“Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression,” wrote the great Jewish-American writer Saul Bellow, “if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.”

And so it is with the act of the Adelaide Festival board in disinviting Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah from Adelaide Writers’ Week. With Australians horrified by the Bondi mass murder, insidiously linking a writer with that massacre is an appalling slander, vile in itself. But in saying one Australian writer cannot speak, inevitably more and more Australian writers will find themselves also unable to speak – first at festivals, soon in universities, then on public broadcasters.

Randa Abdel-Fattah and Peter Singer at Adelaide Writers Week in 2023. This time, her invitation was withdrawn. Credit: Andrew Beveridge

And the categories of what is unsayable and who is silenced will inevitably grow. Today it is Gaza, but next it could be the environment or social policy. As we see in the United States, the slippery categories of terrorism and community cohesion are ever-growing as forces of oppression.

Randa Abdel-Fattah is charged with having given profound offence with past social media posts – but then so too has Tony Abbott been charged with giving profound offence to many Indigenous Australians in the past. Both have new books out, both were invited to speak at the AWW, yet only Tony Abbott remains welcome. Some may not like what Randa Abdel-Fattah has to say, but then others may not like what pro-Israel writers who are also to speak at AWW have to........

© The Sydney Morning Herald