No, it was not.
Despite the brouhaha around Fattah’s dis-invitation, it is as well to point out first and foremost that she was not dropped because she was Arab, Muslim or a “Palestinian”(sic).
She was dis-invited because her presence promoted an ideological monoculture.
She was not dropped, despite her protestations to make capital of her part-Egyptian heritage, because she was “the only Palestinian” on the ticket, not because of who she was, but because of what she said. That she could be provided a prestigious platform to repeat things she said around 7 weeks after the ISIS-inspired massacre of Jews on the sands of Bondi, certainly didn’t help the optics.
So, what sort of things did pshe say and how did she score an invite under the Jewish directorship of Louise Adler, an avowed “anti-Zionist” in the first place?.
Well, in the days after October 7, as well as in Jan 2024, Fattah said she did not regard Hamas as a terror organisation, she had pride in what happened, she changed her facebook profile pic to an October 7 terrorist paraglider with the colours of the Palestinian flag, and she denied outright that Israeli women and girls had been raped or tha the men had been bastardised.
Also in 2024, after more Hamas Go-Pro footage increasingly revealed just how the Muslim terrorists murdered, raped, burned, looted, bastardised and beheaded 1,200 Jews aged 8 months to 85 years old and took 251 Jews hostage, babes and Holocaust survivors alike, into the tunnels of Gaza, Fattah stated in a Mondoweiss (surprise!) essay, “If you ask me about hope, there was a glimmer on October 7. It was palpable, real and exhilarating.” She then added, using the language of jihad/holy war, that “Palestinian” (sic) children killed in Israel’s early response, were “martyrs”.
Her 2025 New Year message to her followers called for “the end of Israel” and “the abolishment of the death cult of Zionism”, adding that Zionists had “no claim or right to cultural safety”. This after helping dox the personal conversations and information of 600 Jewish Australian creatives and academics, leading young children ostensibly on a “school excursion” in April 2024 with chants of “intifada” at Sydney University, successfully petitioning the 2024 Perth Festival’s Literature and Ideas program calling for the cancelling and removal of Jewish musician Deborah Conway over her support for Israel, and signing a letter in 2024 dis-inviting Jewish author and 3 time Pulitzer prize winner for the NYT, Tom Friedman, from Writers’ Week who was then cancelled.
There really is no need to add more, so the question remains how she was invited to speak in Adelaide, South Australia in the first place?
Under the directorship of self-described anti-Zionist Jewish director Louise Adler, who studied under antisemite Edward Said, the Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) morphed into a forum which boycotted all Israeli and Jewish writers and creatives. AWW was effectively turned into a politically and ideologically motivated blacklist.
Adler and AWW appear to have been motivated less by free speech or open debate than by protecting and amplifying particular political narratives.
And even if Adler and the AWW board would have liked the public to believe they were protecting “free speech” (because that evokes ‘integrity’), what they were actually hermetically cocooning was ideology and tribalism.
Adler burned AWW with her 2023 invite to documented antisemitic Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa who had described a Jewish-American civilian shot by terrorists while attending a family wedding in Israel as “human garbage” who did not deserve to be mourned……
Adler hijacked AWW and wedded it to the anti-Israel Free Palestine crusade that followed October 7, 2023.
That crusade led to persecuting Jewish members of its own fraternity who did not renounce their ethnic identity, ostracising them by cancelling music and theatre performances and excluding them from events.
AWW, basking in the glow of their self righteousness and egos, ended up victimising one of its most successful immigrant groups, the Jews.
And Federal Labor in Australia, with FM Penny Wong publicly chastising Israel locally and on the international stage, and changing Australia’s hitherto bipartisan policy on Palestine, effectively furthered the anti-Jewish climate of opinion that roiled Australia over 2½ years, and legitimised and even encouraged turning a blind eye to large, sometimes violent, weekly demonstrations detouring through Jewish suburbs to intimidate the locals.
For his part, however, what South Austraian Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas said was that he did “not support the inclusion of those who actively undermine the cultural safety of others, who celebrate the death of innocent civilians or those who dox other artists simply because of their faith or cultural background.”
And, unlike his Federal counterparts, what Malinauskas did in South Australia in supporting the dis-invitation of Abdel-Fatah to AWW 2025 (only after he was asked for his opinion) so soon after the ISIS inspired massacre on the sands of Bondi, was a last line defence of decency as a political leader who stayed true to his resolve to defend the greater social good.





