Andrew Bolt: Academic can’t get much lower than cheering on children parroting war cries against Israel

An Australian academic can’t get much lower than to cheer on children parroting war cries against Israel – so why on earth are we paying her?

An Australian academic can’t get much lower than to cheer on children parroting war cries against Israel.

Yet Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah last Friday clapped along as a boy of primary school age chanted “intifada, intifada”.

Also given the mic at Abdel-Fattah’s anti-Israel “family event” at Sydney University was a child chanting for Israel’s destruction from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Abdel-Fattah, a Macquarie University fellow, is now getting big coverage for her latest stunt, but I’ve followed her for years and can say she’s said a lot worse, only to be rewarded, including by the Albanese Government.

For instance, I was shocked by her reaction to the 2018 murder of Melbourne cafe owner Sisto Malaspina by Islamist terrorist Hassan Khalif Shire Ali.

“I, an Australian Muslim, refuse to condemn the violence that took place on Bourke Street,” she wrote in The Age.

“To ask me to condemn is to strip me of my basic humanity.”

Randa Abdel-Fattah (wearing the keffiyeh) attended a protest where a boy chanted 'intifada'. Picture: Instagram

Really? My humanity felt strengthened by repudiating evil.

But Abdel-Fattah preferred in her article to condemn Australia’s “state-sponsored terrorism” and “patriarchal, racist, capitalist social order”.

It got worse. She recently helped publicise a leaked list of Jews on a WhatsApp website who were discussing the new anti-Semitism, and issued what to me sounded a threat: “to ensure that every space Zionists enter is culturally unsafe for them’.

This year for International Women’s Day she even shared a poster on her Instagram page of “a few of the many icons of unstoppable Palestinian women that have inspired us”.

They included Islamist terrorist Leila Khaled, who hijacked two passenger jets around 50 years ago, and Dalal Mughrabi, who in 1978 joined a terrorist raid on Israel which slaughtered 38 civilians, including 13 children and an American wildlife photographer, a woman who pointed the way to Tel Aviv and was shot dead by Mughrabi herself.

With that record I believe Abdel-Fattah shouldn’t hold job in any Australian university, yet she not only has one at Macquarie but was given $802,000 by the Albanese Government to help activists like her make common cause with other Left-wing groups here, especially Aboriginal ones.

The State Library of NSW also paid her to head a jury to judge one of this year’s NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

Now she’s encouraging even children in Australia to cry for intifada. Why on earth are we paying her?