3 hours ago
1
If there has been a bright red thread running through my career, it’s the importance of freedom of speech. It underpinned my life as a journalist and correspondent, became central to the campaign to get me out of prison in Egypt and, perhaps paradoxically, it is why I have reluctantly withdrawn from this year’s Adelaide writers’ week.
On Thursday the Adelaide festival board announced it had removed the writer and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from the program, not because of anything she was proposing to say at the festival but because of things she said previously, reassessed in the aftermath of the Bondi attack.
In the words of the board, “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 …”
That is a grave mistake.
To be clear: the Bondi attack was horrific. It has left people shaken, grieving and afraid, particularly in communities already living with heightened vulnerability. That fear is real and it deserves empathy and compassion, and the board may well have believed it was acting in good faith.
But fear also has a way of reducing our moral and intellectual horizons. We tend to simplify: to divide the world into safe and unsafe voices, acceptable and unacceptable ideas, good people and bad ones.
Abdel-Fattah has – through what might well turn out to be a defamatory association – been cast as one of the unsafe ones. But her removal rests on a logic that should trouble anyone committed to open civic debate. It suggests that participation in public cultural life is no longer based on what a writer might contribute but on whether their past words might be uncomfortable in a suddenly volatile climate. That is an alarmingly fragile basis on which to curate ideas.
In 2015 Islamic State – the militant organisation the Bondi gunmen are alleged to have been inspired by – published an essay titled The Extinction of the Grey Zone.
The “grey zone” is that space in which people of different identities, beliefs and loyalties coexist without being forced to choose sides. It is essential for writers, journalists, poets and artists to debate and argue. We can’t do politics without a healthy grey zone.
That is why, in its essay, Islamic State declared that its strategic aim was to destroy the grey zone. Its violence was explicitly designed to polarise – to compel everyone to declare themselves either “with us” or “against us” – and to make mixed societies like ours impossible.
That concept captures something essential about extremism. Its power lies not only in creating bloodshed and trauma but in shaping our response to it: in its capacity to collapse complexity, to make nuance feel dangerous and to render coexistence suspect.
Think about that for a moment. In cancelling Abdel-Fattah (or conservatives, or Jewish writers, or any others apart from those who explicitly incite violence), we are undermining our capacity to hold those difficult conversations and, in the process, doing the work of Islamic State for them.
I do not need to agree with Abdel-Fattah’s views to believe that removing her in this way is wrong. The issue is not about ideological alignment; it is about principle and precedent. If writers can be disqualified from public forums based on past statements and changing political winds, then participation becomes contingent on institutional nervousness rather than intellectual integrity.
My withdrawal is not a repudiation of Adelaide writers’ week as a whole, nor of the many people who work in good faith to sustain it. It is a protest against a decision that undermines the festival’s role as a guardian of the grey zone.
Extremist violence seeks to polarise. It aims to strip away nuance and force us into ideological, sectarian or ethnic camps. Our response should not be to help that project by shrinking civic space further.
That is why I am stepping away. Not to inflame tensions but to insist that fear must not be allowed to do the work of extremists for them – and that the grey zone remains worth protecting.
-
Peter Greste is a professor of journalism at Macquarie University and the executive director for the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom
