Outspoken academic Randa Abdel-Fattah blasts ‘pseudo intellectuals’ and ‘white supremacists’ in universities
Randa Abdel-Fattah has outlined how she injects activism into a ‘white supremacist’ academia while slamming ‘pseudo intellectuals’ in an expletive-ridden speech to an anti-racism symposium | WATCH
An anti-Israel activist with $1.28m in taxpayer grants has labelled fellow academics as cowardly white supremacists, while boasting of “bending rules’’ for research funding in an expletive-ridden speech to an anti-racism symposium.
Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, who works at Macquarie University, said her employer was “named after a genocidal coloniser and so I make sure whatever I do in this university is an act of resistance against that blood-soaked tribute’’.
“I look for ways to bend rules and refuse and subvert them,’’ she said.
Dr Abdel-Fattah boasted that she had refused an ARC requirement to hold a conference as a condition of her latest $870,000 taxpayer grant.
Instead, she invited women to contribute “revolutionary quotes’’ that were printed on coloured paper, cut into pieces and put into jars.
“We had to go back to being in primary school, and we cut those quotes and we shared together everybody’s revolutionary wisdom from each other’s communities,’’ she said.
“We were going back to WhatsApp messages that people had sent to each other, comments people have made around kitchen tables, protest slogans and chants’’.
Dr Abdel-Fattah was a guest speaker at the closed-door symposium organised by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Carumba Institute last Friday.
A recording and video have emerged of her provocative 15-minute speech to dozens of attendees at the National Symposium on Unifying Anti-Racist Research and Action.
Wrapped in a Palestinian Keffiyeh shawl, Dr Abdel-Fattah accepted a symposium award for “innovatively using social media as an anti-racist strategy in 2024’’.
A message posted on Dr Abdel-Fattah’s account on X (formerly Twitter) the day after Christmas stated: “May 2025 be the end of Israel. May it be the end of the US-Israeli imperial scourge on humanity’.’
A December 29 X post referred to “Israeli Zionist demons’’ killing Palestinians in Gaza.
Just a few days after Hamas terrorists used parachutes to invade Israel and butcher, rape or kidnap more than 1200 Jewish civilians, including young Israelis attending a music concert, the profile picture on Dr Abdel Fattah’s Facebook page was changed to a paratrooper in the colours of the Palestinian flag.
After accepting the conference award on Friday, Dr Abdel Fattah used her speech to criticise academics and outline “strategies that I’ve used for political love and accountability in the white supremacist system of the academy’’.
She read out what she called a “ceasefire agreement’’ between Australian police and Indigenous communities.
“The police must put down their weapons,’’ she said.
“No more guns in our communities. We cannot walk around in fear in our own homes.
“And I want to say that as a Palestinian, because how dare I call for a ceasefire in Gaza if I don’t acknowledge the genocide and the fact there is no f..king ceasefire here?’’
Dr Abdel-Fattah, who referred to universities and academia as “the academy’’, told the conference that she was “animated by insurgency, insurrection, change and not reform’’.
Taking aim at fellow academics as “pseudo intellectuals’’, she described them as “protectors and sustainers of white supremacy’’.
Dr Abdel-Fattah is the beneficiary of an $870,269 taxpayer grant over four years, awarded by the federal government’s ARC in 2023 to research the “hidden history” of Arab and Muslim Australians’ social projects since the 1970s.
She also received a $308,431 discovery grant for early-career researchers in 2018, to “explore issues of trust relations, political consciousness and fears among Muslim and non-Muslim youth in Australia’’.
At the Carumba Institute conference, Dr Abdel-Fattah referred to her ARC grant requirements and stated that “I didn’t want to do this in a traditional way’’.
“Part of my funding is to hold a traditional academic conference, and I thought, ‘No, I’m not going to do that’,’’ she said.
“And so what I did was I took some of the funding, and instead of holding a conference, I did something called a Jars for Preservation workshop, where I invited women across community of all different backgrounds – a lot of childcare workers, stay at home mums, students, academics from all across … communities of settlers of colour, and First Nations women.
“I invited them to send me their most beloved quotes from their warriors, their feminist women, their scholars, people who have inspired them and given them that revolutionary zeal and nourished them.
“They sent it to me, I printed it out in coloured paper, everybody got a jar, and we sat down as a workshop and we cut.’’
Dr Abdel-Fattah revealed how she combines her activism and taxpayer-funded research with writing award-winning children’s books.
“Every academic piece of writing I do, I make sure to write a parallel children’s or young adult fiction book,’’ she said.
“Because I want what I am learning to extend beyond students in the academy, to go right down to the grassroots of education.
“We are surrounded by cowards and pseudo intellectuals in the academy, by people who rise the academic ladder, who are exploiting and mining – literally – communities, who posture as progressive and decolonial, and copy and paste acknowledgements of country into their email signatures, but are protectors and sustainers of white supremacy.
“I know the system cannot be reformed. It is totally rotten.’’
Dr Abdel-Fattah has written 12 books, including the children’s picture book 11 Words for Love, which was short-listed for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in 2023.
Her books have also won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for best young adult fiction novel, and the Australian Industry Book Award for young adult readers.
Last year, Dr Abdel-Fattah was filmed clapping beside a group of young children as they chanted “intifada’’ – a word meaning “uprising’’, which has become a rallying cry for violence against Israel – during an excursion to a pro-Palestinian protest encampment at the University of Sydney.
In her speech to the Carumba Institute symposium on Friday, Dr Abdel Fattah spoke of “some of the practical things I do’’ to be subversive – including censoring other academics she described as “deficient human beings’’.
“I refuse to cite anybody who has remained silent over Gaza, no matter how authoritative and big they are in their respective fields,’’ she said to applause from the audience.
“If they have remained silent, they are not scholars to me, they are not thinkers, they are deficient human beings.
“I will not participate in validating them.’’
Dr Abdel-Fattah told the audience that “I use my power and position to challenge myself and my communities to refuse settler parental recognition and to really think about solidarity’’.
“Another way that I try to be subversive is with my own community of students, especially students of Muslim and Arab backgrounds,’’ she said.
“There is a seduction in the whole idea of multiculturalism.’’
Dr Abdel-Fattah, who described herself as “the daughter of empire’’, recounted how a first-year university students had sought her help to research Islamophobia in the media.
“So I sent her away and I said, can you just go and collate every article that’s been written about (Indigenous Senator) Lydia Thorpe,’’ she said.
“I didn’t have to lecture her, but then she would organically get it – she would understand what it means to be a black woman in this colony.’’
The Australian’s expose’ of Dr Abdel-Fattah’s speech follows the furore over a presentation to the conference by the left-wing Jewish Council of Australia’s executive officer, Sarah Schwartz, who showed slides of a superhero dressed as “Dutton’s Jew’’ with a list of attributes stating they hate Muslims, are anti-immigrant and are willing to hug Opposition Leader Peter Dutton for “photo ops’’.
In an unrelated session at the conference, a slide was shown with the words “throat punch a racist’’, with cartoons of people being punched.
In closing the conference on Friday, organiser Chelsea Watego – executive director of the Carumba Institute and Professor of Indigenous Health at QUT’s School of Public Health and Social Work – rebuked an attendee she accused of leaking the “Dutton’s Jew” video to The Australian.
Another female voice in the room shouted “punch him in the throat’’.
Jewish academic Yoni Nazarathy, an associate professor of artificial intelligence from the University of Queensland, told The Australian he had felt afraid and humiliated as attendees stood and shouted “shame’’ while he stayed seated.
QUT vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil apologised on Friday for the “hurt and offence’’ caused by the conference, after federal Education Minister Jason Clare phoned to remind her of the university’s obligation to abide by its code of conduct.
Professor Watego has not responded to The Australian’s requests for comment.
Queensland Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek said he would use a meeting with Professor Sheil next week to “seek an explanation … to prevent a repeat of this very disappointing episode’’.
Dr Abdel Fattah did not respond to The Australian’s request for comment.
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