Preaching intimidation, vilification and harassment under the mantle of scholarship has made her a hero of cultural Left, writes HENRY ERGAS in The Australian (Feb. 3, 2026). Ergas has written a few gems we think are worth sharing with you…
On October 7, 2023, as the gates of hell opened for some, the gates of fame opened for others. And for no one more so than Randa Abdel-Fattah. An obscure academic at Macquarie University, whose intellectual output had not even caused a ripple in radical sociology’s crowded waters, she was known, if at all, for her children’s books.
Turning catastrophe into opportunity, she vaulted into public visibility by adopting a style of political performance in which provocation displaced argument and outrage replaced judgment. The effect was immediate. What began as a series of shock interventions rapidly coalesced into a recognisable persona, one rewarded by constant amplification. Invitations followed, platforms multiplied, and outrage became not merely a tactic but a credential. In a time that values performative antagonism over measured reflection, she proved an ideal fit: reliably newsworthy, quotable, and always available.
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The sheer pace and intensity of Abdel-Fattah’s outpourings continuously stoke her supporters’ rage while leaving opponents flat-footed and disoriented. The need to remain at the front of the pack leads her to constantly escalate the vehemence of her rhetorical aggression, generating torrents of increasingly incendiary claims that gain traction not by withstanding scrutiny, but by permanently outrunning it. Remarkably for an academic – more remarkably still for one lavishly funded by taxpayers – her aim is not to inform, much less to debate. “Dealing with a Zio,” declares a social-media post she retweeted, is pointless, “as they will bring up questions instead of admitting you are right”.
What Israel’s defenders deserve, she insists, is not the opportunity to question and rebut their critics; it is only to “never know a second’s peace in (their) sadistic, miserable lives”. Even respected scholars whose views differ from hers and those of her supporters “are not our peers, not our acquaintances”. Rather than dialogue, their proper fate is erasure, to be delivered in what she chillingly calls “the time of reckoning”.
The fact the line between virulent opposition to Zionism and inciting hatred of Jews is perilously thin therefore gives her no pause. “It’s not my job to manage my words because Zionists have deliberately linked Jewish identity with a violent racist political ideology”.
Little wonder, then, that her accusations unerringly echo the oldest antisemitic tropes. The principle underpinning their selection is simple. Anything Hamas, its sympathisers or fellow travellers assert, however outlandish, is treated as self-evidently true; anything Israel says is dismissed as self-evidently false, without the slightest need for further inquiry. The allegations she assembles on the basis of that premise – a premise that has nothing to do with academic ethics and everything to do with propaganda – are saturated by a virtually pornographic fixation on the carnal destruction of bodies. “The Zionists”, she repeatedly tells her followers, “harvest organs” from Palestinians, “burn civilians alive as they laugh on camera”, “annihilate children in viral TikTok videos”, “torch homes for fun”, free prisoners only to “then execute them”, and “have people raped violently by animals”.
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… any future of coexistence is literally unthinkable, given that “we cannot coexist with our genocidal oppressors”. The only solution is “the end of the US-Israeli imperial scourge”, which in turn requires “the abolishment of the death cult of Zionism and the end of US empire”. Regardless of its human costs, the eradication of Israel and the final defeat of the US will “snowball collective liberation, because the tentacles of Western imperialism oppress and dehumanise us all”.
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But if the “Zionist lobby” gains any traction on our shores, it is only because this country – dismissed by her as “so-called Australia” – is “a racialised colony where Palestinians are evicted from the category of human”. Permeated by a “white supremacist logic” that slots Palestinians into the “bestial, savage, predatory” tropes used against “brown and black communities in service of Empire”, the self-proclaimed “progressives” who govern Australia amount to little more than a despicable “Diet Coke (version) of the far right”.
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“To stand with Palestine in Australia,” she writes, “is to confront the foundational lie of the Australian state: that this is a land of the ‘fair go’ rather than a site of ongoing racialised dispossession.” Only through that strategy of subversion and resistance will it be possible to begin “the dismantling of the white supremacist structures that govern every aspect of life in this colony, from the classroom to the courtroom”. The alternative is to allow the “structural Islamophobia” which is an entrenched feature of Australia to persist: a “structural Islamophobia” which “the white supremacist state (requires) to justify its policing of racialised bodies at home”.
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It is not difficult to discern, in this phantasmagoria, the sediment of older ideological monstrosities. There is, to begin with, the legacy of Marxism in its crudest forms, with its insistence on relentless, remorseless struggle as the engine of history and its utopian promise of total human emancipation. Even clearer is the imprint of Lenin, who dismissed “bourgeois ethics” as “moralising vomit” while justifying terror in the name of “cleansing” the world of the “cursed stain” of reactionaries. Starkly Leninist too is the Manicheanism, with Lenin proclaiming that “the only choice is either the bourgeois or the socialist ideology: there neither is, nor can there be, a middle course” – so that all those who are not on the “right side of history”, including social democrats, liberals and other moderates, have no right to exist, much less to speak.
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It is all of this that underpins Abdel-Fattah’s cast of mind, and most notably her cult of violence, though there is no reason to believe she has any close familiarity with the intellectual history from which it descends. Merged in her academic work with a large – and potentially lethal – dose of poorly digested Foucault and Bourdieu, it yields an analytical outlook that despises the very idea of intellectual objectivity, bears no meaningful relationship to even the most elementary requirements of rigorous empirical validation, and serves a single instrumental purpose: to help cloak the advocacy of intimidation, vilification and harassment in the mantle of scholarship.
COMMENT by Andrew L. Urban
Enough! Enough, I hear you cry, overwhelmed by the sheer whacko ugliness that Henry Ergas has revealed with Abdel-Fattah’s own sickening words. This is the mindset in which terrorist ideology ferments, in what Ergas rightly calls “cult of violence”. Excluding her from the Adelaide Writers Week shocked me: why was she ever invited!? That 180 guests self-deported from the event only goes to show that groupthink is the cheap and easy misguided alternative to the ‘rugged individualism’ decried by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, to which writers used to aspire.