How Two Colleges Revealed Canada’s New Moral Geometry
When Academic Freedom Is a Shield for Some — and a Sword Against Others
There are moments when the veneer of institutional virtue cracks so cleanly that even the dullest observer can glimpse the machinery beneath.
The reinstatement of Dr Natalie Knight at Langara College in Vancouver is one such moment.
The destruction of my own career at Humber College in Toronto is another.
One professor publicly celebrated the October 7 attacks as “an amazing, brilliant offensive.” Back to work, no discipline.
The other — me — said, “I stand with Israel,” and was fired for it. No severance.
An arbitrator ruled in favour of one, calling it a victory for academic freedom.
The other was denied even the courtesy of a disciplinary hearing, denied severance after fourteen years of top student evaluations, course creation, and a small library’s worth of publications; he was then deliberately defamed by management, stripped of pay, stripped of benefits, stripped of due process, humiliated with false criminal charges, stripped even of the ancient right to answer his accusers — and finally, with all the cowardice of bureaucrats who confuse silence with virtue, terminated without cause.
To say the contrast is stark is to say the sun is warm.
THE PARABLE OF TWO PROFESSORS
Langara’s arbitrator took pains to reaffirm that academic freedom includes offensive, even repugnant speech — provided it is political and not hate propaganda. Every protection Knight received — reinstatement, due process, a functioning union — stands in obscene contrast to what I experienced.
At Humber, the moment I said “I stand with Israel,” a trapdoor opened beneath my feet.
Gagged without safety concerns.
Denied particulars.
Denied evidence.
Denied access.
Denied my WSIB-protected medical leave.
Denied benefits.
Denied pay.
Denied appeals.
Denied natural justice.
The union — OPSEU Local 562 — refused to represent me on April 8, 2025, three months before I was fired, stating in writing that they were “declining representation.” This merely made official what they had been doing in practice.
This is unlawful on its face under the Labour Relations Act.
Meanwhile, Humber’s Human Rights Manager allowed a procedurally invalid human rights claim to proceed — even though she knew the claimant had no standing under HRTO rules.
One wonders whether this permissiveness was related to the fact that the claimant was her superior. After all, those two words before “manager” in her title, “Human Rights Manager,” should bring some expertise and understanding of the distinction between a Human Rights Complaint vs. persecution for political speech.
Can’t seem to get good help these days.
No HR professional with integrity would have allowed such a claim forward.
But then again, integrity was the first casualty of this saga.
A DOUBLE STANDARD? NO — IT’S REPRISAL
Some may call this a “double standard,” as though the answer were some bureaucratic coin flip.
But the Human Rights Code has no category for “double standard.”
There is only reprisal.
When one professor glorifies terrorism and is reinstated — and another professor expresses support for Israel and is destroyed — The term “reprisal” is not rhetorical. It is legal.
And when Humber allows Professors Ramadan, Shupak, and others to violate Criminal Code s.318 hate propaganda — calling Jews subhuman, filth, devil-worshippers, Nazis — Yet it fires the Jewish-supporting professor for historically accurate political speech, you no longer have a proper university or college.
You have a political enforcement arm.
A modern Inquisition — minus the candlelight charm.
THE ROLE OF OPSEU 562 — THE ACCOMPLICE
While Langara’s union vigorously defended Knight, OPSEU 562 behaved like Humber’s internal security force.
They told me I might have to repay my pay. The 562 President Milos said he thought my calling Hamas Nazis might be a hate crime. Nice to know on day two, your legal representatives have already switched teams.
OPSEU 562 refused to grieve harassment despite a WSIB-confirmed psychological trauma-based injury caused by Humber.
They refused all 20+ grievances I filed via individual carriage rights.
They refused to meet, refused to speak, refused to answer questions.
They promised representation in theory but delivered only shunning, silence, and disdain in practice.
When a union sides with management against its own member — when it refuses to represent the Jewish-supporting professor while celebrating pro-Palestinian activism publicly — We have wandered into territory the National Post has already documented:
“OPSEU has betrayed its Jewish members.”
My case simply adds another stone to that cairn.
THE DIGITAL MOB
While being gagged, banned, and denied the right to defend myself, the accuser professor, a friend of the VP, orchestrated a campaign reaching 55,000 to 300,000 people across multiple platforms.
Humber’s Communications Department even provided a direct email and Twitter (X) handle to funnel complaints demanding my firing.
Staff repeated defamatory rumours — arrest, assault, violence — that originated, by process of elimination, from inside the Human Rights Office and the senior management office. This is not incompetence. It is orchestration.
THE INFAMOUS ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE
Humber does not possess:
the original post,
a verified forensic capture,
a timestamped record,
or an authenticated digital source.
They have only:
a JPEG,
altered by students,
circulated by accusers,
taken out of context,
and used as primary evidence.
No court, arbitrator, or tribunal would accept such evidence.
Humber relied on it anyway.
Because when you are not pursuing truth — only punishment — evidence becomes an inconvenience.
THE MORAL OF THIS CASE — AND THE COST
This is not about the facts of October 7. This is not about Knight or me as individuals. This is about a country drifting into moral lunacy, where:
praising terrorism is “protected speech,”
but defending Israel is “cause for termination,”
hate propaganda is ignored,
unions become accomplices,
and due process is treated as optional.
Humber is not fighting me. Humber is fighting the rule of law, natural justice, and procedural fairness. They are fighting against the freedoms our soldiers died defending.
They want reprisal to replace due process. And they chose me as the test case. But the law — and now the public — is watching.
Please share this, and please write in.
We speak often — too often — of “red lines.” Of thresholds past which institutions, nations, or people reveal what they truly are.
But history gives us a better metaphor: the Rubicon.
When Julius Caesar stood at the River Rubicon, he faced the border of Gaul — a line he was forbidden to cross.
But note the irony lost on modern bureaucrats: Caesar hesitated.
He reflected. He understood that crossing the line meant war, collapse, and moral rupture.
Humber College, by contrast, did not hesitate for a second.
They traversed their own Rubicon without reflection, without restraint, and without the faintest adult comprehension of what lay on the other side. And the land they entered is a grotesque inversion of an academic institution:
A land where a college can effectively stand with Hamas over Israel.
Where anti-Semitism is tolerated, laundered, and normalised through the language of “equity.”
Where Palestinian flags fly at convocation, while Jewish students and faculty sit in fear.
Where “F* Zionists” can be screamed in the hallways** with no discipline.
Where official institutional social media accounts are linked to anti-Semitic propaganda sites — and no one blinks.
Where a professor brags openly to students that he will “get a pro-Jewish professor fired because he is pro-Israel”, and he does? But management supports the defamer, not the defamed?
Where HR managers allow procedurally invalid human rights complaints to proceed because the complainant is their superior in the hierarchy.
Where evidence can be altered by students, forwarded as a JPEG, and treated as gospel truth by administrators who claim they “follow process.”
Where my union — the one I paid $15,000 into — refused representation, and where Humber College fought for months to cut off my pay, my benefits, and even my WSIB-recognised trauma support.
This is Humber’s Rubicon. They have already crossed it.
They did not merely cross it; they marched into the river singing.
Institutions do not drift into darkness by accident.
They get there because the people who should resist stay silent, or busy, or politely neutral — as if neutrality were anything but complicity when dealing with those who weaponise process to harm.
I cannot fight this alone. And I should not have to. Humber must be driven back across the Rubicon they so joyfully breached — back toward legality, fairness, and the basic decency that should never require public begging.
If you believe Jewish-supporting professors deserve the same protections afforded to those who praise October 7? If you believe due process is not an option? If you believe a Canadian college must follow the law of the land, not the whims of anti-Israel extremists embedded within its own ranks?
Please act. Write — even a single sentence — to:
✉️ enquiry@humber.ca
ATTN: President Ann-Marie Vaughan & the Humber Board of Governors
✉️ milos@opseu562.org
Tell them this cannot stand. Tell them the Rubicon is real. Tell them the public is watching.
Because the greatest political cliché remains painfully true:
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
And silence, right now, is not neutrality — it is surrender.
Help drive them back. Help pull Humber out of the river they walked into. Help ensure that the mob that targeted me — 55,000 to 300,000 strong — does not get to decide the future of a Jewish-supporting professor in Canada
Please write. Please share. Please be the voice that so many were afraid to be when this began. Freedomtoffend.com may light the fire, but it is too small to gain media exposure and move the fickle public.
The Gentiles, to their shame, are largely silent; I must again turn to my Jewish friends.
Humber unleashed up to 300,000 strangers into a digital mob to destroy one professor. Every post that went out urging individuals to request my termination was sent to Humber’s Communication Office. And it was used against me, though Communications refused to respond to inquiries about the volume of manufactured dissent and anti-Semitic sewage that had flowed their way.
If you will not send one email into that storm, then the mob has already won — not just over me, but over the principle that truth must still have defenders.
Please share.
Please write.
Please do not let silence win.
Sent