“Teaching Students to Think for Themselves” Starts with Political Self-Awareness

by Robert Jensen / January 12th, 2026

My nomination for the most predictable platitude invoked by university professors when describing the essence of their job is “teaching students to think for themselves.”

During my 26 years at the University of Texas at Austin, where I was sometimes accused of politicizing the classroom, I repeated that phrase many times, not as a dodge but because I believed it’s the right goal.

As with many platitudes, the problem isn’t that it’s incorrect but inadequate. Teaching “critical-thinking skills” is at the heart of good teaching, but that phrase doesn’t offer much guidance on how to get the job done, especially in the social sciences and humanities. (I taught in a journalism school, which typically are a mix of those two traditions.)

I never met a professor—left, right, or center—who thought the job was to propagandize students, to push a particular belief system. But every professor makes decisions about topics covered, readings assigned, and the direction of class discussions in the limited time available—all of which require judgments that inevitability reflect a way of seeing the world. Call it a framework of analysis, a worldview, an ideology—no one understands human affairs in purely objective fashion, without assumptions about how the world works.

In short: Teaching is not politics but there’s always an underlying politics to teaching about human affairs, because there’s always a politics to living. By politics, I don’t mean partisan battles but rather competing claims about human nature, how to distribute power, what constitutes a good society. In that sense, there’s a politics to everything people do, whether stated or unacknowledged. The question is whether we can make a good case for the choices we make, which inevitably will be politically inflected.

As an example, I want to explain a lesson I used for in my Media Law and Ethics class that illustrates why no teaching is truly apolitical.

I started with widely accepted truisms. (1) The primary role of journalism in a democratic society is to provide information and analysis people need to participate in self-governance. (2) One of the most consequential choices a government can make is going to war, a time when citizens need especially fearless reporting. (3) In a society based on the rule of law—the idea that rules apply uniformly to everyone, including the wealthy and powerful—going to war should proceed lawfully.

I used the 2003 US invasion of Iraq as a case study. Was that invasion lawful? Did journalists provide citizens with the information needed to understand that question?

First, I walked students through the relevant international and domestic law.

The UN Charter authorizes a state to go to war under two conditions: A collective security action authorized by the UN Security Council, or self-defense when facing an “armed attack.” When the US military invaded Iraq on March 20, there was no Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force and Iraq had not attacked the United States. US officials claimed that previous Security Council resolutions implicitly granted the right to go to war, a claim that was rejected by most experts and almost everyone outside the United States. The United States’ unsuccessful attempt to pass a new resolution to authorize military action in February suggested that officials knew that existing resolutions weren’t adequate.

Next, I pointed out that many war proponents argued that the invasion was legal because in 2002 the US Congress had approved a resolution to authorize the use of military force against Iraq and that the United States should not be constrained by international law. But the United States ratified the UN Charter, which has the force of a treaty, and Article VI of the US Constitution makes all treaties “the supreme Law of the Land.” So, a violation of the charter is not simply a question of international law.

Most of the students in the class said that my lecture was the first time they had heard this kind of analysis. That wasn’t surprising, since there was little coverage of these issues in the US news media during the run-up to the war. Should journalists have written more, and more detailed, stories about the legal status of an invasion? Students agreed they should have, although some argued that it was understandable that journalists backed off in the post-9/11 political climate. I agreed, but that’s an explanation not a defense.

So, had journalists failed to provide citizens with the information and analysis they needed to participate in a democratic debate about going to war? Was that an ethical failure? I encouraged students to decide for themselves, making it clear I wasn’t going to test them about a “right” answer.

After the invasion, it’s not surprising that journalists avoided the question. If the US invasion had been illegal, then it constituted what under the Nuremberg Principles is called a “crime against peace”: “Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.” The crime was described by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, which prosected Nazi officials, as the “supreme international crime.” Those principles don’t constitute a formal treaty, but they inform both international and US law, and are a moral benchmark for contemporary international relations.

Is it crazy to label the US invasion illegal? Many experts around the world reached the conclusion that it was unlawful, including then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who reluctantly acknowledged that in an interview with journalists—in the UK. That story forced coverage in US papers, where US journalists treated it as a he-said/she-said controversy, implying that it couldn’t be resolved. Was that good journalism, airing different points of view? Or was it an evasion of responsibility by turning factual questions that journalists could answer into dueling opinions?

A necessary digression: Discussing this in a class today would raise questions about the Trump administration’s recent sea and land attacks on Venezuela. I would proceed in much the same way as with the Iraq example. The obvious difference is that Trump does not feign concern about how laws, domestic or international, constrain executive action.

Back to our subject, how professors can teach critical thinking without imposing their own views on students. Was this lesson an example of teaching critical thinking or inappropriately politicizing the classroom?

I was familiar with this legal analysis because of my work in the antiwar movement, and some might argue that I was forcing my point of view on students under the guise of an exploration of journalistic ethics. But the question isn’t how I learned of the critique but whether it was a helpful illustration of the pressure on journalists to “rally around the flag” in times of war. Were the facts I presented accurate? Were the legal principles and precedents I presented applicable? Did the case study raise an important question? I believe the answer to all three questions is yes.

But a deeper point is important. What of the many professors teaching similar classes who didn’t raise these issues? Were they inappropriately politicizing the classroom by avoiding such questions? If my antiwar activities led me to include this lesson, and that’s political, then weren’t professors who ignored such a lesson also political in the same sense?

Teaching isn’t politics, but there is always a politics to teaching. I believe that the deployment of the US military should conform to international and domestic law. Others disagree. How professors present the legality of the US invasion of Iraq is no doubt influenced by their assessment. But labeling one side political because it emerges from critique while pretending that the other side is neutral because it embraces the conventional wisdom is itself a political act. There’s no escape from making judgments that are, in some sense, political.

My lesson did a good job of teaching students to think critically. The conventional wisdom isn’t always wrong, of course, but it’s wrong often enough that reflexively adopting it is dangerous. Challenging the assumptions of the dominant culture is crucial, especially in a journalism class.

Outside of the classroom, I was politically active for most of my time at UT-Ausin and sometimes ended up in the news because of that activity, especially after 9/11 when I was the subject of intense criticism for my antiwar writing. But I do not think my political activities outside the classroom made me a bad teacher. I was aware of the scrutiny I was under and reminded students that they didn’t have to agree with me, always trying to anticipate objections to points I made and discuss them in class.

My argument: Being self-aware of how my framework for understanding the world could influence my teaching made me a better teacher. Hiding my politics, from students or myself, would have been a mistake.

I know my position isn’t universally embraced. I was reminded of that one night at a dinner for professors who had won the University of Texas System’s Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award. (Yes, that’s a not-so-subtle way of pointing out that I won teaching awards, hoping skeptical readers might take me seriously.)

The group at my table was discussing politics in the classroom, back in 2014 when the subject wasn’t quite as contentious as today. A political science professor said that he worked hard to hide his views, bragging that “my students don’t know how I vote.” That’s a common claim, almost always made with pride, and others at the table nodded in support. I said that I understood his point but that I didn’t always try to hide my views. “How can students evaluate our choices about how to present material if we hide our approach to politics?” I asked. Wouldn’t it be better if we were up front about our own framework of analysis, worldview, ideology? When we do that, it’s likely students could make a good guess at how we voted, but there’s no harm in that. We expect researchers to disclose the sources of funding so we can assess whether money might have influenced a study. Shouldn’t the same principle apply in the classroom regarding ideology?

I respect that political scientist’s point of view; reasonable people can disagree. We didn’t reach a consensus around the table that night, but I worry that the charge that a professor inappropriately politicizes the classroom is too often a weapon designed to impose conformity. That demand for conformity can come from any ideological camp, and it should be resisted whenever it shuts down critical thinking.

Yes, of course, I agree we shouldn’t tell students what to think. But if we really want them to think for themselves, we should be honest with students about not only what we believe but how we came to believe it.

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Robert Jensen’s new book, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning, will be published by Blue Ear Books in 2026. He is Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin, the author of It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics (Olive Branch Press, 2024), and coauthor with Wes Jackson of An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022). To subscribe to his mailing list, go here. Read other articles by Robert, or visit Robert's website.

 

Anti-Democracy

by John Rachel / January 12th, 2026

Killing Democracy should at bare minimum be a university textbook, distributed to every institution of higher learning in America. Ideally, it would be required reading for every literate citizen of the U.S.  Qualitatively, it is on the same level as Howard Zinn’s monumental work, A People’s History of the United States. Like that landmark work, it exposes the realities of American political policy and behavior. Killing Democracy, however, more narrowly delves into America’s odious and destructive meddling in the affairs of other countries. It focuses on the horrible consequences of the U.S. standard practice of regime change, i.e. overthrowing other governments, then installing puppet rulers who faithfully serve U.S. interests. Oftentimes the key leadership figures illegally and cunningly removed from power are democratically elected, loyal to the citizenry, working for the people. Just as often the installed regime is despotic and ruthless, oppressive and tyrannical, erasing any semblance of basic political rights, justice, and personal freedom. The criminals now in charge go on killing sprees to eliminate opposition, take bribes, skim money from the public coffers. America’s goal of this sinister practice is to enhance its power and to accelerate the strip mining of the target nation’s resources, to benefit U.S. corporations.

Much attention is given in the book to the active participation of Western — especially American — media in the regime change agenda. And rightfully so. Without the manufactured consent of the American public, such criminal behavior would be difficult, if not impossible. Everyday citizens have to believe that the U.S. is a force of good in the world, that its wars are absolutely necessary, that its enemies are despicable and real threats to the values and way of life of their nation. To pull off the level of deceit required and thus serve the imperial masters of the U.S. war machine, the media outlets have to propagate entirely fictional narratives — call them what they are, LIES — on an epic scale. Mainstream media has become the Propaganda Department for the warmongers in government. There seems to be no limit on how much the most prize journalists are willing to ignore and distort the truth, to keep the wars and regime change operations in high gear. Bear in mind that any meddling by one nation in the affairs of another — especially regime change — violates international law, treaties, US law, and the US Constitution. Such activities are legally war crimes. Thus the willing, often enthusiastic participation by members of the media in such activities, makes them complicit in war crimes and themselves war criminals.

As the title suggests, the destructive impact of America’s meddling is not just limited to the target nations. It’s destroying democracy at home. It’s such an egregious violation of what most Americans believe their country represents, of how they think the rest of the world looks at us, it is also destroying the most essential ingredient in creating a worthy, united, functional society: faith in themselves as American citizens.

Lastly, I have to remark that the contributions by Jeremy Kuzmarov, Daniel Kovalik, KJ Noh and Ron Ridenour are excellent and important. But the major credit must go to Mr. Cunningham who wrote 85% of this masterpiece.

In a world of fake news, fake history, deep fakes, real fakes and fake fakes, it’s sometimes hard to sort things out and get in touch with what’s real. Killing Democracy is a powerful antidote to the lies regularly told by the U.S. government, with the eager participation of mainstream media, to perpetuate the illegal and extremely destructive agenda of the empire builders in the U.S. government.

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John Rachel has a B.A. in Philosophy, has traveled extensively, is a songwriter, music producer, neo-Marxist, and a bipolar humanist. He has written eight novels and three political non-fiction books. His most recent polemic is The Peace Dividend: The Most Controversial Proposal in the History of the World. His political articles have appeared at many alternative media outlets. He is now somewhat rooted in a small traditional farming village in Japan near Osaka, where he proudly tends his small but promising vegetable garden. Scribo ergo sum. Read other articles by John, or visit John's website.

 A Not-so-Tongue-in-Cheek “Trumpian Traumatic Stress Disorder”

by Peter Blunt / January 12th, 2026

No doubt like many others who awoke to the news that President Maduro of Venezuela and his wife, Cilia Flores (a serving member of the Venezuelan National Assembly with a distinguished career in government), had been ‘captured’ or ‘seized’ by the US and were being transported to NYC to stand trial, my initial reaction was one of shock and disbelief. That any state – even a rogue state like the US – would have the gall to act so brazenly in defiance of the UN Charter and international law, and get away with it, seemed incomprehensible.

Just as shocking was the uniformity of the corporate media’s scramble to euphemise what had happened. The euphemism of (almost unanimous) choice was the word ‘captured’, which carries with it the connotation that the persons concerned were criminals who had escaped.

It was as if editors had been briefed beforehand and told what word to use. As if expunged from their collective vocabulary, the words ‘kidnapped’ and ‘abducted’ were nowhere to be seen.

No need to wonder how the same media would have reacted if Russia had ‘captured’ King Charles and his wife, Camilla. Members of a family whose list of crimes and misdemeanours would provide a much richer source of material for rationalisation – by, say, RT – than the Maduros ever could.

Reminding myself that the US had a long and grisly track record of this type of crime and worse, and that the corporate media always do as they are told, did little to assuage my sense of phantasmagoria and unreality.

Just saying it sounds crazy: “they kidnapped a sitting president of a sovereign country and his wife who are now in NYC facing ‘trial’ on ‘Trumped-up’ charges as drug lords!”

It sounds like a bad (Trump) joke or the theme for a C grade Hollywood movie.

In swift confirmation of the incident’s bizarreness, President Trump then issued a follow-up threat, saying “If they [what’s left of the Venezuelan Government] don’t behave, we will do a second strike.”

He is now openly talking (again) about ‘acquiring’ Greenland and not ruling out the use of military force to do so.

It all made me think that I had been doing a lot of this sort of thing lately, that is, trying to reconcile the lunacy of events like this with the fact that they seem to have become so commonplace and acceptable.

And I wondered whether it might be driving me slightly insane.

This short essay argues that more and more in the Trumpian world that we inhabit doublethink has become the norm and that this erodes deeply held principles and values and our sense of who we are and of reality.

Not-so-tongue-in-cheek, it is suggested that the resulting stress is damaging to our mental health and could lead to a chronic mental illness, a neurosis, which I call Trumpian Traumatic Stress Disorder (TTSD).

The aetiology of the condition, its symptomatology, and treatment options are discussed briefly below.

Aetiology

TTSD develops as a result of prolonged and repeated exposure to behaviour by people in positions of high authority and standing that contradicts what you have been brought up to believe in and value.

The stress of witnessing or being subjected to such behaviour is heightened by the fact that the perpetrators are never held to account. Indeed, one could say that they flaunt their flouting of the law and their complete disregard for standards of decency and fairness and humaneness.

Imagine the devastating effect on an eight-year-old child of realising that his or her revered teacher all along had been breaking rules that she had been teaching her class to uphold. She was a cheat and a liar, a bully, a thief, a murderer, and a racist. She was also greedy and spiteful, and vain, uncaring about others, pretentious, unreliable and inconsistent, and completely without empathy.

Respect for figures of authority and the law and values and beliefs such as those transgressed in the above example are central features of normality and good citizenship. They are deeply ingrained in our sense of who we are and what we would like our children to be.

They are the psychological glue that holds individual psyches, communities and societies together.

Without them, we as individuals and our societies begin to fall apart, as seems to be happening now in the US, as Chris Hedges and others have been arguing for some time.

It is the accumulation of stressful events such as the most recently committed Venezuelan crimes, the genocide in Gaza, and the countless others like them that lead to the development of TTSD.

Symptomatology

Of course, being a Trumpian condition, this is not just any old neurosis.

The principal symptoms of TTSD, which therefore should be writ large and with superlatives ‘like no one has ever seen before’, are the following:

• Free-floating and excessive or disproportionate anger and irritability characterised by intense, often unexplained rage that seems to have no specific cause, or irritability and anger that are triggered by factors that under normal circumstances you would consider to be trivial.

• Intense feelings of dislike – almost hatred – towards Trump and his henchmen and women combined with an irrational tendency to generalise these feelings to US citizens as a whole.

• Feelings of hopelessness and futility, helplessness, loss of interest, isolation, and guilt for not being able to do anything, or enough, to right the wrongs that you perceive.

• Difficulties with concentrating and sleeping, hypervigilance, and hypersensitivity.

• Obsessive thoughts about precipitating or causative events such as those referred to above.

• Pronounced and frequent incredulity or disbelief and a sense of unreality. Could this really be happening?

• Constant questioning of one’s beliefs and values and a growing uncertainty and anxiety as to what and whom to believe.

• Cognitive dissonance or the recurring feeling that you are constantly under pressure to hold or countenance two irreconcilable or incompatible beliefs or attitudes at the same time. What Orwell referred to as ‘doublethink’: shock/horror is the mundane, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, kidnapping is capture, peace prizes are for warmongers, euphemism is menace, and so on.

Some combination of the symptoms outlined above can persist for months or years and are highly likely to coincide with Trump administrations and similar ones that might follow in the US or be in place among US allies.

The effects of TTSD on personal and work relationships, and social functioning generally, can be severe and debilitating.

Treatment

The jury is still out on which of the social sciences is the most ‘dismal’. Unfortunately for TTSD sufferers, however, the front runners in this never-ending and fiercely contested race are still the disciplines of economics and psychology.

The treatment of most psychological ailments either relies on very expensive voodoo-like or shamanic rituals such as psychoanalysis, psychiatric drugs that keep you heavily sedated and dead to the world, or the shock and awe of electro convulsive therapy (ECT).

Regarding the latter, apparently its advocates have ‘discovered’ that administering very large electric shocks to a person’s brain while they are strapped immobile to a bed temporarily makes them less manic or reduces them to a semi-catatonic (but more manageable) state – a state of ‘shock’ you might say! The treatment usually comes as a course, meaning that it is not just a one off. The logic and sophistication of this ‘scientific discovery’ are akin to that of showing that if you hit someone very hard and repeatedly on the head with a sledgehammer, they will probably die.

Accordingly, we do not recommend any of these ‘treatment’ options.

For now (and probably a lot longer), our advice to those with TTSD is to just grimace (!) and bear it.

Otherwise, for those of you who have voodoo sympathies or inclinations, perhaps just buy a Trump doll in which you can stick pins or at which you can throw darts. It won’t do any real good, but it might make you feel a little better.

The Law of the Jungle

Clearly, in international affairs a la US, the rule of law is no more, a condition that is unremarkable given that the US has been hurtling towards this goal since the end of WWII.

The always semi-rules-based global order has been replaced by the law of the jungle, that is, a chaotic, primal struggle for power and control in which the biggest and baddest participant wins (Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism). A state that has been brought about largely by a country whose leaders personify, and whose words and actions corroborate, the idea that the fish rots from the head.

So much so, that the King and Queen of Denmark would do well to beware being kidnapped and charged with claiming suzerainty over a territory that rightfully belongs to the Trump Empire.

Sounds crazy? No prizes for guessing how long before the mainstream media announce that Greenland and its indigenous peoples have been ‘brought under the protective wing’ of the US and that – following the widespread protests in Iran that through sanctions they have created the conditions for, and fomented in other ways – the US and Israel have ‘rescued’ the Iranian people by ‘deposing’ or ‘replacing’ (assassinating) the Iranian leadership, and so on.

Or are these thoughts just a part of my TTSD, examples of some of my more intrusive and obsessive fears, fantasies, and free-floating anger and irritability?

Where did I put those darts?

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Peter Blunt is Honorary Professor, School of Business, University of New South Wales (Canberra), Australia. He has held tenured full professorships of management in universities in Australia, Norway, and the UK, and has worked as a consultant in development assistance in 40 countries, including more than three years with the World Bank in Jakarta, Indonesia. His commissioned publications on governance and public sector management informed UNDP policy on these matters and his books include the standard works on organisation and management in Africa and, most recently, (with Cecilia Escobar and Vlassis Missos) The Political Economy of Bilateral Aid: Implications for Global Development (Routledge, 2023) and The Political Economy of Dissent: A Research Companion (Routledge, forthcoming 2026). Read other articles by Peter.

Our Computers and Televisions Spray Toxic Sludge

by David Swanson / January 12th, 2026

A television writer named Annie Jacobsen recently tweeted that she’d been “prophetic” when she wrote a real CIA scheme of attacking Venezuela into a fictional program, after which the U.S. government actually attacked Venezuela. Another word would be “propagandistic” — not in the sense of the direct, immediate lie, but in the sense of the long con. While there have been societies that could not imagine murder, and in which one ordinary Hollywood clip could cause trauma, a different sort of damage is done to those of us subjected to endless streams of bloodless, normalized slaughter, and easy normalized war.

How does one teach civics to children when top government officials and subservient media outlets are serving up gleeful normalized sadism? The U.S. president posts “snuff” films of boaters. Many suspect him of — among several other evil motives — striving to distract from an ongoing news story about the long-term abuse of girls by the wealthy and powerful. If you turn to fiction for respite from general disgust and nausea, you struggle to find films that are not about murder, perhaps landing on a film being heavily promoted by Netflix called “Priscilla” about a 14-year-old girl dating Elvis. Where does monstrous reality end and heroic fiction begin?

If you read countless reports of “conflicting narratives” about an ICE officer killing a woman in Minneapolis and are bewildered by the news that there exist both a video of the thing and completely contradictory reports of what is in that video, then you find yourself watching a sadistic murder and facing the fact that government officials and so-called journalists are asking you to disbelieve your eyes.

Not just your eyes, but your brain as well. The ICE murderer had learned to shoot people during the war on Iraq, which we know about through countless fictional and “news” accounts in which shooting people was a “service” to thank the shooter for. Now you’re expected to carry that belief over to Minneapolis where dwell humans who are supposed to matter, unless none of them are supposed to matter anymore, unless videos of reality are supposed to be dismissed as “all right because we know it’s not real” just like killing people in video games. The U.S. President talks about a fictional serial killer as some sort of honorable elder statesman but a real video from Minnesota as imaginary.

Only we all know it’s not imaginary, because of all the people (or robots) online telling us not only that it’s acceptable but also that it’s glorious. One must constantly remind oneself that the most powerful videos one shares to make others feel the horror of a war or genocide exist because some participants in that war saw those videos as celebratory. This growing and putrefying war culture has an impact. It increases crime. It harms children. It makes me ill.

There has long been a big “debate” over whether media violence contributes to real world violence, as there has been over whether fossil fuels damage the climate, or cigarettes (or video games) are addictive, or forever chemicals cause illnesses, or nonviolent activism racks up successes, or whether any other fact exists despite huge amounts of money being spent to say it doesn’t.

We ought to be able to predict that imitation-obsessed primates would imitate what they see and hear over and over and over, that money is spent on advertising for a reason, that lies are repeated incessantly for a reason, that those mass shooters who are not actually veterans often pretend to be at war for a reason, and that video games that didn’t lead to killing wouldn’t be developed by and used in training by militaries. But we don’t have to predict anything. The serious studies have been done. I recommend a book by Rose A. Dyson called Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy.

This book documents the evidence that violent media contributes to real violence, as well as the evidence of a decades-long campaign to distract us from that fact, or to shift blame onto parents and children rather than media producers or distributors. Just as oil companies would prefer for you to worry about your personal duty to turn off the lights when you leave a room (which, yes, you really should do), the manufacturers of murder entertainment inc. would prefer that you blame yourself for watching their swill (which, yes, you really should do — but not at the expense of failing to blame them).

What do we know and what can we do about it? I encourage you to join an online book club with Rose Dyson and find out.

• First published at World BEYOND War.

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David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and War Is a Crime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook. Read other articles by David.

AUSTRALIA

Festival of Cowardice: The Cancellation of

Randa Abdel-Fattah

by Binoy Kampmark / January 13th, 2026

Randa Abdel-Fattah

Boards of directors are a funny bunch. Often lacking expertise, claiming knowledge they do not have and insight that never illuminates, its members can make the cockup the stuff of legend. Instead of minding their own business and leaving the Adelaide Writers’ Week to take place without incident as part of the 2026 Adelaide Festival, an act of oafish meddling took place. The meddling centred on removing one invited author from the speaking schedule: the Australian-Palestinian writer and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, who was to discuss her novel Discipline.

The Festival Board’s statement explaining their decision began with a note of gravity. “As the Board responsible for the Adelaide Festival organisation and the Adelaide Writers’ Week events, staff, volunteers and participants, we have today [January 8] advised scheduled writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah that the Board has formed the judgment that we do not wish to proceed with her scheduled appearance at next month’s Writers’ Week.” Then came the note of pure cowardice, framed in the bankrupt language of middle-management. “Whilst we do not suggest in any way that Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah 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.”

Abdel-Fattah’s views on the war in Gaza had evidently proven so salty as to require her deprogramming. These were not specified, though various social media remarks and public statements attacking “this murderous Zionist colony” and claiming that Zionists had “no claim or right to cultural safety” were bound to have featured. Her removal was heartily approved by Norman Schueler of the Jewish Community Council of South Australia and the South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas.

If this decision was intended to reflect balance, intellectual awareness and understanding about the shootings on December 14, 2025 that took place at a Bondi Beach event celebrating the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, it failed on all counts. It ignored the fact that the two shooters had been allegedly inspired by Islamic State (ISIS or Daesh), an obscurantist group indifferent to Palestinian statehood and hostile to Hamas. (The repeated comparison of Hamas to ISIS by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always been erroneous to the point of mendacity.) It imputed a degree of responsibility to Abdel-Fattah as a Palestinian, a representative of a people systematically butchered, dispossessed and starved by the Israeli campaign. It implied that any discussion about Israel’s conduct in response to the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, one deemed genocidal by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and a number of known human rights organisations, was insensitive. Only the meek of opinion would be permitted, the impotent or inert celebrated.

A glance at some of the Board’s membership reveals corporate blandness and brand merchants versed in the nebulous world of “consultancy” and “communication”. No literary figures of note can be found, let alone historians, sociologists or anyone animated by what might loosely be called the liberal arts. There are – or least were, given several resignations – such figures as the now ex-chair, Tracey Whiting, adept in “strategic marketing, audience development and community engagement”. Leesa Chesser’s description sounds like that of an educated canine “trained in health economics and business”. Brenton Cox is all triumph and skill as managing director of Adelaide Airport. Daniela Ritorto is obviously less a journalist than a consultant about journalism, versed in “strategic communications advice” and, it would seem, “a sought-after master of ceremonies and panel moderator”. As with Australia’s innumerable and atrocious university managers, the country’s cultural and artistic governors cannot be accused of having a shred of aesthetic, let alone cerebral sense for the area of expertise they purport to control. It’s all show, and a rotten one too.

In a pugnacious statement, Abdel-Fattah called the decision to scratch her attendance “a blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship and a despicable attempt to associate me with the Bondi massacre.” Her very presence would be construed as “‘culturally insensitive’”, that she, as a Palestinian having nothing to do with the Bondi atrocity was “somehow a trigger for those in mourning”.

The Festival Board seemed to suffer the same maladies that had afflicted the organisers of the Bendigo Writers Festival last August. At the penultimate moment, they thought it wise to make writers and panellists subscribe to a Code of Conduct in what could only be seen as a nasty fit of Zhdanovism. Terms such as “Zionist” or “Zionism” were to be avoided, along with “topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive, or disrespectful.” Many writers recoiled and withdrew.

Cancellation fever, however, remains very modish in Australia when talking about the destruction of Gaza or Israel’s adversaries who must, by definition, be seen as playdough freaks of demonology. When pianist Jayson Gillham took issue with the brutality of Israel’s Gaza campaign during a 2024 recital, his contract was cancelled by invertebrate officials at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. (The matter is before the courts.) The artists Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino fared somewhat better, being first cancelled by Creative Australia from representing Australia at the Venice Biennale only to be reappointed after much cutting indignation.

For Abdel-Fattah, solidarity among the scribblers abounded. Of the initial 124 participants, some 100 have withdrawn. Among them are former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Adern, British author Zadie Smith, former Greek Finance Minister and rabble rouser Yanis Varoufakis, and Australian historian Clare Wright. Wright expressed shock and insult as a Jewish Australian that the Board had exploited “the tragedy of Bondi to weaponise its much loved and respected literary festival.”

Leaving aside the palpable implosion of an event that would have otherwise gone the way of most writers’ events, one lost in fine print and chatter, a supreme irony emerges. Abdel-Fattah, as with many writers, is not immune to the cancellation bug when it comes to those she does not like. In 2024, she added her name to a letter addressed to Adelaide Writers’ Week requesting the removal of Thomas Friedman from the schedule for his remarks in the New York Times analysing the Gaza War through the prism of the animal kingdom (the US, predictably, a lion, if old; Iran, a “parasitoid wasp”; Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, caterpillars; Benjamin Netanyahu, a sifaka lemur). Friedman has made a life of grand, insensitive readings of the human condition, fashioning revenue out of such cowpat efforts as The Lexus and the Olive Tree, but that’s hardly a reason to cancel him. People like that need to be paraded as treasures of ridiculous tripe, not kept hidden to wither.

To their credit, the Festival Board then, unlike now, held firm. Even crass stupidity should have a platform. “Asking the Adelaide Festival and Adelaide Writers’ Week to cancel an artist or writer is an extremely serious request,” came the response from Whiting. “We have an international reputation for supporting artistic freedom of expression.” Much like Whiting herself, that reputation has gone.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.