Curbing the freedom of writers will not advance human rights

Today’s blog post is a little different to my usual posts because I am writing it as a writer rather than as an economist. I write tens of thousands of words every year and have done so for many years. People have asked me whether I enjoy spending my time in that way, given that it would seem to be quite a discipline. It is. But it is also my freedom. My freedom to express an alternative viewpoint. My freedom to publish the results of my research, framed in my own particular way. Many people hate what I write and I get a lot of hate E-mails telling me that. Anytime I mention Palestine, the hate mail floods in. I am told to delete the posts and/or die. Anytime I criticise the US, the hate comes in. I am surprised, frankly, that people have that much time on their hands, and, moreover, think that I will somehow crumple in a heap when accused of being an anti-Semite, when all I have ever done in that space, is to criticise the indecent, genocidal and illegal policies and actions of the Israeli government acting out their Zionist ideology. There is zero anti-Semite intention in that despite the way the current debate has successfully conflated the two. From one perspective, I have known ‘cancel culture’ all my career. The dominant and destructive Groupthink in my profession has always tried to sideline my point of view. But I sense at this period of history that we are in a time where authoritarian viewpoints are once again becoming dominant in the wider society and as a writer I see the danger in that for individuals and our posterity.

Background

Readers from abroad might not know of the current controversy in Australia, where an Australian university academic and author – Randa Abdel Fattah – who has some Palestinian heritage, had her invitation to speak at the (formerly) prestigious Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) revoked after lobbying from powerful Zionist forces to have her banned.

The AWW is part of the leading arts and music festival in Australia and has been held in high regard by people in those communities both here and abroad.

Adelaide has always held itself out as a progressive city and society.

Last week (January 8, 2026), the governing board rescinded the invitation of Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah to participate in this year’s AWW.

The reason?

It is hard to fathom because the Board only released the barest of statements.

The – Adelaide Festival Board Statement (January 8, 2026) – said by way of reasoning for the decision that:

As an organisation and as people, we have been shocked and saddened by the tragic events at Bondi. We have been further saddened by the national grief and the significant heightening of both community tensions and the community debate …

… we have today advised scheduled writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah that the Board has formed the judgment that we do not wish to proceed with her scheduled appearance at next month’s Writers’ Week.

Whilst we do not suggest in any way that Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s or her writings have any connection with the tragedy at Bondi, given her past statements we have formed the view that it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time so soon after Bondi.

What are those ‘statements’?

Google’s AI Overview told me they include, for example:

1. 2024 Twitter post – “The goal is decolonisation and the end of this murderous Zionist colony.”

2. Undated statement online – “If you are a Zionist, you have no claim or right to cultural safety” and that it is her “duty as somebody who fights all forms of oppression and violence to deny you a safe space to espouse your Zionist racist ideology”.”

There were some other similar statements.

She has also stated she condemned the murder of innocent Jews at Bondi Beach recently.

Whether one agrees with her construction of the Zionist project is one thing and this post is not about the right or wrong position on that issue.

The point of this post, is that in a free world, a writer should be able to construct the reality they see in whatever way they want even if someone else might disagree with that construction.

Writing is about stylising ideas and imagery so that the reader can use their imagination to construct their own impressions.

I realise in literary theory that there is a huge debate about who should have the responsibility of constructing what the narrative means – the reality of that narrative.

The division of responsibility also varies across different styles of writing.

In my writing, the author is primarily responsible for the construction because of the technical nature of the material.

I am trying to educate the readership on matters that are difficult and layered.

Of course, all my subjective biases come out as they should.

My freedom.

I can, of course, understand why some people would find her statements about Zionism difficult.

And the Zionist lobby in Australia, like everywhere, is very powerful and has somehow persuaded government, the media and organisations like the Adelaide Writers’ Festival, that that difficulty crosses the line of decency and anyone expressing such views should be silenced.

They go further than that and demand prosecutions and governments seem compliant given the spate of legislation that is now emerging to restrict freedoms in Australia.

However, in all of this, somehow killing at least 72 thousand mostly innocent Palestinians in Gaza and destroying their houses and civic spaces doesn’t cross the line of decency (Casualties of the Gaza War).

The ‘Lobby’ has demanded that expressing those views about what has been happening in the Middle East are not to be publicly allowed.

There is one version of events and no other should be heard.

The AWW Board’s construction that allowing Dr Fattah to speak would be “culturally insensitive” is just another way of saying that censorship is permissible if one powerful group doesn’t like the message.

The immediate result?

Predictably, many authors who value their freedom to write what they want decided to boycott the event.

There is even a Wiki page – Adelaide Writers’ Week boycott – now documenting this controversy.

As the days passed, the boycotts grew and some members of the governing board resigned.

Politicians were questioned about their involvement and squirmed when they tried to deny they had some influence.

Of course they did.

And on Tuesday morning, the Director of the AWW – Louise Adler – also resigned.

Ms Adler is a well regarded publisher (previously CEO of Melbourne University Press) and comes from a Jewish (holocaust) background.

She is associated with the “Jewish Council of Australia, a community organisation representing non-Zionist Australian Jews supporting human rights for Palestinians.”

She had stayed quiet in the last week but, in announcing her retirement, wrote an excellent rationale in the UK Guardian for her decision to quit – I cannot be party to silencing writers, which is why I am resigning as director of Adelaide writers’ week (January 13, 2016).

And soon after on Tuesday (January 13, 2026), the governing board of the AWW announced it had cancelled the 2026 AWW.

They had to do that because “more than 180 writers have withdrawn” from the event and the managing board has all but collapsed.

And the credibility of the AWW was in tatters.

Reds under the bed

I was born in the 1950s during the so-called second – Red Scare – which was characterised by the pogroms that American senator Joseph McCarthy inflicted on many innocent Americans – many in the Arts – who were alleged to be Communist spies and a threat to national security.

It was also an attack on those who weren’t sufficiently ‘religious’ for the Right-wing zealots like McCarthy as well as lingering resentment that somehow the New Deal that had attenuated the impacts of the Great Depression for many disadvantaged Americans was a leftist plot.

One recalls the ludicrous raid on the Baltimore warehouse in 1930 (during the first ‘Red Scare’), where anticommunist officials were told there were secret Soviet documents stored there by Communist spies in America.

The raid yielded some crates of lettuce.

In Australia, I recall as a boy hearing politicians talking on the radio about ‘reds under the beds’.

Prior to my existence, the conservative Australian government introduced the – Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950 – which sought to ban the Communist Party in Australia.

The Act empowered the Governor-General “to declare a person or body (such as a trade union) to be communist and a threat to national security.”

Such a declaration would banned the person from working in the government sector or in other ‘strategic sectors’.

The legislation was challenged in the High Court and on March 9, 1951, the Act was ruled by the Court “to be unconstitutional and invalid; ruling that it was beyond the power of the Parliament to suppress an organisation in a time of peace.”

The governments response was to try to change the Constitution to give them the power to ban and oppress ‘Communists’ via the – 1951 Australian Communist Party ban referendum (held September 22, 1951).

The referendum failed, but only just.

But the campaign was incredibly lurid and divisive and attacks on the freedoms of citizens deemed to be commies continued.

Many careers were destroyed by the paranoia and attacks by the anticommunists.

The Australian Labor Party, the political arm of the trade unions, was split by the campaign, with the anticommunist Roman Catholics forming a new party the Democratic Labour Party.

This split the working class vote and allowed the conservatives to rule for many years unchallenged.

This graphic was a handbill published by the YES case during the Referendum campaign – the arrows from Asia are obvious.

The campaign was really about the autocratic inclinations of the conservative party under the dominant control of the Prime Minister Menzies.

His intention was to ban, imprison and generally harass any political opponents.

There were also ‘religious’ aspects.

In his 1951 election campaign launch – Election Speech – the PM said:

… Communism is a materialistic doctrine, void of spiritual content. It is not only anti-Christian, but is opposed to all those nobler aspirations which spring from the religious faith of decent people. True, Communism itself has been called, by some, a religion. But it is a religion of hatred; it derives from the darkest recesses of the human mind; it has nothing in common with the Christian gospel of love and brotherhood. If it had, it could not preach the class war or use envy and malice as its characteristic weapons.

As part of this anticommunist zealotry, citizens were assaulted by politicians and lobby groups with the so-called – Domino theory – which invoked the imagery of all the South East nations between China and Australia toppling like dominoes as the evil reds invaded and finally came to our borders.

When asked to comment on a question about “the strategic importance of Indochina to the free world?”, the US President at the time Dwight D. Eisenhower told the media at – The President’s News Conference (April 7, 1954) – that:

Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the “falling domino” principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences …

… the geographical position achieved thereby does many things. It turns the so-called island defensive chain of Japan, Formosa, of the Philippines and to the southward; it moves in to threaten Australia and New Zealand.

This ridiculous theory – given China didn’t have a credible navy at the time to launch any invasion, even of the – Paracel Islands – much less anywhere else – was used to justify illegal military interventions by the US and its allies across the world, but particularly in Indochina.

The illegal Vietnam War, which thankfully the West lost, was an example of this ‘domino’ paranoia.

Trump’s recent escapades in Venezuela is redolent of the ruses that the US repeatedly makes about other nations threatening their sovereignty and, as a consequence, must be invaded and damaged.

What is at stake here?

The responses by government and the media since October 7, 2023 has been over the top and biased in my view to the Zionist position.

The events of October 7, 2023 were appalling, but I rejected comments from Australian politicians that they were without provocation.

Try being a Palestinian in their homeland over the last several decades.

Try coping when Zionist zealots in the West Bank since the late 1960s, who are given free rein by the IDF to illegally seize houses and property from the Palestinian families.

Human rights organisations and the UN have reported incidents of physical violence, theft and sexual assaults as part of this illegal activity.

Anger can only be contained for so long.

Since October 7, 2023, the heavily armed IDF have slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza.

There is no doubt that has happened.

It has also destroyed the infrastructure, housing, civic buildings, universities, schools and more that are required to create decent communities.

The intention was genocidal.

There is no doubt about that.

People around the world are very angry about that.

I am very angry about that.

The problem is that people like me get angry but will never resort to violence ourselves because we can stream that anger in non-violent ways – street marches, lobbying politicians, attending events, supporting film makers and musicians, and writing, writing, writing.

But in any society there is a fringe, where some angry people will resort to violence.

Some on the fringe have mental health issues that make it hard for them to resolve their anger in non-violent ways.

And the more angry some get the more likely that violence will occur, especially when the State government (NSW) has done dirty deals with the gun lobby in order to win elections, with the consequence that gun control has been lax.

And then we get the Bondi Beach killings in that same state (NSW), which like the October 7, 2023 killings were appalling.

But the response should not be to stifle the freedom of writers and academics.

Exactly the opposite should be our goal – to elevate the debate and allow people to express their anger in peaceful ways.

The Israeli government claims that slaughtering all those Gazans is making the world a safer place for people of the Jewish faith.

In fact, its actions have made the rest of the world a much less safer place for those people.

The new authoritarianism has also invaded the university system in Australia and there is subtle (but not too much so) pressure on academics to conform to what the Zionist lobby desires.

The top level representative body of Australian universities has adopted a very contentious definition of anti-semitism, which is I disagree with.

That is a separate topic.

But academics are often in the front line of the repression that authoritarian regimes impose on their societies.

It is easy to understand why.

Historically, academics were the gate keepers who probed the sensitivities in society to expose fictions and advance our knowledge and awareness.

Now the biased notion of ‘cultural sensitivity’ that the AWW claimed justified their silencing of Dr Abdel-Fattah, is threatening to restrict free speech and certainly, as the ‘Lobby’ desires, will curb academics who show support for the Gazans who have been willfully attacked and murdered by the IDF.

And don’t forget that this travesty has been under the direction of a Right-Wing Zionist zealot, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for being “Allegedly responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts …” (Source).

Australian universities have introduced a raft of policies since October 7, 2023 to curb free speech on the Gazan situation.

The justification – to curb anti-Semitism.

If these curbs were actually reducing the evil of anti-Semitism then we should celebrate that.

But, of course, they will not achieve that end.

On December 15, 2025, the Murdoch media newspaper, The Australian, published an article – Top adviser slams Australian universities for failure to stamp out anti-Semitism – which recounted how a “government-appointed academic has delivered a scathing assessment of universities’ handling of campus anti-Semitism, saying their inaction had made hatred ‘fashionably acceptable’.”

This character is a federal appointee tasked with preparing “a ‘report card’ on how each university was responding to anti-Semitism on campus”.

He was reported as saying:

… a large majority of academic staff and students have sympathies with the Left. Therefore they find it very hard to confront the Left, because large parts of the Left is anti-Semitic.

And:

Every time you see a chanting, vicious protest on a university campus, it’s telling you that anti-Semitism’s all right …

Can you believe that these views are of the person tasked with providing the Federal government with correct advice on this matter?

Note the tie in – Left -> anti-Semitic.

Protests on campus about the slaughter of Gazans -> anti-Semitic.

These protests, by the way, are full of chanting and rarely are violent or “vicious” – but that fact wouldn’t suit the narrative would it?

The excellent Op Ed by Sydney academic, David Brophy on Overland (January 9, 2025)- Universities and the arts after Bondi: from definitions to “ambient antisemitism” – concluded that:

In a sane world, that outburst alone would disqualify him. No one who sees anti-Jewish hate in every pro-Palestine rally should be entrusted with adjudicating institutional responses to antisemitism at universities.

Agreed.

He provides extensive detail of the numerous shifts within our universities that are seeking to embed the views of the “Zionist lobbying infrastructure” with the operations of those institutions.

He also notes that in all these shifts, there has not been a willingness by authorities “to recognise diverse Jewish perspectives by offering space to anti-Zionist Jews in the fight against antisemitism”.

I won’t go further on this.

Conclusion

Authoritarianism is spreading at a pace throughout the world under the guise of defending Jewish interests.

Louise Adler referred to Adelaide as “Moscow on the Torrens” as a consequence of its cancellation of Dr Abdel-Fattah’s invitation to speak at the AWW (the Torrens being the river that flows through the city).

Jewish people should have the same rights and protections as everyone and existing anti discrimination legislation in Australia provides that protection.

However, the pressure on government by the ‘Lobby’ to restrict freedom of expression and any criticism of the Israeli government’s actions is going well beyond protecting those rights.

Suppression the freedom of writers to write and talk will not curb anti-Semitism and will not protect those inalienable rights.

The Jewish people, above all, should understand that, given what an evil authoritarian regime did to them in Poland, Germany and beyond during the 1940s.

I will be back to economics next time.

That is enough for today!

(c) Copyright 2026 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.