Premier Peter Malinauskas has condemned Adelaide Festival Writers Week for hosting two authors accused of anti-Semitic hate speech, declaring he will personally boycott next month’s event.
But he has stopped short of using his authority to insist on changes to the taxpayer-subsidised event, saying instead that he wants organisers to reflect on the wisdom of their current program.
The Australian revealed on Thursday that Australia’s Ukrainian and Jewish communities are dismayed at the presence of Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa and Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd at Adelaide Writers Week.
Abulhawa is a fierce critic of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom she has described as “a depraved Zionist trying to ignite World War Three”.
She has written several tweets saying the war is Ukraine’s fault for trying to join NATO and has also tweeted declaring “DeNazify Ukraine”, the line also used by Moscow to defend the invasion.
“This man is no hero. He’s mad and far more dangerous than Putin,” Abulhawa wrote of Mr Zelensky on Twitter a month after Russia launched its illegal assaults.
El-Kurd has written scores of tweets that prompted the New York-based Anti-Defamation League and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry to write to Adelaide Festival organisers warning they are giving a platform to “unvarnished anti-Semitism”.
Read the article by David Penberthy in The Australian.