‘I refused to join the Adelaide Writers Week boycott. The attacks on me since have been frightening’
Last week, the Adelaide Writers Week decided to remove one of the most prominent Palestinian writers from its program – a decision that was deeply shocking.
It also forced me to ask: does Australia finally intend to hear other voices too?
Across the past year, almost every voice other than protest in support of Palestinian rights has effectively been ignored or silenced. For this reason, when The Guardian asked whether I intended to boycott the festival in protest, my answer was no – because the festival is also one of the few platforms through which the voices of Iranians can reach the world, and I was not prepared to see that space closed as well.
The publication of this response quickly led to a co-ordinated attack on my Instagram page, and the tone of the messages soon became openly threatening. One person wrote, “Go back to your country, you fat ugly woman.” Another wrote, “Death to Iran and the Pahlavis.” In a private message, someone even wrote, “You should be killed like the Israelis.” Several people threatened to boycott my books. By the end of that day, I was forced to delete the post in order to return to the solitary life of a writer.
This experience was deeply shocking to me and made me ask whether we are returning to the atmosphere of the early years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution – whether Australia is beginning to resemble the patterns of intimidation and exclusion that so many of us fled in the Middle East.
It was this sense of danger within the intellectual and cultural sphere that finally pushed me out of my silence to speak openly about what I am witnessing and fearing.
I come from a society where, for many years, only one voice was allowed to exist: the voice of extremist political Islam. Every other voice was erased or brutally suppressed. For this reason, on both ethical and principled grounds, I oppose the silencing of any voice in the public sphere – whether that voice belongs to the people of Palestine or to ordinary people (not governments) in Israel, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon and especially Iran.
I strongly and unequivocally support the right of Palestinians to be heard and to live with dignity, security and justice. But with the same conviction, I reject and condemn the silencing of any other people’s suffering. Human beings cannot be divided into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” victims.
I say this not as a professional political activist but as a writer who has spent many years immersed in the literature, history and mythology of the Middle East. I am not usually involved in day-to-day political battles. Yet what I see today in Australia deeply concerns me: not simply disagreement but a growing structural intolerance toward hearing different views. This climate strongly reminds me of the years following the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, when labelling, exclusion and ideological purges gradually pushed the intellectual sphere towards monophony, and the mechanisms that were meant to resist tyranny became tools of repression themselves. Our history shows that monophony does not lead to justice; it ultimately leads to the establishment of some of the most violent and ideological regimes in the region.
In today’s polarised environment, it often seems that if you do not explicitly condemn Israel, you are immediately placed on the “wrong side” of history; and if you speak about Palestinian suffering while also acknowledging the suffering of Iranians, Afghans or Yemenis, you are accused of diverting the conversation.
I fundamentally reject this logic. Supporting Palestinians is, for me, a non-negotiable moral principle. But that principle must never be weaponised to erase or marginalise the suffering of other people – especially those who have lived for decades under extremist Islamist regimes and have paid for regional ideological projects with their own lives and futures.
This is precisely why I am among the writers who understand the dilemmas faced by the Writers Week – not because I agree with silencing anyone but because I am deeply worried about the increasingly polarised and monophonic climate within parts of Australia’s intellectual and cultural communities. A climate where every cultural decision is immediately dragged into ideological warfare, leaving little space for genuine dialogue.
My fear is that if cultural institutions cannot maintain their independence from political pressure, they will become instruments of the same exclusionary logic the Middle East has suffered from for decades.
And this is why I hope that in literary festivals we will hear not only Palestinian writers but also Israeli, Yemeni, Afghan, Iranian, African and many other voices – equally and without fear. This is the society I sought refuge in. This is the society I still hope to see realised: one that does not replace one form of exclusion with another but actively protects pluralism, complexity and dialogue.
Cultural and literary spaces, if they are to have any meaning, must be places where opposing views can coexist, not arenas for ideological purges.
Silencing a voice – even one we strongly disagree with – does not bring us closer to truth or justice. It only pushes us closer to the mechanisms of repression we claim to oppose.
If the intellectual community cannot tolerate complexity and insists on reducing the Middle East to simplistic moral binaries, it risks serving the same structures that have kept the region trapped in cycles of violence for generations.
Today, however, this is no longer merely a theoretical or cultural debate for me. During the past two weeks, 85 million Iranians across cities and villages have been engaged in an effort to overthrow the Islamic regime. For the past five days, the internet has been completely shut down, and reports speak of thousands massacred. This is a full-scale humanitarian catastrophe.
My expectation of Australia’s and the world’s intellectual communities is that they do not turn their eyes away from the painful reality that large parts of the Middle East are victims of extremist political Islam – the same ideology that has taken Palestinians hostage, as well as Iranians, Afghans, Yemenis, Syrians and Lebanese. I expect them to stand with the people, to defend us and to be our voice rather than dismissing our suffering because it does not fit neatly into simplified political narratives.
I want to address those who ask why Iranians do not reject the support of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The answer is simple: Western powers had 50 years to stand with the people of Iran but they chose silence because instability in the Middle East served their strategic interests.
In the past two years, the only two figures who publicly and forcefully stood with the Iranian people were Trump and Netanyahu. If the free world had truly stood by us, we would never have had to accept help from the US and Israel. In truth, it was not we who turned our backs on the world; the world that turned its back on us.
I firmly believe the solution is not for Australia to become polarised like the Middle East. Australia is not meant to resemble the Middle East; rather, the Middle East deserves to one day resemble societies like Australia – societies built on dialogue, law and coexistence.
The only way out of this endless cycle of violence, hatred and erasure is a return to the roots that existed in the culture of us Iranians long before modern ideologies – roots grounded in human dignity, freedom of conscience and peaceful coexistence. The same values articulated under Cyrus the Great in what is widely recognised as the first declaration of human rights, emphasising respect for diverse beliefs, the rejection of slavery and the right of people to live freely.
Today, the people of Iran are once again striving to return to those foundations, to a culture in which human beings come before ideology.I believe Iran will move again towards these ethical principles, towards a society built not on revenge and exclusion but on responsibility, empathy and respect for human life.
How ignorant. Doesn't she know that colonialism and Zionism are the reason why the Middle East have been trapped in cycles of violence since the Sunni-Shiite split?!
