The collapse of Adelaide Writers’ Week is not a free-speech crisis.. No writer was censored. No one was silenced by the state.

What occurred was a programming decision, followed by an extraordinary display of hubris that ultimately destroyed a public cultural institution.

Randa Abdel-Fattah was not banned from publishing or speaking.

She was simply uninvited from a writers’ festival after making comments about Israel that many reasonably regarded as antisemitic and beyond acceptable bounds.

Writers’ festivals make such judgements constantly. To pretend otherwise is to drain the word “censorship” of meaning.

She had previously demanded that a Jewish writer be banned from the festival.

The real failure came after that decision.

At that point, Abdel-Fattah had a choice. She could have responded with humility and proportion, acknowledging that her language had caused offence, accepting that festivals must draw lines, and urging other writers not to withdraw.

She could have said that Adelaide Writers’ Week mattered more than any individual participant.

That would have been the stoic response: disagreement without self-dramatization.
Instead, she chose escalation.

Lawyers were engaged. Apologies were rejected. The decision was reframed not as an editorial judgement but as a personal and collective injury.

Abdel-Fattah claimed she was being excluded from the “national discourse”, as though a festival invitation were a civic right rather than a discretionary decision.

That response revealed a striking lack of self-awareness.

No writer, however prominent, is indispensable.

To behave as though a festival must either host you or deserve to collapse is not an assertion of principle.

It is an assertion of moral supremacy.

The consequences were predictable and disastrous.

More than 180 writers withdrew. The director resigned. The board dissolved itself. Adelaide Writers’ Week, Australia’s largest free literary festival, was cancelled altogether.

Thousands of readers and writers lost a public cultural event not because of censorship, but because one person could not accept being told no.

All because writers acted like a herd, lacking courage to stand up against the trend and fearful that they would be cancelled themselves by their tribe.

Such is the nature of identity politics today - shameful.

What is most telling is the absence of responsibility. At no point did Abdel-Fattah acknowledge that her own words might reasonably have led to disinvitation.

At no point did she urge restraint or de-escalation. On the contrary, the controversy was personalised, moralised and amplified, ensuring maximum damage to the institution that had dared to draw a line.

This is not courage. It is hubris.


It reflects a worldview in which identity confers moral entitlement and disagreement becomes persecution.

Within that framework, humility is impossible. To accept a decision is to concede legitimacy to one’s critics.

Everything must therefore be escalated until institutions break.

And break they did.

The irony is stark. A writer who insists that words matter refuses to take responsibility for her own.

A movement that claims to oppose cancellation engineers the cancellation of an entire festival.

A protest against exclusion ends by excluding the public.

Adelaide Writers’ Week did not fall because free speech was threatened.

It fell because one individual, and those who followed her lead, believed she was bigger than the institution.

Declarations of writers’ voluntary withdrawals. Declarations of support for free speech. Declarations of support for the cancelled writer, herself a party to various cancellation demands, including the removal of a Jewish American writer Thomas Friedman from this same festival in 2024.

It is also widely documented that Abdel-Fattah actively participated in the 2024 doxxing of more than 600 Jewish creatives and academics from a WhatsApp support group that I founded in the wake of October 7, 2023 to help one another deal with the antisemitism we were facing professionally.

She was among those who publicly shared the leaked chat and falsely framed us – predominantly progressive Jews, often advocates for a two-state solution – as a sinister cabal of fascists. Nothing could be further from the truth.

She also gained notoriety for her brazen call to make cultural spaces unsafe for “Zionists”, meaning to purge from public discourse any Jews who feel a connection to their ancestral homeland and support its right to exist.

freediver wrote on Jan 16^th, 2026 at 12:25pm:

She was 'disinvited'. 'The board of the Adelaide Festival last week said Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, a vocal critic of Israel, had been removed from its Writers' Week lineup'.
She was in then she was out. That's active removal.

She was simply uninvited from a writers’ festival after making comments about Israel that many reasonably regarded as antisemitic and beyond acceptable bounds.

Writers’ festivals make such judgements constantly..