I should have known better.
Adelaide Festival director Louise Adler was never going to voluntarily remove antisemites Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd from the festival line-up, despite their antisemitic and terror-supporting tweets and statements.
And while she has positioned this as a free speech issue:
“Writers festivals are places for us to gather together to share ideas and discuss ideas that might be upsetting, might be provocative, might be disturbing, but in the context of civil and respectful debate, so I’m really sorry they’re not going to be here because I think their voices would have been a valuable contribution.”
It seems to me the main reason she has defended her decision to invite them and keep them, despite their vile views, is simple: she agrees with them for the most part.
After I have repeatedly tweeted to Adler examples of their blatantly antisemitic tweets – including those playing into the antisemitic trope of powerful Jews controlling the media, as well as those comparing us to the Nazis in the Holocaust (which I thought Adler might find especially offensive given her background as a daughter of Holocaust survivors) – Adler has not responded.
Instead, she has managed to find the time to retweet a vile Ha’aretz piece also comparing us to the Nazis and praising terrorists:
Sometimes it’s also hard to sympathize with the soldiers. You cannot sympathize with the storm trooper, even if he’s one of your people. The common nationality, heritage, language and culture lose their meaning in view of some of their actions. That uniform and that army you worshiped in your childhood have been utterly stained. Even the acts of courage you’ve been told about as a child are no longer theirs. The Palestinian fighters facing them are braver and more willing to sacrifice than they are. Anyone prepared to die under the Israeli “pressure cooker,” to face more barbaric behavior, is a brave person ready to sacrifice everything. How can you not admire it, even when it’s directed against you and your people?
The right attacked those who organized donations for the victims of the Hawara pogrom. The Zionist left, being the Zionist left, immediately sealed the noble gesture with a despicable attempt to have Shin Bet pensioners look into the “security record” of those receiving the donations. Whatever. The act remains noble, despite the Zionist-left grotesquerie.
How can you oppose donations to survivors of a pogrom carried out by your own people?
and tweet another article that mentions, inter alia, the power of the “Zionist lobby”:
Some people think it’s fanciful to claim that Palestinian speech in this country is policed. Others think it’s fanciful to talk about the influence of a Zionist lobby here, even though it has been anything but silent recently and its actions over decades are widely documented. You might even think that publication of this piece somehow disproves such notions. You’d be wrong. It’s not enough to hear from one Palestinian voice.
By the way, this article falsely implies El-Kurd has just lashed out with some angry tweets. His antisemitism and terror support goes way beyond Twitter.
But back to Adler, who also tweeted a condemnation of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s idiotic and morally repugnant call to erase Huwara – a call condemned by the vast majority of Israelis and of course not supported by the government:
Yet no condemnation from her of the murder of the two Jewish youth that triggered Smotrich’s angry response.
In the words, I do not think Louise Adler invited Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd in spite of their vile views. She invited Abulhawa and El-Kurd because of them.
