her own disinvitation. The board explained that, while it did not suggest she or her work had any connection to the Bondi massacre, her past statements made it ‘culturally insensitive’ to program her so soon after the attack.

Those statements include a March 2024 tweet: ‘If you are a Zionist, you have no claim or right to cultural safety. It is the duty of those who oppose racism to ensure that every space Zionists enter is culturally unsafe for them.’ This threat is directed not just at Jewish Zionists but all Australians who support Israel’s right to exist – bipartisan foreign policy since Australia supported the UN resolutions establishing the Jewish state. Claims Zionism is racist are flatly contradicted by Israel’s multiethnic, multiracial democracy, where equal civil and legal rights apply regardless of race or religion.

Then there was RAF’s Facebook profile photo: changed to a paraglider in the colours of the Palestinian flag the day after Hamas terrorists paraglided into Israel on 7 October 2023 and slaughtered 1,200 Israelis, wounded thousands more, and abducted 251 hostages. She also organised a children’s excursion to a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Sydney where children led chants of ‘intifada’ – the terror campaign that killed more than 1,000 Israelis.

RAF rejected the board’s reasoning, calling her disinvitation ‘a blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism’. In reality, her refusal to recognise Hamas as a terrorist organisation and her hostility to Australian Zionists (Jewish or not) make her presence threatening. One student described how it feels: ‘As an Israeli and as a Jew on campus, I can’t let them say that “resistance” is justified or that Jews should be made to feel uncomfortable. I’m done being silent. This is how the Holocaust began.’

RAF has been involved in two writers’ festivals that have spontaneously combusted. Last year, the Bendigo Writers Festival imploded over a code of conduct and La Trobe University’s definition of antisemitism – neither of which found favour with the anti-Zionist crowd.

With operatic flourish, Adelaide Writers’ Week director Louise Adler resigned this week – RAF called it a ‘tragedy’ – warning that Adelaide risked becoming ‘Moscow-on-the-Torrens’ and that creatives should beware: ‘they are coming for you’.

Perhaps Adler has been too busy turning Adelaide into Ramallah-on-the-Torrens to notice that Pallywags have already come for more than 600 Jewish creatives whose personal details were leaked online. Many received death threats, threats against their children, abusive calls and emails accusing them of genocide; employers were pressured; businesses vandalised; one musician lost his job; and many now live in fear of lone-wolf attacks.

Publisher Morry Schwartz called for Adler’s resignation three years ago after she programmed eight Palestinian extremists. Among them was Susan Abulhawa, who labelled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a Nazi-promoting Zionist, and Mohammed El-Kurd, who described Hamas terrorists as ‘martyrs’ and declared at a London rally: ‘We must normalise massacres as the status quo.’

Adler has invited RAF to Adelaide Writers’ Week every year since she began programming it in 2023. Indeed, RAF has been a fixture of writers’ festivals nationwide, appearing at least a dozen times over the past decade.

According to Adler, RAF’s disinvitation ‘weakened freedom of speech’ and signalled a future where political pressure determines who may speak. That future is already here. Writers’ festivals have long been monopolised by green-left activists enforcing ideological conformity.

Adler warns darkly that religious leaders will be policed, universities monitored, the ABC scrutinised, and the arts starved. ‘Are you, or have you ever been, a critic of Israel?’ she asked – invoking Joe McCarthy. The irony is thick.

The arts was one of the few sectors that didn’t call for a royal commission into antisemitism. Given their culture, that’s hardly surprising. But a taxpayer-funded platform is a privilege, not a right. And it shouldn’t be extended to those who use it to normalise terrorism and threaten or denigrate law-abiding Australians.