Morry Schwartz, the owner of Black Inc and Schwartz Media which publishes the ailing The Saturday Paper and his PC flagship, The Monthly, has called on Louise Adler to resign as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, claiming she invited “authors of hate speech” to the festival.

In a letter to The Australian, Schwartz said antisemitism was “again showing its ugly historical face. It is again being normalised and made acceptable”, regarding comments made by Abulhawa and El-Kurd.

“I call on Louise Adler, who invited the authors of these atrocities to Adelaide Writers’ Week, to disinvite them. And I call on her to resign,” Schwartz said.

These writers were attacking the state of Israel, the displacement of the Palestinian people and the fact that Palestinian children are being shot for throwing rocks at tanks.

On Tuesday, before Schwartz’s call, Adler said she had found the “antagonism towards individual writers [to be] disturbing and immoderate”.

She said that both Abulhawa and El-Kurd have been asked to participate in the program because of their published work – which continues pertinent discussions about “land, homelands, dispossession and exile” – not what they write on social media.

I call on people who value free speech over de-platforming, to stop buying Schwartz’s papers or books from Black Inc.