If there has been a bright red thread running through my career, it’s the importance of freedom of speech. It underpinned my life as a journalist and correspondent, became central to the campaign to get me out of prison in Egypt and, perhaps paradoxically, it is why I have reluctantly withdrawn from this year’s Adelaide writers’ week.

On Thursday the Adelaide festival board announced it had removed the writer and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from the program, not because of anything she was proposing to say at the festival but because of things she said previously, reassessed in the aftermath of the Bondi attack.

In the words of the board, “given her past statements, we have formed the view that it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time …”

That is a........

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