Gnads wrote on Jan 14
th, 2026 at 11:33am:
Frank wrote on Jan 13
th, 2026 at 9:52pm:
greggerypeccary wrote on Jan 13
th, 2026 at 7:36pm:
It was on The 7:30 Report on ABC tonight.
I've known
Pete for more than 15 years, and he's a really,
really decent bloke, but I'm not with him on this one.
He should have kept out of it.
He did, creep.
It was really the festival director, Louise Adler who insisted on including the pro Hamas activist woman in the line up.
The festival board said it would not be “culturally sensitive” to include her voice so soon after the tragedy, citing concerns about community tensions. Abdel-Fattah decried the decision as racism and censorship.
The **cking cheek of her.
In 2024 Abdel Fattah herself called for on the same festival to rescind the invitation of Jewish New York Times columnist. Yes - it's one of these Islamists biggest faults - hypocrisy.
And Abdel-Fattah is a terrorist supporting anti-Semite/racist herself.
Muslims and lefties meet at that junction: hypocrisy. You cannot be either wighout being a comlkete and utter hypocrite and arse. So they invariably intertwine their hypocrisies.
Former Adelaide Writers Week director Louise Adler has been accused of hypocrisy
over free speech after former Adelaide Festival board member and businessman Tony Berg claimed she had in 2024 issued an ultimatum over the cancellation of Jewish Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman.
In a letter sent to The Australian, Mr Berg claimed the direction Ms Adler was taking the festival was the reason he stood down from the board last year.
“I am now utterly astonished at Louise Adler’s statement in her resignation letter in support of free speech. I am likewise surprised by Randa Abdel-Fattah‘s invocation of free speech and her outrage at being ‘cancelled’,” he wrote.
“They both exhibit hypocrisy in defending free speech for some, when I observed them both to stridently oppose free speech during my time on the Board.”
Mr Berg said that at a board meeting in February 2024, Ms Adler “led a demand to the Board” to rescind an invitation to Mr Friedman to Adelaide Writers Week.
After (New York Times journalist) Tom Friedman was invited to speak, Randa Abdel-Fattah (the writer disinvited from the his year’s AWW, which ultimately triggered its collapse) had led a group of academics demanding that Tom Friedman be deplatformed. Then Louise Adler, Ruth MacKenzie and Kath Mainland put an ultimatum to the Board that they would resign if it did not endorse their recommendation to disinvite Friedman
“I regard it to be utterly hypocritical of Randa Abdel-Fatah and Louise Adler to now accuse the Board of repressing freedom of speech when they have both actively sought to deny it to Tom Friedman. I understand why a number of authors have turned down invitations to come to AWW 2026 on freedom of speech grounds,” he said. “But they should understand that the people, with whom they are standing, in fact, have actively undermined freedom of speech in the past.
If Albanese gets his "hate speech" Bill up in Parliament these writers won't have to worry about "free speech" because it will be dead & buried along with their little festival.