One of Australia’s top writers’ festivals was canceled on Tuesday, after 180 authors boycotted the event and its director resigned in response to the festival disinviting a Palestinian author who praised Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre.

Last week, the Writers’ Week festival revoked its invitation to novelist and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, citing in part the recent terror attack against a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, in which 15 people were gunned down by two attackers.

“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,” the festival’s board wrote in a statement last week.

In response, a raft of writers backed out of the festival in solidarity, and on Tuesday, the event’s director resigned in protest, leading organizers to cancel the event entirely several hours later.

Abdel-Fattah said the move to bar her was “a blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship,” and was a “despicable attempt to associate me with the Bondi massacre.”

She has advocated for making spaces “culturally unsafe” for Zionists and appeared to laud Hamas terrorists who infiltrated Israel on October 7, 2023. In........

© The Times of Israel