Normal People, Abnormal Judgement: Sally Rooney's Suicidal Empathy

Sally Rooney's books are gone from British shops.

Not burned.

Not banned.

Simply no longer supplied, in any format, by her own publisher.

Faber says it can't legally pass on her UK royalties, because she pledged the proceeds to Palestine Action, a group Britain has proscribed as a terrorist organisation.

There's a phrase for this.

Canadian professor Gad Saad made it famous, and it's the title of his book: Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind.

Look at that phrase for a second.

Suicidal empathy.

Saad's point is simple.

Empathy is a good thing until it's aimed at the wrong target, in the wrong amount, and starts destroying the very people showing it.

I can't think of a neater example than a celebrated novelist torching her own British readership to bankroll a banned group.

She wanted to make a stand.

She's made a bonfire, and her own books are the kindling.

The Facts, Plainly

Rooney is Irish, not English, and she's no fringe pamphleteer.

She wrote Normal People and Conversations with Friends.

Both became hit TV shows.

She is, by any measure, among the biggest-selling writers of her generation.

On 20 June 2025, Palestine Action activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and sprayed red paint into the engines of two military aircraft.

Within a fortnight, the British parliament voted to proscribe the group.

The ban took effect in July 2025.

Palestine Action calls itself a direct action movement.

Its favourite target has been Israeli arms maker Elbit Systems, and the UK government cited millions of pounds in property damage at defence sites when it moved to ban it.

Under UK law, supporting a proscribed group can land you up to 14 years in prison.

In August 2025, Rooney wrote in the Irish Times: "I too support Palestine Action."

"If this makes me a 'supporter of terror' under U.K. law, so be it."

She then pledged the proceeds of her books, and of the TV adaptations, to the group.

The legal fight hasn't finished.

The High Court ruled the ban unlawful in February 2026.

The Court of Appeal overturned that in June.

The UK Supreme Court hears the case on 4 and 5 November.

Until then, the ban stands.

So Faber is sitting on money it can't hand over.

Its statement called it an "unconscionable situation for a publisher".

For the record, nobody has shown that a single pound of Rooney's UK royalties has reached Palestine Action.

The money is stuck, precisely because the law won't let it move.

That's the system working.

It's also the system being forced to step in because a grown woman insisted on making her own career the test case.

She Saw This Coming

This wasn't an ambush.

In a High Court witness statement in November 2025, Rooney warned her books could vanish from UK shops.

They have.

She told the Bookseller that fulfilling contracts to publish her work in the UK "could now constitute a serious criminal offense".

She said she was "wholly prepared to accept the consequences".

Wholly prepared.

She weighed her readers against the cause and picked the cause, in writing, on the record.

Faber says the decision to pull supply was made in full agreement with her.

She has also cancelled trips to the UK, reportedly over fears she could be arrested.

Nor is this her first grand gesture.

In 2021 she declined to let an Israeli publisher put out a Hebrew translation of her latest novel, citing the BDS boycott movement.

So the Israeli reader was cut off first.

Now the British reader is cut off too.

Readers here in Australia can still buy her, for now.

Kindness Aimed the Wrong Way

Here's the bit that gets under my skin.

Privileged white women, yet again, empathetic to the point of trying to fund a group banned as terrorists.

I don't say that lightly.

I say it because the pattern is so familiar it's almost boring.

Comfortable.

Educated.

Celebrated by the very institutions they claim to despise.

Secure in a Western democracy that guarantees them a vote, a voice, a passport and a royalty cheque.

And all that compassion is pointed outward, at causes that would happily take every one of those freedoms away.

Plenty of blokes do it too.

But it's the comfortable class, male and female, that seems to find it easiest to love the people who'd least love them back.

It costs them nothing they can't afford.

That's the luxury.

The staff at the Elbit site in Bristol, which the group raided in 2024, didn't get to feel noble about it.

They got the damage, the clean-up and the fright.

The novelist gets an op-ed, a round of applause and a reputation for courage.

Rooney's novels are about tender, anxious young people working out how to be decent to each other.

Her politics are about something else entirely.

That gap is what Saad is describing.

The empathy isn't fake.

It's just aimed at the wrong people, cranked up to the wrong volume, and the bill lands on the person holding the pen.

Her British readers lose her books.

Her publisher loses a bestseller.

Rooney loses a country she can safely visit.

And the cause she's backing?

It gets a headline.

That's a strange kind of kindness.

It hurts nearly everyone it touches, and the one outcome it reliably produces is a warm glow for the person doing it.

The Cheer Squad

Rooney didn't invent this.

She's just the latest, most bookish example.

Think back to October 2023.

The bodies in southern Israel hadn't all been identified when 34 Harvard student groups put out a statement holding "the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence".

Entirely.

Not Hamas, the people who did the killing.

Israel.

Those were some of the most privileged young people on Earth, at one of the most expensive universities on Earth, rushing to explain away a massacre.

Then there's Queers for Palestine.

Gay and lesbian Westerners waving rainbow placards for a cause, while Gaza under Hamas has never been a safe place to be openly gay.

I'm all for solidarity.

I'm less keen on cheering a cause whose rulers would treat you as a criminal for who you love.

And closer to home, two days after October 7, a crowd marched on the Sydney Opera House while the sails were lit in Israel's colours for the dead.

What many of us heard that night was "gas the Jews".

Police later said a forensic expert concluded the words were "where's the Jews".

They also confirmed other antisemitic chants were used.

Pick your version.

Neither one is comforting.

What links all of it is the same reflex.

Feel deeply, pick a side early, and never ask what the side you've picked actually stands for.

That's suicidal empathy in a sentence.

The compassion is real enough.

The judgement has gone missing.

We're Stuck

Now for the uncomfortable bit, for me and for AP.

We are for free speech.

Full stop.

Banning books is against everything we stand for.

I don't want any government deciding which novels Australians, or Britons, are allowed to read.

If the UK state had marched into Waterstones and confiscated Normal People because of what's printed in it, I'd be first in line to call it out.

I'd say the same about Canberra.

We've watched this country pile up hate laws at a rate of knots, and I trust none of them to stay in their lane.

But that's not what happened.

Nobody banned her words.

Her ideas are still in every library in Britain.

Faber still sells her books everywhere else in the world.

She could write a 400-page novel savaging Israel tomorrow and it would be published.

What she can't do is route the money to a proscribed group.

That's a choice she made, with her eyes open, after her own witness statement had predicted exactly where it would end.

She could have given every cent to a hospital in Gaza.

A food charity.

A children's fund.

She chose the group that breaks into air bases and smashes up arms factories.

So yes, we're stuck.

A law that makes a novelist's royalties a potential crime makes me uneasy.

Free speech people should never get comfortable watching the state decide where an author's money may go.

But c'mon.

Call them activists.

Call them direct action.

Call them whatever the arts pages prefer.

The way I see it, she's giving the money from her books to jihadis.

That's what this looks like from out here.

A rich, admired writer, in a free country, pointing her fortune at a group that sabotages the defence industry of the nation whose readers made her rich.

You don't get to do that and then cry censorship when the bookshelf goes empty.

Nice Things

Here's what really grates.

Free speech is a nice thing.

A publishing industry that will print almost anything is a nice thing.

A country where a writer can call her own government wrong and keep her career is a very nice thing.

All of that depends on people not using those freedoms to underwrite groups the law has banned.

Every time someone does, the people who hate free speech get a fresh argument.

More laws.

More lists.

More powers.

And the next writer, the one who hasn't pledged a cent to anybody, pays for it.

That's the real damage.

Not one author's lost British sales, but the ammunition she's handed to every politician itching for a broader law.

Freedom only survives when the people enjoying it show a little restraint.

Not silence.

Restraint.

Rooney had every freedom a writer could want, and she spent it on the one gesture guaranteed to make free societies more nervous about freedom.

Rooney says she'll wear the consequences.

The trouble is, she isn't the only one who has to.

Her British readers are paying.

Her publisher is paying.

And every free speech case the rest of us want to make just got harder, because she gave the other side its perfect exhibit.

She wanted to be kind.

She ended up proving Saad's point for him.

This is why we can't have nice things.

And Remember:

Trust no Single Source

Trust Your Gut

and Stay Curious

Lee Robbins

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