Randa Abdel-Fattah: The Untouchable Extremist. By Henry Ergas in The Australian.
On October 7, 2023, as the gates of hell opened for some, the gates of fame opened for others. And for no one more so than Randa Abdel-Fattah.
An obscure academic at Macquarie University, whose intellectual output had not even caused a ripple in radical sociology’s crowded waters, she was known, if at all, for her children’s books.
Her activist schtick worked because our media and ruling class lap it up — because they think it increases their status as extra virtuous people:
Turning catastrophe into opportunity, she vaulted into public visibility by adopting a style of political performance in which provocation displaced argument and outrage replaced judgment.
The effect was immediate. What began as a series of shock interventions rapidly coalesced into a recognisable persona, one rewarded by constant amplification. Invitations followed, platforms multiplied, and outrage became not merely a tactic but a credential. In a time that values performative antagonism over measured reflection, she proved an ideal fit: reliably newsworthy, quotable, and always available.
Instant notoriety thus hardened into an expanding public presence — one that made her, for the first time, a star and a fixture on the progressive elite’s indignation-driven cultural scene. Nowhere was that clearer than in the uproar surrounding the Adelaide Writers Festival, when many seemingly decent people accepted her assertion that she was the carefully selected victim of a smear campaign — a campaign Louise Adler characterised last week as part of an incipient wave of McCarthyism. …
How does she do it?
At the heart of that style, which has now become her trademark, lies its incessant tempo. The sheer pace and intensity of Abdel-Fattah’s outpourings continuously stoke her supporters’ rage while leaving opponents flat-footed and disoriented.
The need to remain at the front of the pack leads her to constantly escalate the vehemence of her rhetorical aggression, generating torrents of increasingly incendiary claims that gain traction not by withstanding scrutiny, but by permanently outrunning it. Remarkably for an academic — more remarkably still for one lavishly funded by taxpayers — her aim is not to inform, much less to debate.
“Dealing with a Zio,” declares a social-media post she retweeted, is pointless, “as they will bring up questions instead of admitting you are right”.
What Israel’s defenders deserve, she insists, is not the opportunity to question and rebut their critics; it is only to “never know a second’s peace in (their) sadistic, miserable lives”.
Even respected scholars whose views differ from hers and those of her supporters “are not our peers, not our acquaintances”. Rather than dialogue, their proper fate is erasure, to be delivered in what she chillingly calls “the time of reckoning”. …
Antisemitic? Anti-white? And then some:
Her accusations unerringly echo the oldest antisemitic tropes. The principle underpinning their selection is simple. Anything Hamas, its sympathisers or fellow travellers assert, however outlandish, is treated as self-evidently true; anything Israel says is dismissed as self-evidently false, without the slightest need for further inquiry. …
“The Zionists”, she repeatedly tells her followers, “harvest organs” from Palestinians, “burn civilians alive as they laugh on camera”, “annihilate children in viral TikTok videos”, “torch homes for fun”, free prisoners only to “then execute them”, and “have people raped violently by animals”.
It is not Hamas and Hezbollah – who fight for “the best of humanity” – but the Israelis, “the worst of humanity”, who are trapped in a “psychopathic death cult ritual”. As for Israel itself, a “genocidal slaughterhouse” that is “dripping in Arab blood”, it stands condemned as a “cursed stain on humanity”. …
If the “Zionist lobby” gains any traction on our shores, it is only because this country — dismissed by her as “so-called Australia” — is “a racialised colony where Palestinians are evicted from the category of human”. Permeated by a “white supremacist logic” that slots Palestinians into the “bestial, savage, predatory” tropes used against “brown and black communities in service of Empire”, the self-proclaimed “progressives” who govern Australia amount to little more than a despicable “Diet Coke (version) of the far right”.
Their refusal to entirely sever our ties with Israel follows directly from that lineage: both states, she insists, are “built on a shared history of frontier violence” and remain committed to “the ongoing maintenance of white supremacy in the Global South”. …
“To stand with Palestine in Australia,” she writes, “is to confront the foundational lie of the Australian state: that this is a land of the ‘fair go’ rather than a site of ongoing racialised dispossession.” Only through that strategy of subversion and resistance will it be possible to begin “the dismantling of the white supremacist structures that govern every aspect of life in this colony, from the classroom to the courtroom”.
Sure Randa. And those are the stories the Australian ruling class rewards her for telling. No wonder they want to bring in more Muslims, especially from Gaza. Everyone, please admire the Australian ruling class, so virtuous, and secretly vying with Sweden for the title of “humanitarian superpower.” (Except the Swedish New Class have dropped that honor in horror, as they now have to live with the consequences of their vanity.)
It’s so unfair, she cries, all the way to the bank. By Natasha Bita in The Australian.
Anti-Israel activist Randa Abdel-Fattah has accused Australia of “white supremacy’’, as her employer warned it will alert police if any staff or students contravene new hate speech laws.
The provocative academic and author will speak at a rebel “free speech’’ writers festival in Adelaide next month and tour literary salons in Sydney, after her temporary axing from the Adelaide Writers Week program triggered a boycott from 180 authors, the dissolution of the festival’s board, the resignation of director Louise Adler, and ultimately the festival’s cancellation.
She has now announced she will take a break from social media, after lashing out at a front-page article in The Australian on Tuesday detailing her anti-Zionist diatribes on X and Instagram.
“I won’t dignify this hit piece with a response,’’ she posted on her Instagram account. …
“I’m accused of being an extremist, the worst of the worst, an enabler of terrorism and Bondi, for daring to accuse Australia of white supremacy.
“This is the insecurity of colonisers and oppressors everywhere in the fact of the material evidence of white supremacy.
“They weaponize our righteous anger to claim that we are terrorists, anti-Semites, extremists, savages, or whatever the disparaging term of the day happens to work.’’ …
Dr Abdel-Fattah insists her rants against Zionists are not racist or antisemitic because Zionists are not a racial or religious group – despite most Jews identifying as Zionists in support of their post-Holocaust homeland of Israel. …
The taxpayer-funded academic … has an $889,000 Australian Research Council grant to study Arab and Muslim social movements in Australia since the 1970s. …
Australia’s biggest free literary festival, Adelaide Writers Week, collapsed under a mass author boycott after it “uninvited” the academic last month, stating her attendance would not be “culturally sensitive” so soon after the Bondi Beach massacre.
Beautiful. So much that’s wrong with modern Australia illustrated in one episode.
