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.
Instant notoriety thus hardened into an expanding public presence – one that made her, for the first time, a star and a fixture on the progressive elite’s indignation-driven cultural scene. Nowhere was that clearer than in the uproar surrounding the Adelaide Writers Festival, when many seemingly decent people accepted her assertion that she was the carefully selected victim of a smear campaign – a campaign Louise Adler characterised last week as part of an incipient wave of McCarthyism.
The style she adopted made those protestations of innocence far easier to sustain. Because so much of her public presence takes the form of short, disjointed social-media interventions, its overall content is inherently difficult to reconstruct, allowing her to brush aside the objections her vitriolic statements regularly provoke. Yet when reassembled, those fragments cohere into a moral and political universe that leaves little room for persuasion, inquiry, or disagreement – and whose unqualified exaltation of violence, adamant rejection of intellectual and political pluralism, and strident advocacy of harassment and intimidation sharply contradict her self-presentation as an academic rationally and peacefully advocating for Palestinian rights.
At the heart of that style, which has now become her trademark, lies its incessant tempo. 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”.
Nor is there any doubt, in her mind, as to who those opponents really are. The “demons” who are “committing a Holocaust”, as she tweeted in an unguarded moment, are “the people of the Holocaust”: that is, the Jews.
There are, to be sure, a few Jews she deems acceptable – just as Stalin, while butchering Soviet Jewry’s finest thinkers for being “Zionists” and “cosmopolitans”, flaunted Ilya Ehrenburg and Lazar Kaganovich as proof that his regime was not antisemitic. But if “the majority of Jewish people allow themselves to be used as human ideological shields for Zionism, that is not a problem for Palestinians to solve” – and the price “the majority of Jewish people” will pay is their own fault alone.
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”.
It is not Hamas and Hezbollah – who fight for “the best of humanity” – but the Israelis, “the worst of humanity”, who are trapped in a “psychopathic death cult ritual”. As for Israel itself, a “genocidal slaughterhouse” that is “dripping in Arab blood”, it stands condemned as a “cursed stain on humanity”.
One can readily see how, within this vision, the paraglider of October 7 is effortlessly transformed from a symbol of wanton rape and murder into a motif of “insurgent hope” and “prison escape”. It is obvious too that any future of coexistence is literally unthinkable, given that “we cannot co-exist 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”.
Yet Zionism, fused with American power, is not merely a deadly adversary. It is a system so pervasive and corrupting that it invariably seeks to crush any opposition, including in Australia. And as “a brown woman with a platform” she is a natural target of the “malicious pro-Israel propaganda machine”, which has deployed “the same eliminatory logic that powers the bombs in Gaza” to secure her “bureaucratic and cultural assassination”.
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”.
Their refusal to entirely sever our ties with Israel follows directly from that lineage: both states, she insists, are “built on a shared history of frontier violence” and remain committed to “the ongoing maintenance of white supremacy in the Global South”.
For the same reason, the progressives’ obsession with “dialogue” and “civility” is no more than a “velvet glove on the iron fist of colonialism”. The fantasies they peddle of the “marketplace of ideas” are also just a trap, a shield of “cotton wool” wrapped around racism to prevent the “reckoning”. And as for “all this hysteria about the social cohesion of Australians”, including the wave of concern that has followed the murderous antisemitic attack at Bondi, it is mere froth that reflects “the domestic anxieties of the coloniser”.
In effect, with “whiteness” finally under serious threat, the “weaponisation of grief, tears, outrage, shock, and horror by the coloniser” is another thinly veiled cover for treating “the challenge to the settler-colonial peace as a national security threat”, stepping up repression. As the slide towards open authoritarianism progresses, “words are being criminalised, jobs are being threatened, and our very history is being erased to satisfy the demands of the Zionist lobby”. To believe there can or should be, in this “racialised battlefield”, scope for compromise is entirely delusional. At this “pivotal moment in the collapse of Western moral authority,” when the “kingdom of the dark” – Western imperialism and its inherently “racialised” colonial outposts – is being unmasked by the “unrelenting light of Palestinian resistance”, “you either stand with the oppressed and their right to resist, or you stand with the machinery of death and the institutions that facilitate it. There is no middle ground”.
That Manichean choice applies every bit as clearly here as in the Middle East. “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”.
Taken together, these elements cohere into a single, internally consistent cast of mind that is driven by a closed and unforgiving logic. The world is divided between “the oppressed and their right to resist” and “the machinery of death”, with “no middle ground”. Zionism, fused with Western power, is cast as a “white supremacist” system that saturates states and institutions; Australia itself becomes a “racialised colony” whose “white supremacist logic” polices, suppresses and brutalises “racialised bodies” at home.
Because power is thus imagined as total and racialised – embedded in institutions and even in grief itself – persuasion is ruled out in advance. Disagreement becomes complicity; civility and dialogue are recoded as ploys designed to defer the “reckoning”. Political and intellectual pluralism are nothing but shams.
Just as eradication is reframed as “collective liberation”, coercing opponents into silence therefore appears as mere justice, while dismantling Australia’s “Whiteness” is presented not as extremism but as a moral necessity – one that promises a redemptive future for Palestinians and Indigenous Australians alike.
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.
Crucially transposed by Frantz Fanon into a struggle between “White faces” and Black, that Manicheanism was later recast into a “racialised” battle in which the enslaved peoples of the “Third World” would “bring about not only their own liberation, but also the world-historic destruction of the power-apparatus oppressing all humanity”, thereby “permanently alter(ing) the human condition”.
And implicit in those 1950s adaptations of Leninism were the seeds of what later hardened into Critical Race Theory. Most importantly, Albert Memmi – a central figure of that moment who would later repudiate the movement over its genocidal anti-Zionism – famously argued that the coloniser possesses “Whiteness” as a birthright privilege, quite independently of personal conduct or merit.
Once that premise is accepted, moral responsibility dissolves into racial essence. Arbitrarily “killing a European settler” accordingly ceases to be a crime and becomes – in the notorious words of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1961 preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth – a “two birds with one stone” act that destroys both oppressor and oppressed, “creating a free man”: a grotesque moral alchemy that elevates executioners into the saviours of their victims.
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.
Academic freedom is thereby invoked not to protect inquiry, but to license silencing and coercion, notably by obliterating the “cultural safety” of the Zionists and liberals she abhors. The privileges of the academy are claimed in full, while its ethical obligations – including respect for the diversity of opinions and the value of intelligent discussion – are repudiated wholesale. Shielded by notoriety from what would otherwise be the professional consequences of thus breaching the norms that underpin academic freedom, Abdel-Fattah is able, at the taxpayer’s expense, to indulge in the Intifada of the faculty lounge, where the vicarious thrills of revolutionary violence are prosecuted from the safety of Macquarie University before breaking for lunch.
Meanwhile, her followers – who are even more confused than she is – can luxuriate in fantasies of storming the Winter Palace, all the while wailing about their supposed victimhood at the hands of a repressive order at whose teat they suck.
But none of those absurdities can hide far more sinister undertones and realities. Voltaire put it best, in his entry on fanaticism in the Encyclopaedia: it is rogues, masquerading as thinkers, who guide fanatics and put murderous daggers in their hands.
And it is no accident that all of the worldviews she has inherited have ended in calamitous disasters which – far from bringing human liberation – have wrought only death and destruction.
Yes, Randa Abdel-Fattah may, in this fatuous era of ours, be the fatuous hero of a fatuous herd. But read as a whole, her words lead to only one end – an end which is forever painted in blood and sorrow on the sand, the stone, and the shattered lives of Bondi Beach.