 | I'm an adjunct prof/lecturer in Canada and our universities - because they don't have involved alumni - (no sports programs to speak of) are better at staying out of the media glare. I have been suspended since Nov. 27 of last year for responding to a Pakistani 'academic' on LI and saying I stood with Israel and Hamas are Nazis. Unfortunately, I set off a very influencial Palestinian professor who is well connected to Guelph and Humber administration and has the V Provost signing a claim against me. His anti-semitism? He posts at least five times a day and his top hits are Jews are not human, exterminate Israel, Jews are satanists, Jews shot all their hostages, there are no tunnels in Gaza, genocide etc. The HRC against him was rejected, his against me has left me banned, banished, slandered, libeled by both faculty and staff, I have had no chance to offer a defence. Their investigator is another Jew hating zealot. Today, I received what seems to be the pre-sacking payout, a 14 year career finished. Yes, at the U of Guelph anti semitism is the baseline, saying you stand with Israel will get you a HRC and get you fired. Hamas University or the University of Guelph (they prefer the latter) is breaking new ground! There are far more Muslim students than Jewish at my Uni and the administration has granted them all anonymity to fire vitriol at me, admin have encouraged verbal attacks at me, they have surrendered to the mob and the few Jewish faculty and students have become very good and hiding avoiding attention. I am not officially canned but they stopped paying me, cancelled my courses, ended my benefits, and disabled all my passwords, I am not allowed to even look at my paystubs. The Jewish and Free Speech Community is not happy but they are keeping their powder dry until I am officially sacked. Then we will see. This is Canada. https://www.freedomtoffend.com/p/to-the-chanting-boy-wearing-a-keffiyeh?r=iy2ds. https://www.freedomtoffend.com/p/i-am-being-thrown-in-the-slowly-grinding?lli=1 Expand full comment |
1 reply
 | May 10 Hey, I'm in the UPenn encampment, and I've been reading your blog for a few months (came from ACX). I don't speak for anyone else in the encampment, but since I want to assume you wrote this in good faith, I have to note that some things you said are just not true: - No one (reasonable) is concerned about COVID anymore. The masks are only to protect students' identities. Police and agitators continually shove phones and cameras into the encampment to identify faces, and some of us have had their entire family's background researched and published. Yes, there are some paranoid types at the encampment, because protesting is a honeypot for those kinds of people, and those people will wear masks. Very few do otherwise. - Hamas committed unspeakable atrocities. I can't say that everyone in the camp will say this out of context, but I think people who won't should leave, and many of the people spouting the kinds of stupid sh*t that news networks pick up are not Penn students. Unfortunately, anti-Israel sentiment has always been a honeypot for antisemites, but let's shake hands: Republicans aren't racist simply because they're a honeypot for racists, and protesters aren't antisemites just because there's a common hot-button issue at the moment. (And let me reiterate that, statistically, an obscenely huge part of the encampment is Jewish.) - Related to both of the points I've made so far, the protests are not "open displays of sympathy for Hamas." Again, let's shake hands: you're not a secret racist just because you occasionally mention IQ, and the encampments aren't secretly racist because they take issue with their tuition funding bombs that have so far killed 2% of an entire region's population(!) and counting(!). I'm not advocating for any particular solution; I'm there solely because wars should not involve this unimaginable level of suffering for innocent families, no matter how just the cause. (And if they must, I cannot consent to my tax dollars and tuition paying for it.) Personally, if the university simply disclosed whether they invest in anything directly related to selling weapons to Israel and committed to reducing those investments over some reasonable time, I'd leave, and (in my experience) many share a similar sentiment. Yes, there are unreasonable people who don't understand economics, but who cares? You're not arguing against them; trust me, you're smart, and your time is far too valuable for that. They're just clickbait. That's fine, but I respect you less every time I read a paragraph I expect to contain an informative point and get . . . this instead. Last, let me note that this all relates to classic stuff that neoliberals have been dealing with since the dawn of time. Frédéric Bastiat said in 1845 that “the worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.” What you're doing by reiterating these misleading accounts of (very hateable!) people, conflating them with the rest of us, does no one good. Additionally, if universities do crack down on peaceful protests, it sets a dangerous precedent for unconditional free speech, and I will defend unconditional free speech to the grave. (Incidentally, I was excited for leftists to wake up and start defending free speech again once establishments tried to silence discussion of Palestine, but unfortunately that hasn't happened yet.) I'm surprised that reasonable libertarians/neoconservatives are not outraged that their tax dollars are being used to fuel an unimaginably destructive and wasteful military campaign overseas, and I have to think that these unfavorable accounts of the "culture" of the encampments contribute to this distortion of reason. So go ahead, skewer these people who are admittedly very fun to skewer. But once that's been milked dry, there are some reasonable beliefs across the aisle. Not everyone in these encampments is insane. P.S.: yes, this is a new account; sorry but I don't trust you all yet <3 Expand full comment |
9 replies
