{"id":238766,"date":"2026-01-15T04:30:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T04:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/238766\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T04:30:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T04:30:11","slug":"adelaide-festival-apologises-to-randa-abdel-fattah-and-invites-her-to-participate-in-2027-writers-week-adelaide-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/238766\/","title":{"rendered":"Adelaide festival apologises to Randa Abdel-Fattah and invites her to participate in 2027 writers\u2019 week | Adelaide festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new Adelaide festival<\/a> board has issued a public apology to Palestinian Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, and has promised she will be invited to Adelaide writers\u2019 week in 2027.<\/p>\n

Abdel-Fattah immediately accepted the apology, posting on Instagram that it was a vindication \u201cof our collective solidarity and mobilisation against anti-Palestinian racism, bullying and censorship\u201d.<\/p>\n

She said she was still considering the board\u2019s invitation to appear at the 2027 event.<\/p>\n

In a statement on Thursday morning, Adelaide Festival Corporation acknowledged they had previously said they would exclude Abdel-Fattah from this year\u2019s event \u201cbecause it would be culturally insensitive to allow her to participate. We retract that statement.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe apologise to Dr Abdel-Fattah unreservedly for the harm the Adelaide Festival Corporation has caused her. Intellectual and artistic freedom is a powerful human right. Our goal is to uphold it, and in this instance Adelaide Festival Corporation fell well short.\u201d<\/p>\n

The apology comes after Tony Berg, a former board member and the former managing director of Macquarie Bank, issued a statement to the media accusing the former Adelaide writers\u2019 week director Louise Adler and Abdel-Fattah of a \u201cselective\u201d and \u201cutterly hypocritical\u201d devotion to free speech.<\/p>\n

Adler resigned on Tuesday over Abdel-Fattah\u2019s cancellation, and later that day, the Adelaide Festival Corporation announced the cancellation of the 2026 writers\u2019 festival.<\/p>\n

But in the statement circulated by Berg this week, the Sydney businessman said he was \u201cutterly astonished\u201d at Adler\u2019s claim she had resigned in the name of free speech, and at Abdel-Fattah\u2019s \u201coutrage at being \u2018cancelled\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey both exhibit hypocrisy in defending free speech for some, when I observed them both to stridently oppose free speech during my time on the board,\u201d he said, referring to the 2024 incident when controversial New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was scheduled to appear but did not do so.<\/p>\n

Ten academics, including Abdel-Fattah, had written to the festival board on 6 February 2024, requesting it rescind the invitation to Friedman, who had published a controversial column days earlier, which compared the Middle East conflict to the animal kingdom.<\/p>\n

The festival board responded three days later in writing, telling the lobbying academics that requesting the board to cancel an artist or writer was \u201cextremely serious\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have an international reputation for supporting artistic freedom of expression,\u201d the letter said, signed by the board\u2019s chair, Tracey Whiting.<\/p>\n

\u201cThomas L Friedman was programmed to contribute online from New York. However, I have been advised that due to last-minute scheduling issues, he is no longer participating in this year\u2019s program.\u201d<\/p>\n

Berg said: \u201cAdler led a demand to the board to retract an invitation to Tom Friedman to participate in the 2024 Adelaide Writers Week.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter Tom Friedman was invited to speak, Randa Abdel-Fattah had led a group of academics demanding that Tom Friedman be deplatformed. Then Louise Adler, Ruth MacKenzie and Kath Mainland put an ultimatum to the Board that they would resign if it did not endorse their recommendation to disinvite Friedman. In the face of that threat, the board felt it had no alternative but to allow withdraw [sic] the invitation to Friedman.\u201d<\/p>\n

Berg said he understood why a number of authors [more than 170] had turned down invitations to come to AWW 2026 on freedom of speech grounds.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut they should understand that the people with whom they are standing, in fact, have actively undermined freedom of speech in the past,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnlike Adler and Abdel-Fattah, I support free speech, not on a selective basis but with a range of views presented in respectful dialogue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adler responded to Berg\u2019s allegations by accusing the former board member of breaching board confidentiality.<\/p>\n

\u201cI consider discussions of the board table to be confidential,\u201d she said in a prepared statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m rather surprised that a former CEO of Macquarie Bank has breached those confidences. It\u2019s indicative of the way the former board operated, and I believe will make for a rich case study for future management students.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abdel-Fattah disputed Berg\u2019s claims that she, along with Adler, led the charge to cancel Friedman.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was one of 10 Indigenous and academics of colour who wrote a researched letter with references and footnotes about the harm of racial tropes,\u201d she said in a statement to the Guardian.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is missing in this is the question of power. We write letters on Google Docs to boards. The people who want to cancel us have premiers intervening.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adelaide festival has been approached for comment.<\/p>\n

Abdel-Fattah announced on Wednesday she would be pursuing defamation action against South Australian premier Peter Malinauskas<\/a> over comments he made earlier this week.<\/p>\n

Abdel-Fattah said she would continue her defamation proceedings against Malinauskas on Thursday.<\/p>\n

Since last Thursday, the South Australian premier has consistently denied any direct interference, insisting the board acted independently.<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever, when asked for my opinion I was happy to make it clear that the state government did not support the inclusion of Dr Abdel-Fattah on the Adelaide writers\u2019 week program,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Greens arts spokesperson, Senator Hanson Young, said the premier also had to apologise.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeter Malinauskas must also now apologise to Randa Abdel-Fattah, Louise Adler and the people of South Australia,\u201d she said in a statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new Adelaide festival board has issued a public apology to Palestinian Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, and has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-238766","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}