The collapse of this year’s Adelaide Writer’s Week is a sad sign of the times after a Palestinian writer was cancelled for daring to criticise Israel.
I gave the following comments to AAP:
Independent journalist and author Antony Loewenstein, who sits on the advisory committee of the Jewish Council of Australia and has regularly appeared at the Adelaide event, said such lobbying moves were “a familiar pattern”.
“What worries me greatly is these kinds of actions are worsening anti-Semitism because what a lot of people are seeing, and I’m talking about non-Jews here, is often secretive, powerful, in my view bigoted, powerful forces trying to curtail or silence critical voices,” he told AAP.
“That leads to very unfortunate stereotypes about Jews, which is something I worry about as a Jew.”