Louise Adler quits as Adelaide Writers’ Week boss in protest at anti-Israel author Randa Abdel-Fattah dropping

Louise Adler has quit as the director of Adelaide Writers’ Week after controversial academic Randa Abdel-Fattah was uninvited over a series of social media posts calling for the elimination of Israel, leading to an exodus of more than 50 writers.

Ms Adler, a Jewish woman who is critical of Israel, has revealed she was opposed to the board’s decision on Thursday last week to cancel Dr Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian-Muslim Macquarie University sociologist who had been scheduled to discuss her new novel Discipline.

“The Adelaide Festival’s board’s decision – despite my strongest opposition – to disinvite the Australian Palestinian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah from Adelaide writers’ week weakens freedom of speech and is the harbinger of a less free nation, where lobbying and political pressure determine who gets to speak and who doesn’t,” she said in a column for The Guardian Australia on Tuesday morning.

“I cannot be party to silencing writers so, with a heavy heart, I am resigning from my role as the director of the AWW.

“Writers and writing matters, even when they are presenting ideas that discomfort and challenge us.”

The Adelaide Festival board had justified its cancellation of Dr Abdel-Fattah on the grounds it wanted to be “culturally sensitive” in the wake of the December 14 Bondi massacre on the first day of the Jewish Hanukkah holiday.

But Ms Adler, a former chief executive of Melbourne University Press, likened that approach to a McCarthyist witch hunt, which saw 1950s US senator Joe McCarthy’s hold hearings grilling alleged communist bureaucrats during the Cold War.

“Now religious leaders are to be policed, universities monitored, the public broadcaster scrutinised and the arts starved,” she said.

“Are you or have you ever been a critic of Israel? Joe McCarthy would be cheering on the inheritors of his tactics.”

Ms Adler also took aim at Jewish community groups following the Bondi massacre, mocking their supporters as “stenographers in the media and a spineless political class”.

“The increasingly extreme and repressive efforts of pro-Israel lobbyists to stifle even the mildest criticism has had a chilling effect on free speech and democratic institutions,” she said.

The Adelaide Festival Corporation on Monday morning denied Ms Adler had resigned, after rumours had spread throughout the publishing industry that she had submitted her resignation.

“Louise Adler hasn’t resigned as director of Adelaide Writer’s Week,” a spokeswoman had told The Nightly.

By Monday night, more than 50 writers had pulled out of Adelaide Writers Week, scheduled for February 27 to March 15, with former New Zealand Labour prime minister Jacinda Ardern joining the likes of Peter Fitzsimons, a former Wallabies international who in 2019 called for rugby union fullback Israel Folau to be sacked for posting anti-gay social media posts based on Biblical passages.

Miles Franklin winners Michelle de Krester and Melissa Lucashenko and Marxist former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis have also withdrawn, along with former ABC Gruen panelist Jane Caro.

The writers have quit in droves to defend Dr Abdel-Fattah’s right to call for the destruction of Israel and declare Zionists don’t have a right to feel safe.

On October 9, 2023, she mocked moves to remember the 1200 victims of the Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel.

“They can light up their colonial buildings. But we know that popular global support is with Palestine and that the genocidal state of Israel has only the ruling elites by its side,” she said on X.

Six months later, on April 10, 2024, she said: “May we see next Eid in a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, whose Labor State Government funds the Adelaide Festival, last week revealed Dr Abdel-Fattah had lobbied the group in 2024 to cancel Jewish American pro-Israel writer Thomas Friedman over a column in The New York Times likening the Middle East to an Animal Kingdom.

While Friedman didn’t appear because of scheduling reasons, Dr Abdel-Fattah told The Guardian Australia she had objected to “Friedman’s views on socially and historically marginalised people who have been dehumanised and discriminated against by the use of such racist tropes”.