Today, in Canada, it is like Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

But I, as a Canadian "Gentile," will live and die a friend of the Jewish People.

“Pro-Palestinian” protestors in Canada as the Israel-Hamas war wages on (photo: Jewish Starlight/X)

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, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

Five months ago, I was happy to be an academic nobody, just a scruffy, hoodie-wearing, never-a-tie, student-friendly professor.

My dad was a proper professor who had his research translated and published, but he was happy to have students call him Hank. He was always just a farm boy who became a professor. 

I was my father’s son, teaching at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, going into my 14th year. I was easing into retirement and did not worry about the world.  

My office often teemed with students, with overflow going into the hallway. Sometimes, it was just social visits, but more often, help sessions for the major projects that butted-ended my courses.

On November 27th, 2023, I went in early before my marketing course to help a student review her project.

A week ago, a friendly student told me a group of students and parents were stirring, angry at me for responding to an “educator” in South Asia who called for the destruction of Israel. But I was not concerned. My comment was no worse than what you see on the editorial page; Canada believed in free speech. Cancel culture was only in the papers or on X, but they surely would not come for me. 

My response to the man who fancied himself an educator came after I had watched the Israeli massacre videos; my children are the same age as those concertgoers, and I was angry, alarmed, and shocked that within hours of the massacre, while the bodies were still warm, that animus was building — not against Hamas, but against Israel.  

I said I stood with Israel and that if you stand with Hamas, you are standing with Nazis — not the most eloquent response, but it is social media, and I thought nothing of it. 

I do not discuss politics in class, and I am no agitator. I thought people dealt with big issues through discussion, and I thought this was just a popcorn thunderstorm, just a few TikTok-driven teens who had just climbed aboard the Palestinian bus. I did not think much would come of it, and I assumed if they were truly that upset, they would knock on the door. I believed what I said, though, and was not apologizing. 

The assistant program head poked into my office door and told me I was wanted in a meeting. It was in a room on the fourth floor I would never been to. When I arrived, there were no pleasantries, just an angry assistant vice provost sitting at the end of a small table.

A muscular bouncer type by the door said he was “human resources.” A piece of paper was thrust in my face, and they said I was suspended with pay based on an online post. No run-up. Just the facts.  

“What online post?” I asked.   

“I haven’t read it,” answered the assistant vice provost.

“You are suspending me based on a post you haven’t read?” I said.

The assistant vice provost was someone who I had eaten with and talked politics and British football with. We were not friends, but it was never formal or unpleasant. And it was never like this. The paper they had given me warned me about communicating with thousands of current and past students, administrators, and faculty. That was it.  Probably a three-minute meeting. I left.  

The human resources representative was at my office in a few minutes and was embarrassed to tell me that I had to leave campus. I had yet to learn my office was off-limits. I had brought my two Westies to school once, and they got kicked out; my puppy had crapped on the floor, so I guess she deserved to be sent to the parking lot; but I had no personal experience with banishment. At home, I discovered it was more than advertised; I had been kicked off the learning management system, and my courses were quickly removed.

It was not just the allegations or the suspension but the animus. Somehow, I was now the enemy. 

Three weeks later, I was officially told why I had been suspended. A professor and a few students had complained, and they were all given anonymity because they feared violence, though I had never even raised my voice. They all said they were afraid, and they peppered their accusations with words like “violence,” “safety,” and “fear.”

Though not allowed by policy, their dishonest, unsubstantiated, defamatory claims were rewarded with anonymity. With anonymity, it was as if the Human Rights office was encouraging the unnamed offended to take their swings at me. Their claims were pure vitriol, accusing me of the following: racist, Islamophobe, violent, unworthy of teaching, should be fired.

How do you defend yourself against cruel personal lies? You can’t, you sputter, you sit down.

A lawyer took me on, and a few kind Jewish strangers online supported me. John Ivison, a columnist in the National Post (Canada’s second- or third-biggest newspaper), wrote about me three times, which brought in some more support. 

Students who defied the ban texted me the latest gossip. Some unknown staff and faculty accused me of the wildest things — getting into fights in class? Calling me a trouble case on the verge of termination? What? Where was this coming from?

An anonymous senior staff member told her staff I would be terminated. They had apparently decided this a week before any investigation had started or even before I had been told what I was suspended for. It’s university justice; due process is not included. A friend showed me the texts of a staff member arguing with him. She had witnesses. I was a criminal, and I had lost it, she said. I knew the staff member; we had never had an angry word.

Some students pushed into the department head’s office and told them they were disgusted with my treatment. They said I was the best professor in the department and the only one who cared about them.

But the spiraling rumors and bursts of malice continued. I would feel the gathering winds at the fringe of the storm. I was at a hockey game, and I saw a student. I locked eyes and prepared to say hello, and he looked at my wife and me and walked by. It would not be the only time I got walk-by’s — from popular to pariah.  

There was a human rights complaint (HRC) against me; I had to Google this “HRC.” I discovered the professor who complained, Wael Ramadan, was a prolific antisemite; his LinkedIn and X were full of hundreds of posts calling for the extermination of Israel, accusations of apartheid and genocide, saying the IDF shot their hostages to save money, praising dictators everywhere, praising terrorist groups, equating Hamas with Ukrainian soldiers.

The official Claimant, Melanie Spence Ariemma, was bizarrely the university vice provost, someone I had never met; she was also to be my judge, and her signature on the HRC aligned her officially with my accusers. It was not looking good. 

I filed a human rights complaint against Ramadan.

Lawyers raged, administrators refused to respond, and my union, the one with Fred Hahn at the helm — the man whose response to October 7th was “let the uprising begin” — was doing just enough to avoid a bad faith complaint.

Since November, I have never met one union representative and have only spoken on the phone once. Most of my emails go unanswered. My lawyer’s firm was suing them for antisemitism. But the unions, on their worst day, are better than management. 

I may have been too involved in my job. I even kept in touch with students who had graduated ten years ago. I was always working on a new textbook staying late. Many nights, I would walk down the sidewalk by the new Barrett Centre, the building that looks like a ship, and peer down the hill to see my car alone in the lot. My hard work and good rating had inoculated me. How could this be happening? 

It was not just my job, it was the betrayal. It was the people who never called, the sudden chill. I had said that I stood with Israel against savages, and I had become a gossip-driven caricature, some Jewish monster. My community turned on me, my sanctuary was gone, my anxiety soared, most of my friends were work ones, and they were not supposed to speak to me. Many did not care enough to ignore this ridiculous and illegitimate edict. 

The logic of the university has been: “We make all the accusers anonymous, but we also make it so you cannot speak with anyone in the community.” Talk about belts and suspenders. They wanted to make sure that everyone felt completely uninhibited in their pursuit of calling me a racist.

Some organizations outside the country picked me as their “Let’s Fire Zionists” poster boy and kindly offered contact information where digital visitors could express their thoughts to interested parties at my university. And these thoughts  always ended with “Let’s fire him.” Parents piled on; the original gang was stoking the fire.  

I had said that I stood with Israel and spoke against Hamas, and for this, I was banished? Even in Justin Trudeau’s idiotic Canada, Hamas was a designated terrorist organization.

I was being accused of criminal acts that were not half-truths but pure inventions, accused of threatening someone’s career? I had never threatened anyone and could not; maybe I should get the plank out of my own eye before I started talking about other people’s careers. I had done nothing of what they said, but evidence and truth did not matter. 

At one point, an old friend spoke with me and said she was worried because I was often up all night, going to bed at eight in the morning, up a few hours later, writing defense documents, researching madly, flailing away. She thought I would have a nervous breakdown.

I spoke with two psychiatrists and therapists. They said I had developed Complex PTSD from the entire affair. They gave me sleeping pills. When I brought up “Palestine,” one doctor’s back stiffened; she said Hamas was not the government in Gaza and pulled back and said, “So what do you want from me?” and I knew she would be no help.

I have always been the soft-hearted fool, the one too quick to jump to empathy, the one who would pull a tearful student aside and hear her out, listening to stories of failed relationships. I was the one who would give cards when students had a death in the family. I had lost my father recently, and I, too, was torn up. I did not want to abandon my students. But I was not cut out for legal warfare.

---

I have always been into the Jewish culture. Maybe it was reading Leon Uris’ “Exodus” when I was young, or maybe it was the Sunday school stories, always the underdogs: David standing defiant against the Philistine monster, the crowds rippling with mockery but silenced when their giant fell.

Even as a child, I read books on the horrors of the Holocaust; I imagined smuggling food to Jews that I hid in a cardboard shelter in the bush near my home in Fort Garry, a suburb of Winnipeg.

I left Winnipeg when I was 19 years old and went to work on a farm in Switzerland.  My first respite from my grueling farm labor was a vacation to Auschwitz, less popular than the red-light district in Amsterdam, but I had to go.  

I saw the most famous lie, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” above the camp gates and saw the tracks where they brought in families, separating them, sending some to work and some to perish that same day.

I did not pick where I was born. I did not pick the year. Why was it not my family suffocating in a cold brick room, leaving white nail scratches on the bricks? I wondered if the people back then knew and why they did not try to flee. But they were unarmed, they were exhausted, they were in shock, beaten and abused.  

However, stories of the birth of Israel, as defiant as David, filled my bookshelf. Israel was the last refuge, and surely, in Canada, we would let them be. 

But today, in Canada, it is like Nazi Germany in the 1930s. These were the words of the father of one of my Jewish students. He said the words so flatly, such resignation. He said that the Jews had been here before.

---

Amateur lawyering kept me up at night and drove myself and my lawyer mad. I worked on projects and taught at another university, but I knew I needed something physical, gritty and sweaty. No, a gym membership or Peloton was not enough. As I had been making friends with so many random Jews online, I knew it had to be Krav Maga.

As a child, I was so uncoordinated that I could not even do jumping jacks. Dancing was a coordination dream galaxies away. I had not been in a fight since grade seven, which I told my kids I won, though I probably lost — memory can be very self-serving.  

Sensei Mike was my instructor. He made me do pushups anytime I said sorry. He teamed me with a gifted accountant that he had been training for months. The accountant was leaving Canada for Florida soon; his wife said the antisemitism was too much. It was the chants of “death to the Jews” that had been the final straw. 

It is April now, and soon, I will have to defend myself before an external investigator.  She is a lawyer hired by the school to “investigate” an altered post of less than a few hundred words, and she claims to have been poring over it for the last two months.

At last count, 14 individuals were aligned against me between accusers, school lawyers, and human rights staff. I had spoken to Jewish organizations, who were sympathetic but had nothing to offer. Rumor was that they were waiting to see what would happen — to see if the university sacked me.

I have no idea. And I am told that my main accuser, Wael Ramadan, has had none of the restrictions that I have received put on him. Indeed, nothing seems to have been done to him at all.

At the University of Guelph, antisemitism is now a normative belief and standing with Israel is an outlier, someone far down the tail of the distribution curve. The school has dragged it out for so long, and most processes, timelines, and procedures have been ignored.

A wise Queens University professor told me that university tribunals, with their “balance of probabilities” instead of the assumption of innocence and evidentiary standards, should not be considered a judicial process. If they do not like you, they can believe the liars. And you are fired.

My anger has evolved into indignation, betrayal, and a final resignation with no regret, a broken admission that although the arc of the moral universe was long, it would never turn toward justice, and certainly not for Jews.

Everyone says that I will be fired soon. They say the decision is made, but the union will grieve it. I will not go silently. I hope that my Jewish and free-speech-loving friends join me in saying, “Enough.”

I do not have a lawyer now, and they say the person who defends themselves has a fool for a client. The delays were too much. My lawyer, who was defending me pro bono, became too busy in court. She was a solitary outpost of kindness in my life; she got it.  Hopefully, she will check back when Spring is here.

Not knowing what will happen is difficult. I have discovered that I must have faith. I am back going to church and have new, supportive friends. Grasping and flailing for earthly truth and justice in a university justice system does not help in a handleless world.

What will happen to my teaching career? A 59-year-old lecturer surrounded by controversy and rumor might need help finding teaching work. The final sentence on my “crimes” is forthcoming. I am sure the verdict will follow — a good “Alice in Wonderland” sequence.  

The punishment started on November 27th, 2023. Even if the union somehow gets my job back, can I go back to an institution where students scream “F*ck Zionists” in the hallway?

Perhaps I am a little tougher now with the Krav Maga, but it is the emotional toughness I need. Perhaps not caring, not engaging the heart is the key to academic success. The silence of the few Jewish students at the university and the one Jewish professor I know has hurt, but I will not be moved.

I am not a Jew, but I have seen the hatred; I have seen the room chill when you mention Israel, backs stiffen, tones flatten, words are measured and carefully parsed out, speakers fight internal pressures that seem to want to scream out: “I hate you, Jew!”

Such is a monstrous, ancient, seething Godless evil.  

I do not own my job and cannot claim it back. My days of teaching at the University of Guelph-Humber seem over. All involved say those machinating against me silently decided long ago to fire me, and all these “investigations” are theatrics. They are the storefronts and signs that mark a Potemkin village of justice and decency.

All I can do is work with the union and get legal counsel to help me extract as much financial compensation as possible. More importantly, I want to get help from PR experts to spread the word. Firing someone because they said they stood with Israel cannot be ignored; it is a dangerous precedent. While Gen Z thinks firing someone for a thought or speech crime is kosher, most Canadians disagree.

Most may turn away and say, “Not my problem.” Winston Churchill said an appeaser feeds an alligator, hoping it will eat him last. If we are silent in the face of tyrants, it only emboldens them; the time to push back is now, not to wait for others to be hurt. 

To be silent is no politeness; it is selfishness, and today, as mobs on the streets of Montreal and Toronto scream, “Gas the Jews!” our police largely stand idly by. Even our prime minister, who is no friend of Israel, was stopped by anti-Israel mobs from meeting with the Italian prime minister.

It must not just be the Jews who stand up to them. Let there be an uprising of the Gentiles. Let us stand shoulder to shoulder with our Jewish brothers and sisters and say, “Enough!”

This whole affair is about a lot more than one man’s job and the institutionalized antisemitism at the University of Guelph and Humber College. Can we accept a university saying that antisemitism is the norm and that to say the words, “I stand with Israel” leaves one treading on illicit grounds, whereby they fear the loss of their livelihood?

Caesar knew the consequences when he chose not to cross the river Rubicon from Italy into Gaul. Let firing someone for standing with Israel be our Rubicon.  

Israel has a right to exist, and Hamas is a hateful death cult. 

The lessons of my youth are still remembered, and I will stand my ground. I will live and die a friend of the Jewish People.

An old friend near Tel Aviv has invited me, saying that his door will always be open. I will go. After all, I have never been to Israel.

---