Remember how the Adelaide festival removed terror-supporting writer Randa Abdel-Fattah from its lineup citing concerns over “cultural sensitivity” – only to subsequently apologize to her and invite her to next year’s festival?
Now the Sydney Writers Festival has invited her to be a featured writer at two sessions.
“A festival like ours, which holds freedom of expression as a core value, is not going to be in the business of cancelling or censoring writers,” festival chief executive Brooke Webb said. “Readers can make up their own minds about what they would like to attend. We know that without writers, there is no festival.”
You know what else cancels a festival? A terror attack. Yet your featured speaker not only refused to condemn it – she celebrated it:
This follows Randa Abdel-Fattah’s invitation to the Newcastle Writers Festival earlier this month. For context, both Sydney and Newcastle are in New South Wales, the Australian state in which Bondi – the site of the Chanukah massacre – is located. Not that a terror supporter who has written that Zionists had “no claim to cultural safety” should have been invited to speak anywhere.
Both the Newcastle and Sydney Writers Festivals receive some funding from the NSW government. I call on the government to withhold funding from both – like at least one of the Sydney Writers Festival’s corporate sponsors:
Global accounting giant KPMG has distanced itself from the Sydney writers’ festival, requesting its name be removed from the event’s website where it was listed as a corporate partner.
The move follows the festival scheduling Palestinian Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah to speak at two sessions in this year’s event.
A KPMG spokesperson confirmed the change on Thursday, telling the Guardian in a statement: “We are the auditor of the company, which we do not define as a ‘partner’. This is now reflected on their website.”
Meanwhile, 7News Australia have a lot to answer for with their coverage of this:
It is bad enough they report she was uninvited from the Adelaide Writers Festival for her “pro-palestinian” views (with no mention of the real reason: her vile terror support and comments about Zionists). But watching this, you’d think she is some kind of progressive:
This isn’t about “freedom of expression.” No one is stopping anyone from expressing anything. It’s about who taxpayer-funded festivals choose to elevate – and who some in the media chooses to sanitize in the process.
