Timothy Cootes Quadrant Online January 13, 2025
Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah continues to prove you can get away with the most grotesque exhibitions of moral lunacy in this country, so long as you have an academic title. The Future Fellow in Sociology at Macquarie University began 2025 with a New Year’s message of sorts, and there are no prizes for guessing her latest resolution. “May 2025 be the end of Israel,” Abdel-Fattah wrote on X. “May it be the end of the US-Israeli imperial scourge on humanity.” As usual, she banged on in this manner at some length, but the salient point — her giddiness for the extirpation of the Jewish homeland — handily required little elucidation. Not for the first time, I suspect, followers of Abdel-Fattah’s social media antics may have noticed a kind of channelling of the spirit of the late Yahya Sinwar. The former Hamas leader, in the immediate aftermath of October 7, warned Israel and the world that his carefully planned pogrom was “just a rehearsal” for his even more violent and psychopathic ambitions.
On that day, in an apparent gesture of solidarity, Abdel-Fattah updated her Facebook banner to depict — what else? — a paragliding Palestinian. Since then, shocking to report, her anti-Israel activism has only become more bitter and deranged. An abridged list of Abdel-Fattah’s recent contributions to public debate includes: denying the fairly obvious fact that Hamas is, indeed, a terrorist organisation, and then declining to offer a bad word about its October 7 massacres; enlisting schoolchildren in the “intifada” against the “terrorist state” of Israel during their excursion to the University of Sydney; circulating the doxxed identities of Jewish artists and writers, who went on, unsurprisingly, to be subjected to death threats and contumely; and, in a bit of follow-up work, explicitly advocating for Zionists to be made to feel “culturally unsafe” wherever they go.
On that last point, one wonders whether Abdel-Fattah is pleased with some of the latest results. In their win column, the pro-Palestine mobs can add, among other accomplishments, the immolation of a Melbourne synagogue, the serial vandalism of cars and businesses in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, and the intimidatory behaviour of the campus Hamasniks. The nation’s Zionists, it’s safe to assume, are feeling rather unsafe at the present moment.
It’s pleasing to see at least some pushback against Macquarie University’s turbulent academic. Senator Sarah Henderson and Alex Ryvchin, of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, for example, are reliable critics in Parliament and the media. Quite fairly, they question the wisdom of the Australian Research Council’s granting of $870, 269 to Abdel-Fattah, arguing that her anti-Israel extremism makes her an undeserving recipient of all that taxpayer lucre. That’s a positive start, to be sure, but such a narrow focus, I would argue, understates one of Abdel-Fattah’s related manias.
The pro-Palestine movement in Australia, including its intellectuals, politicians and street protestors, showcase as much contempt for their own country as they do for Israel. Both nations, according to this radical cast of mind, are illegal settler-colonial regimes, which never should have existed in the first place. To rectify this historical mistake, the land of Israel needs to be cleansed of its Jews and replaced with a Palestinian state, from the river — as the genocidal rhyme reminds us — to the sea. Although the details on plans for Australia’s decolonisation are somewhat sketchier, the revolutionary language doesn’t change much at all.
This first became evident just moments after October 7, when the New South Wales government determined to light up its Parliament in the colours of the Israeli flag. This decision caused a joint hissy-fit among The Greens, and Mehreen Faruqi summed up the mood pretty well: “One colonial government supporting another,” the Senator harrumphed. “What a disgrace.”
In an effort to turn this theory into practice, in 2024 a group of keffiyeh-clad imbeciles ascended the roof of Parliament House in Canberra, unfurling pro-Palestine banners and making general pests of themselves. One banner was emblazoned with the phrase, “No peace on stolen land”, which applied equally, in their view, to their dual enemies. Another, placed just under The Great Verandah Coat of Arms, even included Hamas’ inverted red triangle, a symbol denoting an upcoming target of assassination.
Randa Abdel-Fattah, in what ought to be a surprise to exactly no one, shares this contemptible worldview. Again, I shall have to condense the numerous examples, but the most obvious is her fan-girling over Senator Lidia Thorpe. After our most rebarbative parliamentarian staged a tantrum in front of King Charles during the Royal visit last year, Abdel-Fattah rushed to her defence. “Sovereign, defiant and fearless,” she swooned. “Solidarity always with First Nations here and a commitment to put in the work needed collectively to bring down the colony.” In a similarly unguarded moment on Australia Day, just after thugs had taken to Melbourne’s Captain James Cook statue with an angle grinder, Abdel-Fattah looked upon their work with glee. She enthused: “This energy everyday (sic). All colonies will fail starting here.”
This also explains some of the punctuation choices in Abdel-Fattah’s taxpayer-funded academic research, which she previewed at a recent public forum with fellow Macquarie lecturer, Jumana Bayeh. An advertisement for the event reads: An Archive of Arab Culture and Politics in ‘Australia’. The inverted speech marks — yep, you guessed it — dutifully indicate our nation’s inherent and ongoing illegitimacy.
This may be a good point to raise at the next inquiry into Abdel-Fattah’s research grant. After all, how can she accept money from the very “colony” that she’d like to see ended, just like Israel? By the way, ARC applicants are required to explain how their proposed research advances the national interest; her answer, obviously, would be hard to square with a worldview in which that same nation is contemned and regarded as ephemeral.
Perhaps that’s a reminder to keep our New Year’s goals as modest and achievable as possible. Israel, to the continued disappointment of Randa Abdel-Fattah and her co-thinkers, will still exist at the end of 2025. A stern revision of our grant-giving criteria, on the other hand, seems quite doable and necessary.
Editor’s note: The photo below this page is a detail from the cover of Ms Abdel-Fattah’s book Does My Head Look Big in This?, which the Booked Out speakers agency hails thus:
A big congratulations are in order for our talented author, Randa Abdel-Fattah. Her entertaining and eye-opening book, Does My Head Look Big In This?, was this week among four Australian novels to receive adaptation funding from Screen NSW. This is a well-deserved book-to-film project and an important step in understanding and promoting multiculturalism in Australia.
Until the time comes to “bring down the colony”, as the Macquarie academic has tweeted, settler society largesse is always acceptable.
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