Accepting a free speech award on Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s behalf, Louise Adler details a coordinated campaign of intimidation, censorship and vilification aimed at silencing Palestinian voices.

Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah has been awarded the Liberty Victoria’s Empty Chair award in recognition of her advocacy in the face of an unrelenting campaign to silence her.

Louise Adler

Unfortunately, Dr Abdel-Fattah can’t be here tonight and I have the honour of accepting this award on her behalf. It is not accidental that the mainstream media unfailingly forget to use Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s academic title; delegitimising her credentials as a scholar are par for the course. Tonight, I certainly don’t want to contribute to that denigration. But I hope with her approval that I can talk about Randa tonight as we are among friends, and I am speaking here tonight as her friend and colleague.

7 October was not the starting point for Randa’s efforts to highlight the plight of her people in the mainstream media, she has long been an advocate for justice and freedom for the people of Palestine. For many years she sought the opportunity, unsuccessfully, to argue against the abuses of Palestinians’ human rights. Randa has lost count of the rejection slips. But that’s not new. Efforts to block discussion of these issues have been evident for over 30 years. It would be illuminating, for example, to publish the very short list of those journalists who have NOT been duchessed with junkets to Israel. A succession of broadsheet editors will tell you, sotto voce and in retirement, about the haranguing phone calls they received if they published articles that deviated from the talking points provided by the Israel lobby. The lobby’s task, for decades, was to ensure that there was no coverage of the legitimate right to self-determination for the Palestinian people. However, 7 October and the war on Gaza made that impossible so the lobby has, to use a Trumpism, now resorted to “flooding the zone”.

To be clear, when I refer to the lobby, that includes the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Zionist Federation of Australia, the Jewish Board of Deputies, the Australia-Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, the Australian Jewish Association and the Australian Academic Alliance against Antisemitism.

Mohammed El Kurd writes in The Perfect Victim: “when it comes to Palestine the sacred laws of journalism are bendable – passive voice is king, omitting fact is standard, fabrication is permissible, journalists become stenographers, and reporters become state secretaries and the parrot police and military narratives. They tamper with evidence …The courageous industry boasts of speaking truth to power but is actually a bullhorn for the powerful.”

The ‘GET RANDA’ campaign is one, high profile, instance of this recent strategy, a strategy that involves ensuring Palestinians are silenced. Just think for a moment: when was the last time you read an opinion piece in the mainstream media from a Palestinian? We on the ’left’ speak of the silencing of Palestinians. Silencing is a shorthand we’ve come to use, but it domesticates what is in fact a far more radical situation: the lobby can’t abide Randa not because of what she says but because she speaks at all. A Palestinian who speaks – let alone one who speaks with Randa’s eloquence and mobilising force – represents a fundamental challenge to the Zionist project and its underlying logic of elimination.

It would take longer than my allotted time to catalogue in detail all the instances where Randa has been censored, vilified, cancelled, demonised and misrepresented. But let me briefly summarise the campaign of the past few years.

In January of last year, Randa was invited to take part in a QUT symposium on unifying anti-racism research and action. One might view this symposium, given all the rhetoric about social cohesion, as timely and important. But, instead, the lobby issued extensive correspondence to the university’s executive arguing that the symposium would be a forum for hate speech and antisemitism. As per the manual for lobbyists: the facts were mangled, the rhetoric inflammatory, the ever-reliable Murdoch press briefed to give oxygen to these baseless accusations, and the relevant ministers lobbied to investigate this so-called festival of hatred.

The lobby was able to parlay the campaign against this symposium into a demand that the Australian Research Council suspend Randa’s highly prestigious Future Fellowship at Macquarie University. A 10-month investigation eventually vindicated Randa. But you can see how vice chancellors are intimidated by the combined efforts of an interest group with a daily broadsheet at its disposal to whip up ever more defamatory disinformation. While Macquarie University was busy ‘investigating’, La Trobe University was also being pursued by the lobby.

La Trobe who had partnered with Bendigo Writers Festival were persuaded to issue a code of conduct for participants, two days prior to the festival, to avoid topics deemed “inflammatory, divisive and disrespectful”. Perhaps La Trobe might have been better off sponsoring something potentially less subversive than a gathering of writers; perhaps a festival of accountants? The writers invited to take part in La Trobe sponsored sessions were also obliged to comply with the university’s anti-racism plan which included a deeply flawed definition of antisemitism. Once again, the lobby campaigned to have Randa’s invitation cancelled, describing her as a “person who perpetually dehumanises people who hold Zionist views”. As a consequence over 50 writers boycotted the festival.

And then the festival that was to be Adelaide Writers Week 2026 imploded. We don’t need to rehearse the details of that debacle. Suffice to say that the inclusion of Randa in a one-hour conversation about her new novel, Discipline, prompted political interference by the South Australian premier, the cancellation of Randa’s invitation, the resignation of the Adelaide festival board and a walk out by over 200 writers. The reason to cancel Randa’s invitation was that it was deemed culturally insensitive so soon after Bondi. The implied link between Randa and Bondi was obvious and intentional, whatever milquetoast apologies were later proffered.

Fast forward to September and yet another invitation to appear at the Cambridge Literary Festival was withdrawn after the Jewish Chronicle, we can assume helpfully briefed by the Australian lobby and News Ltd, cranked up its campaign. Of course News Ltd stringers were on hand to continue the masthead’s fine tradition of misquoting Randa.

If anyone is in doubt about the campaign to silence Randa let me cite Ette Media who have done the hard work of compiling the statistics. Between 7 October 2023 and 9 April 2026 The Australian published 412 unique articles referring to Randa. This is more than Nine newspapers, ABC Online, The Guardian, the Canberra Times, Newcastle Herald and Bendigo Advertisernewspapers combined, which amounted to 399 articles.

Israel has allocated over US$730 million to public diplomacy this year. It is clearly not enough if the task is to silence voices like Randa’s. If the strategy is to foster outrage over Randa’s advocacy of the plight of the Palestinian people, the coverage has only served to promote both her latest novel which has garnered a raft of awards and highlight the injustice and inhumanity of the war on Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. A recent Pew Research poll has revealed that 79 per cent of Australians view Israel unfavourably. That is due almost entirely to the work of courageous people like Randa.

I feel obliged to acknowledge the apparent irony – that I am here, as they say “as a Jew”, on behalf of Randa, a Palestinian, once again expanding the Jewish presence and shrinking the space for Palestinian voices. Despite my reservations in this regard, I felt it was an honour to have the opportunity to speak about Randa tonight. The relentless fixation on Randa – as evidenced by the litany of cancellations and confected controversies I have just itemised is symptomatic of the lobby’s modus operandi: to intimidate, harass, bully their ideological enemies. More importantly though, it is testament to and evidence of Randa’s strength, moral clarity and the potency of her political intervention on behalf of the Palestinian people.

The daily morbid fascination by the importance and power of Randa’s voice.

The Liberty Victoria Empty Chair award is important because it recognises the work of Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah and honours her refusal to be silent. I will finish with her words: “all eyes on Palestine”.

This is an edited copy of Louise Adler’s speech at the Liberty Victoria’s Annual Dinner.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/11/silencing-dr-randa-abdel-fattah-was-never-just-about-randa/

PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….