Should I apologize for $2 million?

The word "apology" has two very different meanings. I prefer the old-school one, if any, when it comes to my undying support for Israel and the Jewish People.

“Pro-Palestinian” college students and faculty members across the West are blatantly lying to their peers, gaslighting Jews, and spreading dangerous propaganda. (photo: Nikolas Gannon)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay written by Paul Finlayson of Freedom to Offend.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Share this essay using this link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/should-i-apologize-for-2-million-dollars

---

Editor’s Note: Professor Paul Finlayson (who is neither Jewish nor Israeli) was placed on administrative leave at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto after writing on social media, following the October 7th Hamas-led massacres in Israel, that he stands with Israel and those who stand with Hamas are standing with Nazis.

---

For over seven months, I have been suspended from my professorial pleasures.

This means no side chats in the hallways with Elizabeth (the cleaning lady); no brainstorming over grand creative projects with students; no writing and tweaking custom textbooks for my courses; no hearing of students' entrepreneurial dreams (one former teacher’s assistant started a brand that is now known worldwide, but I don’t think my advice helped him much); no real talks with the office door closed; no hearing about my students’ hurts, their pain about their parents’ divorce, or their stories of how they were affected by the racism of low expectations growing up in Rexdale (a neighborhood of Toronto, Ontario, Canada).

I miss it all, but I am banned from campus and from communicating with all students, faculty, and staff — past, present, and future. If I communicate with anyone who has any connection to my university, the third-ranking public safety officer at a related college (where I don’t even teach) said she’d report me to the police for criminal harassment.

So, I guess my lunch with the dude who picks up the shredded paper every Wednesday is cancelled.

Yes, apparently, in this new world run by third-ranking parking and security officers with messianic ambitions, it is a criminal offense to WhatsApp the staff member who pulls students aside and whispers to them about fictional events, criminal accusations, all the while saying that she has “inside sources.” I may not, at risk of imprisonment,  tell her to stop telling lies about me. I guess being told to stop defaming me might hurt her feelings, and hurt feelings really, really matter these days.

Maybe they want to add another “hurt feelings” panic button to the school app.  

The right to defame without consequences must have sneaked into the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Who knew? But most of my law training comes from watching cop documentaries on the Discovery Network, so I’m no better than a first-year law student.

I still have yet to have a chance to defend myself. The crawl of cancel culture has been purely digital. I have never met my accuser or the claimant. They have never spoken a word to me, and even their digital complaints have bypassed me, my intentions have been thrown into the tornado that is social media, ragged remnants of my speech, now torn to bits have been left miles away from the centre of my intentions, like rubbish on the ground after an outdoor concert, with some half-truths caught on digital fence posts.

Yes, the racist professor, the violent racist professor, the tens of thousands of digital wanted posters that have gone out with the picture of me wearing my one suit — yes,  fire him, fire him, fire him, terminate him, he assaulted students, he has been causing problems for years, he went to a student’s house. He threatened the family. He probably shot JFK and probably poked the hole in the Chinese lab to let COVID-19 run amok.

Did you hear that? Indeed, by some miracle of telepathic transmission, within hours of my suspension, before I even knew the charges, faculty were telling lies to students, and politically unfriendly staff were pulling aside students to try to convert them to some perverse religion in which I am a prominent demon.

My suspension and treatment are simply a case of senior management at the University of Guelph-Humber using the institution's labor and financial resources as their political proxy to attack me.

Yes, with all the rumors, the flotsam of my broken ship has been left on the rocks of malice, self-righteous indulgence, and people’s perverse delight in pretending to stand on the bulwarks above the deck, defiant, as if bravely facing the winds of prejudice, I think there was a scene in “Titanic” where Leonardo DiCaprio struck a similar pose.  The truth is, though, that there is no ship of war but merely a bourgeois pleasure craft, and the day is warm and pleasant, and the breezes are light.

Despite all this, and despite this extended and someone tortured ship analogy, I am still fighting to be able to offer a defense and not just have some randomly assigned person write a report that determines whether I am sacked based on interviews with 15 people already on the record for wanting me sacked.

And if she writes a negative report, I have the right to appeal, but unfortunately, to the same person who filed the claim against me; again, this is all because I said I stood with Israel and that Hamas is a group of modern-day Nazis. 

But nothing much is happening, and to this point, everything is digital; I have been involved in about two minutes of discussions. But the lawyers are making out well. 

As a human rights complaint respondent, I might want to discuss this with someone connected to the process. By that, I mean words vocalized, not just written, but not yet — it’s just been seven months. 

I could send management a string of emojis, but that would probably be considered criminal harassment, and the police seem to have a double standard: hot coffee for screaming and threatening terrorist-endorsing Arab protestors, and arrest for Jewish supporters.

But enough of the social media. Social media is not really very social, not in any decent way. It is social in the sense that there are often people on the other end of those messages (though there are many, many bots). It is often para-social (creating delusional relationships with strangers), but messages, packetized and targeted through the wonder of the internet, are often nothing more than the much-discussed practice of virtue-signaling. 

Social media use is like a dog race, where the fake rabbit is on a stick that is permanently in front of the dogs. (I have never been to a dog race, but this is what I’ve heard happens.). It is mindlessly circling around idols that people never get close enough to see.

When we see someone in flesh and blood, we are not so harsh. It is not just a social convention; it is much more than fear of creating offense. It is because we see their eyes, we see their hands, we hear their tone, and we set their words in a painting in which all the rich features mentioned above provide context and background color.

It is how we draw meaning, where we allow ourself not to simply take a stream of words and digitally crush them, stick them full of gossipy firecrackers and toss them into the sky. At the same time, we gaze dumbly, looking at all the brightness and color we have made — we can even feel the heat — is this ignition not the essence of new truths?

I have never before had unadulterated lies created about me. In my case, the classroom assault falsehood did not evolve through gossip but was deliberately formed and injected into a closed social ecosphere.

I know one person or perhaps a pair who created them, but the university has yet to be interested in speaking with them. One might think administrators like the sulphureous vapors of lies. Of course, the administration will say they don’t believe such fiction, but they like the effect.

In a small university, you can work backwards, looking at the diminishing velocity of the rumors.

For example, when nobody has heard the vile lie of me assaulting a student before a person who claims to have heard it five days previous, it’s more than reasonable to assume that this “I heard it five days earlier” person did not spread the lie; they created it.

It is especially sad when foolish, excitable students do this, but infinitely worse when your colleagues whose Jew-hatred, previously hidden like the cicadas, have burst out to join the insect chorus.

Lies are curious; they work on different levels. Normal people would say, that’s a lie; there is no evidence. Can’t you use reason? But it’s important to note that people are hurt not only by the effect of the lie but by the creation of it. They say: “I can’t believe you invented such horrible lies about me!”

Often, one feels a subtle gaslighting, the aroma of rotten eggs. How could they say I did something criminal that I did not do? Am I the mad one here?  

But then you realize that it has nothing to do with reason, logic, or witnesses that strangely no one seems to have met. The propagators of the lie are there to enjoy the attention they get as they whisper it in the hallways, in the administrative lunch rooms, or behind the podium after the class has finished. It is a delicious morsel made up of attention and validation, often propelled by past resentments and jealousies.  

The proverb calls the person who creates conflict “perverse.” This has no sexual connotation; that interpretation is thoroughly modern. The word comes from the Hebrew word “ikkesh” whose primary definition means twisted, distorted, and crooked.

Cancel culture has never had a better friend than social media. It is more than just a hyper-focus on past and present speech; some act like it is a noble tool designed to help us better monitor speech. It is not.

Social media is not a poker to contain fire. It is gasoline and explosives designed to spread fire. It is unashamedly brazen about its entire purpose: to capture and sell attention.

The two photos below are from organizations whose “reason for being” is to get people who support Israel’s right to exist sacked, fired and canned. Yes, I am a Zionist.

One calls me a racist — I am not — but it reeks of desperation to say I am not. What am I supposed to do, list all my Black friends? The other that has been re-tweeted over 640 times focuses on the separation between Palestinian non-combatants and combatants, I believe I said Palestinian government, meaning Hamas, and it has been deliberately altered, even this copy has been altered; the post I responded to has been removed, making it look like I was responding to some facile piece on mental health in Gaza.   

Thirty-two thousand viewers were encouraged to contact my university and advocate for my termination, even if only 0.1 percent of the investigation produced 3,200 “Fire the bastard!” emails. I was never so popular. And every one of these emails is used against me, as if social media amplification and truth and justice were the same thing.

The deep irony of this is that those who brought this complaint against me are not even students, at least not the majority of them; I responded righteously to a man calling for the extermination of seven million Jews and two million Arabs and was correct when I noted the historical connection between Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood was a Hitler fanatic, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a Nazi groupie. But I’m sure the grainy video of this is just AI magic.   Hajj Amin al-Husayni, an Arab nationalist and prominent Muslim religious leader, is shown in the video meeting Hitler for the first time. They look so chummy.  

But the latest postmodern fad is that reason and truth are rubbish justifications for speech. If what you say is true, but someone feels bad about it, their feelings are more important than the truth. This isn’t hippy talk circa 1964; this is pre-Enlightenment, more 1364.

Isn’t modernity great?

But my university has no problem with faculty who proudly stand with Hamas. Indeed, you are deemed “Islamophobic” if you say you don’t stand with Hamas or if you dare criticise everyone’s favorite terrorist group, Hamas, or hurt their feelings in general. Today, Hamas is even cooler than the Symbionese Liberation Army was at its peak.

If you talk about your hurt feelings, the truth can be damned. You can say whatever you want to someone. Feelings are like an all-you-can-eat coupon for defamation. 

Considering this seven-month banishment, it’s interesting that the day I was suspended, and three weeks before I knew what I was being suspended for, staff told students: “What I said was disgusting and that I would be terminated.”  

I have it in writing, so much for due process.  

But there is a solution; a lawyer and no end of self-proclaimed advisors have presented it to me. They suggest I apologize, say sorry. 

The root meaning of the word “apology” comes from the Greek word “apologia,” which originally meant a defense or justification of one’s actions or beliefs. It comes from the Greek words “apo” (meaning “away from”) and “logos” (meaning “speech” or “reason”).

In ancient Greece, an “apologia” was a speech made in defense against accusations or charges. So, the word’s meaning has mutated. 

This essay and the ones that precede it are my apologies. Okay, perhaps I’m just being a tad pedantic in sticking to the word’s original meaning. I’m old-fashioned, not a modernist, not into this new-fangled modern meaning of apology, the expressing regret or remorse for a mistake or wrongdoing, which is the primary meaning of “apology” in modern English. Sorry (in the modern sense). 

I am told that if I grovel enough and say I’m sorry for what I said, I might be able to reclaim my job.

Where does the $2-million figure come from? 

I did the math, and if I planned on working 11 more years to the same age my professor father did, and if I factor in lost salary, lost pension payouts (assuming I lived until age 85), lost drug benefits, and lost royalties, I would be out over $2 million if I don’t go back.

The number is accurate, even if I wasn’t smart enough to factor in inflation properly. Still, regardless, if a grovelling apology was the key to returning my employment and I declined, it would be a rather expensive non-apology.

Most advisors or people who believe themselves qualified advisors propose that I demean myself, perhaps insincerely saying that I shouldn’t have told a complete stranger in Pakistan who was calling for the destruction of Israel that I stood with Israel because my response to him might have hurt the feelings of someone who publicly calls Jews subhuman and who says that Jews (conflating Jews and Israelis) shot their own hostages on October 7th, 2023, to save money on potential ransoms. This is not an appealing option to me.

One of those might work for me — like: “I’m sorry if your feelings were hurt by my message, that was not intent. My intent was to support a people I love who had just had what would be the equivalent of over fifty thousand of their youth murdered by Hamas and their supporters.”

That’s a modern apology I could do.

But those “I’m sorry you feel that way” apologies are simply repackaged gaslighting. They imply nothing more than saying you’re crazy and irrational to feel like you do, but let me indulge you. In my case, I would be saying that if you do feel that way, I take no pleasure from it; my point was to stand up for my friends and people and to express my condemnation of a designated terrorist group.

Sorry about that. (Again, that’s a modern sorry, not the old-school apologia.)

There is no guarantee that I’ll lose my job. Still, when an unnamed administrator (there are only two with such privileges) says that what I said was disgusting and that I would be terminated from staff and faculty, and this is all said on the same day I was suspended for unknown reasons, the case for being optimistic about my job retention is weak.

Would I apologize for $2 million?

I guess it depends on the nature of the apology. If saying I stand with Israel is legitimate grounds for a human rights complaint that turns my life into a maelstrom of defamation, broken promises, abuse, non-responsiveness, and threats, then I guess I am guilty.

Two million dollars or not, I won’t be walking that one back.

If calling a group of butchers “Nazis” because they murdered some 250 barefoot youngsters dancing at a music festival, my only capitulation would be that it was poor writing. Calling anyone a Nazi is usually just a symptom of lazy writing. Godwin’s law of Nazi analogies says that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches. So maybe I jumped into the Nazi analogy a mite early, but maybe not.

If we can overlook the semantic particulars and just use the term “Nazis” as the worse and most malevolent form of humanity, I would also not be walking that one back either — even with two million clams on the table.   

If some young Muslim student at my school knew me and was genuinely hurt by my words, I would regret their hurt feelings and would be happy to sit down and explain my position with them.

But that does not seem to be the case. It is more the case of allowing those who already hate Israel and Jews to use me as a scapegoat to satiate their blood lust and anger toward Jewish people and the State of Israel. They had bought tickets and boarded the antisemitic train long before October 7th, 2023. 

To the last point, I can’t be part of trading in $2-million appeasement coupons if the accuser is a long-established antisemite.

I just went to see my friend Jack, who, I suspect, disagrees with much of what I am saying in this essay. He owns a tremendous jewelery store and is a man of deep principle. I bought a white gold necklace with a small Celtic cross (a tribute to my Irish roots and Christian faith) and a Star of David, the latter a tribute to my Jewish friends who have shown such immense kindness to me throughout the last seven and a half months.

The word in Greek for “standing firm” is steko. That sounds good to me. So, the answer to the two-million-dollar question is rather nuanced, but clarity is important when there’s that much money on the table.

At this point, steko.

---