STEPHEN JOHNSON: Anti-Israel academic Randa Abdel-Fattah example of university double standards

Since the Bondi massacre, NSW Premier Chris Minns and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese have made a flurry of announcements promising to crack down on hate preachers of the radical Islamist prayer centre variety.

Australia’s worst-ever terrorist attack and a spate of anti-Semitic incidents have finally sparked State Government bans on street protests and hate speech that incites contempt for a particular group of people.

But when it comes to hate preachers of the academic kind, there are double standards when it comes to free speech.

University lecturers in a tenured position have licence to express inflammatory personal opinions outside of work, provided the trendy left and the Greens agree with them.

Apparently, it’s okay to describe the existence of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, as akin to genocide during a time when synagogues and Jewish schools need 24-hour security.

It’s also fashionable for those with a title to use their position to mock the idea of lighting up the Opera House to commemorate the worst terrorist attack against Jews since the Holocaust.

But if an academic, who’s also a published author, expresses concerns about immigration or multiculturalism, well, that is a pathway to being cancelled.

Take the case of two Macquarie University academics.

Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah has continued to specialise in “Islamophobia, critical race theory and Arab and Muslim social movements particularly Palestine”.

The former lawyer turned sociologist at Macquarie University describes herself “as one of Australia’s most prominent Palestinian advocates”.

She was uninvited from Adelaide Writers’ Week last week over her past social media posts on Israel — sparking an exodus of more than 50 so-called progressive writers.

This only made her a free speech martyr, more so following the cancellation of the festival on Tuesday afternoon just six hours after Louise Adler quit as Writers’ Week director in sympathy.

Dr Abdel-Fattah certainly has a band of fashionable left-wing supporters in the arts — just like fill-in radio mornings presenter Antoinette Lattouf after she was unlawfully sacked by the ABC in December 2023 for sharing a social media post accusing Israel of using starvation as a tool of war in Gaza.

The Macquarie University future fellow’s progressive cheer squad don’t seem to have an issue with Dr Abdel-Fattah’s trivialisation of the October 7 terrorist attack, two days after more than 1200 Israelis were murdered in 2023.

“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,” Dr Abdel-Fattah sneered on X.

This was also the day Islamists waving Palestinian flags marched on the Sydney Opera House shouting “where’s the Jews?” as the world famous Jorn Utzon-designed landmark was lit up in the colours of the Israeli flag.

Other posts in 2024 have called for the destruction of Israel with that cliched line, “May we see next Eid in a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

She has also declared the existence of Israel as akin to murder.

“For Palestinians, Zionism is a genocidal slaughterhouse. A child killing, amputating, burning, bombing, raping, torturing, land thieving and destroying machine,” she tweeted in December 2024.

Not that Macquarie University seems too worried, despite declaring via a spokesman: “We stand against anti-Semitism and all forms of racism, discrimination and violence” before adding, “The university does not comment on individual staff matters.”

Greens senators, like deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi, were regularly accusing Israel of genocide, in street protests and in Parliament, in the two years leading up to the Bondi killings.

Expressing views that are offensive to the Jewish community is apparently okay, as that’s intellectually so couture.

But not if it’s another racial group.

Macquarie University, which now employs Dr Abdel-Fattah, two decades ago stopped Canadian-born constitutional law lecturer Professor Andrew Fraser from teaching after he wrote to his local Parramatta Sun newspaper arguing African immigration would put Australia on the path “to become a colony of the Third World”.

“Experience practically everywhere in the world tells us that an expanding black population is a sure-fire recipe for increases in crime, violence and a wide range of social problems,” he said in the July 2005 letter.

“The fact is that ordinary Australians are being pushed down the path to national suicide by their own political, religious and economic elites.”

That was enough for Macquarie University’s then vice chancellor Di Yerbury to cancel all his classes until further notice, after he refused to retire early. An apology was issued to the Sudanese community by the university’s top administrator.

Professor Fraser’s comments about African crime were really little different to former home affairs minister Peter Dutton — a future candidate for prime minister — in January 2018 declaring on 2GB that Melburnians are “scared to go out to restaurants” because of “African gang violence”.

Both Dr Abdel-Fattah and Professor Fraser have expressed reprehensible views, stigmatising specific ethnic groups.

But only one of them was cancelled from making a living because free speech is really about what’s acceptable to politically progressive zeitgeist that dominates culture, publishing and academia.

The authors quitting Adelaide Writers’ Week in solidarity with Dr Abdel-Fattah are looking more like members of a political party faction at a conference, doing as they are told.