Michael Gawenda’s submission to the (absurd) Royal Commission is being highlighted in the ABC today and it is as self pitying and grandiose as you can imagine. Chief amongst his complaints are that he has “lost friends” due to “Jew hatred”, that he hasn’t been invited to any of the literary festivals held after Oct 7, and that he has been “reduced to a Zionist supporter of a genocidal Israel.”

This is the same Michael Gawenda who has repeatedly (and prior to Oct 7) flogged in print the dead horse of his defunct friendship with Louise Adler, the Jewish (now former) director of the Adelaide Writers Week. This was a friendship of more than 30 years - and one in which Adler as publisher at MUP also published several of Gawenda’s books - that Gawenda chose to end.

And not only did Gawenda choose to end it, he also chose to publicly (and repeatedly) excavate the reasons why he chose to end that friendship - the most notable of which was that in 2021, Adler had joined other writers and journalists in signing an open letter condemning Israel’s renewed military assault on Gaza and calling for an end to the Zionist lobby’s threats against honest reporting.

Gawenda writes that he raged privately at Adler at the time, but then canned the friendship for good when she commissioned the journo John Lyons to write a short book on how the Zionist lobby’s interferes with Australians reporting on Israel - outrageous, according to Gawenda, especially given Lyons didn’t interview HIM.

This is all laid out in an excerpt of Gawenda’s book, “My Life As A Jew”:

In Dec 2023, Gawenda (whose submission to the RC positions him as the wretched target of animosity and “ended friendships”) wrote another scathing piece about Adler (this time on his Slopstack), criticising the citing of her Jewish “credentials” in an interview she did with the ABC’s Laura Tingle:

“To which Louise replied that her grandfather was murdered at the Birkenau Death Camp—gassed most probably I assume―and her father was in the French resistance during the war. Her father, she implied, would be proud of her though perhaps not so much, I thought, her murdered grandfather.

[My note: how dare this bloviated old goat whine about hostility and antisemitism when he feels completely comfortable projecting political views that favour his own onto the dead grandfather of a woman he needs to go to therapy over?]

It seems widely accepted now—and Tingle certainly accepted it—that all you have to do to be a kosher Jew, a proud Jew unassailably fighting for the rights of the Palestinians and advocating for the end of Israel and calling out powerful Jews who are trying to destroy theatre companies and shutting down any criticism of Israel, is to proudly say that your parents or grandparents or third cousins twice removed were Holocaust survivors.

It is never clear just how having relatives who were killed or managed to live through the Holocaust, in any way gives you a special moral clarity, any sort of authentic lived experience, a greater sense of what is morally right and wrong and some sort of almost metaphysical empathy for the suffering of others.  It is never clear because it is nonsense.”

THE IRONY.

In his book, Gawenda also wrote this about Adler’s Lyons commission:

“It is disgraceful for journalists to state as facts or truths what is open to debate and contradiction. This is the road to fake news.”

Perhaps Gawenda should remember that as he asserts that his absence at Australian literary festivals and the ending of friendships with him is due to unequivocal “Jew hatred” and not, say, the fact he’s an intolerable fuckwit obsessed with his own importance and the sanitising of his grotesque Zionist ideology against his prideful insistence on being “left wing”.