Grant funding must be stripped

Anti-Israel academic Randa Abdel-Fattah says she “looks for ways to bend rules, and refuse and subvert them”, including those that apply to her $870,000 taxpayer-funded research project.

This is enough for Education Minister Jason Clare to correctly call for the Australian Research Council to investigate her refusal to hold a conference, a standard practice for such ARC awards.

The minister should also ask the ARC how Australia benefits from research by an activist who calls for the end of Israel and whose test of academic worth is agreeing with her on Gaza.

And he can call on the council to consider how her statements sit with the National Interest Test, which was a basis of funding.

Dr Abdel-Fattah’s project is meant to show how “contemporary minority communities … can negotiate the politics of exclusion and inclusion and nurture united relationships”.

Given her vile denunciations of Israel and her contempt for academic integrity based on respectful debate, it is hard to see where “united relationships” fit.

And it is impossible to see how the ARC can continue her funding.

Perhaps she would have got away with not behaving as other researchers do if she’d kept her mouth shut.

But discretion, as well as common courtesy to other academics, is not something she does.

As Natasha Bita reported on Friday, Dr Abdel-Fattah described Macquarie University, where she works, as named after “a genocidal coloniser”, and academics as “protectors and sustainers of white supremacy”, as well as “cowards and pseudo-intellectuals”.

She is also light on for logic: If the higher education system is so terrible, how is it that she has received, and why did she accept, multiple grants?

Mr Clare has a reserve power to veto research funding on national security grounds and, in these days of anti-Semitic violence threatening the safety of Australian Jews and community peace, he could have used it.

Not doing so probably reflects concern that protesting about academic independence could distract attention from the real issue – the appalling behaviour of an academic who demonstrates no respect for the rights of all Australians who reject her hate speech. But if Mr Clare won’t act, the ARC must.