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.
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 and, on April 8, 2025, three months before I was fired, stated 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 so-called “paid suspension” that Humber fought against every semester like misers guarding a dragon’s hoard. Not once did they pay me correctly without legal pressure. Every term, without fail, they withheld pay until threatened with lawyers or the Labour Board, and even now, I am taking them to Small Claims Court to recover what they unlawfully withheld.
My benefits? Drug coverage for trauma-induced hypertension and other trauma-based injuries, conditions explicitly linked to Humber’s conduct by both WSIB and Sunnybrook Hospital? They denied it—not by courage, not by explanation, not by the dignity of an honest refusal—but by the purest, laziest form of institutional cowardice: silence.
Silence as a tactic. Silence as a weapon. Silence as a declaration that I was not a person, merely a bureaucratic inconvenience, a non-entity to be starved of oxygen until I stopped struggling.
Even as recently as last week, they could not resist mocking me again. The same individual who initiated the anti-Semitic frenzy at Humber — the same architect of the lies, the smears, the criminal insinuations — now occupies, with perfect Orwellian symmetry, a desk inside the Human Rights Office.
And under OHSA, the offender is now permitted to investigate themself.
Yes: last week, the very person whose conduct I have been reporting for two years sent me a “formal” inquiry — unsigned, naturally; they treat honesty as a contagion that must be quarantined — under the grandiose banner of The Humber Human Rights Department.
A title which, if matched against their actual conduct, is not merely ironic but a fully animated oxymoron.
They asked me, with breathtaking gall, to provide evidence of the charges.
“I beg your pardon — you want me to tell you what you did?” I replied.
It is the kind of bureaucratic delirium that would make Kafka blush and Orwell sigh with recognition.
At Humber, the arsonist investigates the fire, the thief audits the books, and the human rights office is staffed by those who violate them with professional efficiency.
This is what happens when Humber encourages faculty and staff to brand me a criminal, to circulate lies about “assaulting a student,” and when, after I tried to stop the defamation, they threatened me with arrest for “criminal harassment” for doing nothing more than attempting to defend my own name.
Once you permit lies of this magnitude, they metastasise. Do you imagine rumours stop politely at “assault”? Lies obey no fences once institutions feed them.
And yet—Sunnybrook has now confirmed what any sane observer could see: the trauma inflicted on me is so severe that I am unable to work. I am injured.
I am damaged.
But I am not broken.
Humber did not break me, though they tried. I will rebuild, and I will heal. I will emerge stronger. You will not see the end of me.
But let us speak with the blunt clarity this moment deserves:
This was a war on one man because he said he stood with Israel.
Yes. It is that simple. And that's obscene.
Fight not for Paul Finlayson, fight for Israel, fight for Jews, fight for free speech, fight to end institutional tyranny driven by anti-Semitism. The tales you hear about the colleges and universities are not exaggerations.
The OPSEU 562 President, Milos Vasic, 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:
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 termination.
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 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.
COWARDICE: THE VICE THAT HOLDS THE KNIFE
We have a childish cultural notion that cowards are merely people who tremble in corners and avoid loud noises. But the older meaning—the one the Greeks, the prophets, and the medievals understood—is far more serious.
Cowardice is not simply fear. Fear is a human reflex. Cowardice is a moral condition. It is the deliberate refusal to face the truth when one’s duty requires it. It is the willingness to let an innocent man fall so long as one’s own comfort remains intact.
By that standard, Humber’s leadership is a cathedral of cowards.
Take AVP George Bragues, the ethics professor who produces books about moral courage but could not muster the courage to respond to a single sentence of my appeal. I wrote a careful, structured, legally grounded defence—the type of document any ethical administrator would have the decency to answer.
Bragues received it. And like a man ashamed of his own shadow, he scurried back into silence. Not once did he meet, call, or even acknowledge the existence of the person he was destroying. This, from the college’s supposed moral philosopher. A man despised even by his own faculty and openly called a tyrant by the union itself. Ethics, it seems, are easier to publish than to practice.
But cowardice is a hierarchy at Humber, and its summit is Melanie Spence-Ariemma.
Here is a vice-Provost who, when confronted with her violations of the Collective Agreement and HRTO procedure, clutched her pearls and declared she had “safety concerns.”
The oldest and cheapest card in the deck—the feminine vulnerability plea—was invoked not from fear, but out of convenience. A shield against accountability. A diversion tactic. A smear by implication. And, given her behaviour, it was an act of pure theatre. This is not a woman trembling in fear. This is a bureaucratic warlord who hides behind the language of fragility when challenged.
And let us not pretend this was her first performance. Before she turned her attention to me, she set her sights on the head of the Business department—a man widely respected, a beloved mentor, a man loved by students, and a coach whose students competed against Ivy League case teams and beat them.
She terminated him before she turned her guns on me.
Her campaign against him was vicious, personal, and petty. She insulted his public speaking, of all things—he, who trained young people to stand in rooms with Harvard, Wharton, and Ivey and win. Yet this same Spence-Ariemma once delivered a faculty speech so excruciating—a monotone droning of clichés glued together with no structure, no soul, and no craft—that the room exchanged glances of horror. This was the new leader? God help us all.
But even Spence-Ariemma does not operate alone. Every tyrant has an Igor. Hers is named Daniel Douak.
Douak is the sort of lawyer who behaves like a hunched attendant to power—following behind Spence-Ariemma like some medieval famulus carrying the potions and poisons of an insecure duchess. Her entire legal repertoire appears to consist of threats, insinuations, and slander masquerading as process.
One is left to wonder whether she has ever once practised anything resembling real jurisprudence, or whether her entire legal career has been a sort of ceremonial cosplay conducted in the shadow of authority. She is not a “monster” in the cinematic sense; the word, properly understood, denotes something tragically inhuman.
No — she is considerably worse. She is entirely human, and therefore entirely capable: capable of malice, capable of obedience to a corrupt hierarchy, capable of assisting in the destruction of another person with the bland indifference of someone filing expense reports. She carries out her petty persecutions not from principle but from profit, each act of bureaucratic cruelty neatly itemised into billable hours.
She is a Judas of the modern professional class, bar-certified and ethically hollow.
And at no point—no stage, no hearing, no meeting—would any of these people confront me directly. That is the hallmark of true cowardice: the refusal to face the man you are stabbing.
A courageous institution would have allowed a hearing. A competent institution would have examined evidence. A decent institution would have spoken to me.
Humber did none of these things. They hid. They delegated. They whispered. They passed memos back and forth like schoolchildren swapping forged notes. They avoided meetings. They refused phone calls. They ignored appeals. They rejected information. They chose the dark because the light would expose them.
Cowardice is the vice that holds the knife while pretending the knife fell there by accident. And Humber’s hands are drenched in it.
ON BRAVERY, AND WHAT IT IS NOT
I do not think myself brave.
Bravery implies I once considered backing down. I did not.
I never considered abandoning the Jews.
I never once considered abandoning my Jewish students, my Jewish colleagues, or my Jewish friends. Why would I? That impulse to stand with them is older than my career, older than my politics — it is marrow-deep. It was put there by my father, Hank Finlayson — a good, God-fearing man whose death still knocks me sideways without warning, as though his absence sends a wake-wave across every part of my life.
And let us pause for the obscenity of it: when I walked into the meeting where Humber announced my suspension, I thought we were discussing bereavement leave. That is when they chose to strike. May God judge them as they deserve.
It was my father who took us, as children, to Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, who walked us through the shattered ghosts of Poland’s camps, who insisted we look — actually look — at what human beings did when the world decided Jews were expendable.
Later, as a teenager, I followed his path alone, walking the grounds of Dachau and Auschwitz, trying to understand how ordinary people convinced themselves that cruelty was virtue and silence was safety.
So no — I am not brave. Bravery implies some inner debate, a moment of trembling calculation. I never debated. I never hesitated. I never imagined anything but standing with the Jews because that is what my father taught me a man does.
And now, when I fight, I fight for him too.
I fight for Hank Finlayson.
My father made certain we understood what silence makes possible.
When I was eight, having devoured Leon Uris novels, I imagined building a fort in the woods if “they ever came for the Jews again,” smuggling food to keep my Jewish friends alive. It was childish, sentimental, and utterly sincere.
Bravery has never been the point.
I simply have a soul — and a sense of right and wrong.
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.
It’s quite true that I cannot fight this alone. And yes, I can already hear the sophisticated shrug: “But this isn’t my problem.” A touching sentiment—if you’re eight years old, or the sort of adult who believes history is something that happens to other people.
Because if everyone turns away, if each decent person decides this is someone else’s fire to put out, then you may confidently expect the flames to reach your own doorstep.
Institutional antisemitism does not politely confine itself to one campus like a quarantined rat. It spreads—by precedent, by cowardice, and by bureaucratic osmosis. What Humber has done today, others will feel licensed to do tomorrow. And they will do it with greater confidence, because silence is always interpreted as permission.
Do you imagine, in some touching burst of naïveté, that this will stop at Humber? That the apparatchiks and activists who now swagger through our institutions will suddenly discover restraint? Why would they? They have tasted blood, applause, and impunity.
That combination is historically fatal.
And for those still inclined to disbelieve—those who cling to the fantasy that this is all exaggerated or conspiratorial—let me offer a gentle reminder: organisations openly funded by the Muslim Brotherhood, with Qatari money sloshing through their accounts like sewage through a gutter, have said—explicitly, repeatedly—that their goal is to drive Jewish and Jewish-supporting academics out of universities.
This is not a rumour. This is not speculation. This is not the fever dream of the paranoid. This is their stated programme.
Why on earth should we not believe people who have told us, calmly and in writing, exactly what they intend to do?
The only real mystery is why you are surprised.
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? If so, then do not be silent, do not be reserved.
Please act. Write — even a single sentence — to:
✉️ enquiry@humber.ca
✉️ alvina.cassiani@humber.ca
Note: They hide behind “enquiry@humber.ca”, but the general email format is first name.lastname@humber.ca. They do not give out emails. Their cowardice is institutional. Here is the directory: https://humber.ca/directory/
ATTN: President Ann-Marie Vaughan & the Humber Board of Governors
✉️ milos@opseu562.org or Milos.Vasic@humber.ca
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 watched as up to 300,000 strangers were turned into a baying digital mob, drooling with hatred at the thought of destroying 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.
You forgot one point in your comparison of professors: one speaks the Truth and is Brave, the other Doesn’t and Isn’t!
Your story is beyond infuriating. Gets my blood boiling every time I read about this gross miscarriage of justice.
Please enlist the help of CIJA for your campaign. They can email it to all their supporters and have a pre-populated email ready to send.
You need to make it easy for people to register their protest. A “one and done” process.