Remember how all those speakers boycotted this year’s Adelaide Writers Festival after antisemitic terror supporter Randa Abdel-Fattah was axed?
It turns out not all of them would have done so had they known the truth about her.
Kate Llewellyn is probably the only person alive to have attended every Adelaide Writers Festival, except the first.
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Llewellyn blames the former artistic director, Louise Adler, for the festival’s demise – it was cancelled after 180 writers withdrew, citing concerns about censorship – saying “It’s breathtaking”.
“She (Adler) was talking about the wickedness of censorship but she knew – she absolutely knew – that the same people (Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah, and some of her colleagues) had been trying to ban other people behind the scenes.
“She allowed people to think this was about free speech. She told them to stand up against censorship but she didn’t tell the whole story. I never understood her motivation, I don’t think I ever will.”
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Llewellyn says she was “concerned and puzzled” by Adler’s programming from the beginning.
“In her first program, in 2023, she had all these political speakers from one side, and it bothered me,” she says.
“Instead of writers standing up to talk about why they wrote the book and how they had the idea and what was the aim of it, it became a thing about politics.
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“It is warm, and beautiful, and she had it all. And she ruined the festival, and turned on her heel and walked out.
“One friend said to me ‘If I’d known the truth (about the efforts by Abdel-Fattah to cancel Jewish writer Thomas Friedman before she was herself cancelled), I would never have joined the boycott’. The hypocrisy – it’s shameful.
It’s reassuring to know that at least one writer would not have joined the boycott had they known Abdel-Fattah was a hypocrite working behind the scenes to silence others. But it would be far more reassuring to hear that none of them would have joined it had they known she was also an antisemitic terror supporter
Apparently, hypocrisy is a dealbreaker. Antisemitism and terror support? Less so. That uncomfortable hierarchy of outrage says far more about the boycott than its participants might like to admit.
