"I am being thrown in the slowly grinding gears of cancel culture" piece. Part II.
I have changed metaphors from a guillitine to grinding gears. Apologies for confusion.
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This is the second part of my essay on my Kafkesque voyage through cancel culture. The suspension I mentioned in the first cancel culture piece has led to two difficult weeks.
I have no experience in legal jousts; I think I would have been a poor lawyer. I am still shocked that the administration and their staff fanboys/girls are teaming up to throw out nasty rumours, all hidden behind many pleases, thank-yous, and letterhead. It feels like I have been pushed onto the set of Mean Girls, except there is a lot more legal boilerplate, and the people are less attractive.
Whether I return to my beloved teaching or not, things will never be the same; I will be much more parsimonious with my trust, and my respect for such institutions will not recover.
My employer is still hounding me for the crime of calling Hamas Nazis and for awaking some woke white warriors (TikTok and YouTube-educated experts on Israel) who are dedicated to destroying my life from their keyboard, all the while their mother is undoubtedly putting their underwear back in their drawers and commending them on their new hobby of being political, so much healthier than being addicted to one of those first-person shooters.
I wonder if the accusor who so casually tossed such vitriolic bombs at a stranger sleeps well. I wonder if the man who said my comments had violated his fundamental human right (as opposed to the human who asserts bovine rights) is using his melanin and grievance culture sympathies to bleed off his bitterness.
He accuses me of violence (I didn't mention violence or action), racism (I didn't mention race), and Islamophobia (I didn't say Islam). I wonder if he realises the scope of his actions, I wonder if the students who riled him up think about the power of their words, their exaggerations, I wonder if they hope that my daughter can't afford to go to University because of their efforts, does that put one up in the victory column for them? She will go. My RESP will not be touched to fund lawyers.
All these keyboard revolutionaries had to do was walk down the hallway, look me in the eye, and say, "I don't like what you said. Can we speak about it?" But of course not. There aren't emojis in real conversation.
Are we near the point where truth is no longer a defence? Suppose my accusor feels a bit lumpy after being exposed to someone who lives outside his Jew-hatred bubble. Does the examiner/inquisitor feel no obligation to look to the truth while only focusing on and verifying the extent of his specious emotions?
We have become a feelings-based culture, a building with no cornerstone, shifting and moving, arbitrary and infantile, dipping and rising in political winds.
Strangely, though, I noticed that one of my fellow professors somehow escaped examination. I don't know if he is part of the accusation. Still, journalist John Ivison named him independently as someone from whom Ivison had received anonymous complaints. These anonymous accusations of anti-Semitism were directed at Wael Ramadan, someone I don't know but whom I have seen at my University.
But I have read he is a brilliant professor and a Fullbright scholar. Good on him.
However, this fellow has a social media full of anti-semitic gems, including running a video accusing Jews of shooting potential hostages so they might later save money on ransom payments. Those cheap Jews - isn’t that funny!! Also suggested by him was that Israel and all Jews should be eliminated (or move to Northern Saskatchewan?) and that Ukrainian fighters defending their country against Russian monsters (my mother-in-law still supports Putin, but her fridge magnet of Stalin was recently lost above the garbage bin) are on the same moral level as the Houthis and Hamas (though both groups are official terrorist groups in Canada).
Ramadan's final kicker was having some racist comedian regale us with those classic gags about how Jews skinned people alive and sold the clothing made from the skin. She said it quickly, but I caught it. Beautiful girl, though.
I’m dying with laughter after seeing all of Wael’s humour!
I must sit down. Of course, the laugh track is derailed a bit when it moves into all the Holocaust analogies; he has rebranded Israel to “Apartheid and Genocidal Israel.” It's sort of like Burger King being the home of the Whopper. One of the secrets to good branding is, of course, repetition. And his marketing instincts are strong.
But this guy is firmly aligned with the administration; they love him; it's just me, the emotional bastard who couldn't watch terrorists stalking Israeli hippies and shooting them (even though these were the most sympathetic people in Israel to the Palestinians) with all the dispassion of my son on Fortnight.
And I bet now Israelis might not be so eager to let the 20,000 Gazans who worked daily in Israel out of their "open-air prison" - I guess you'd call it a work release program - as it has been confirmed that Hamas savages were guided by Palestinian employees who showed their gratitude to Jewish employers by telling Hamas gunmen where they needed to go to maximize their killing and torture productivity coefficient. Is there an ISO standard for pogroms?
Yes, when employees are telling murderers where their boss is hiding, it could get mentioned at the Christmas party. But in Canada, I suspect if you mounted a defence and threw out enough pity words: brown, racism, oppressor, etc, you could get away with it. But in this case, it would all be moot for the accused as this boss, his wife, his aged mother, and two toddlers can’t launch any legal defence when they are prostrate on the ground, now blotchy and beginning to bloat in the heat, their corpses riddled with bullets, doused with gasoline and burned.
Yes, I do sound a little bitter, but I think it's well earned; I just love the tactics of HR (that's human rights or human resources - they share the acronym) that create a process to abuse you; they banish you from the community you love, they allow students (and staff and faculty) to circulate wild rumours - I have screenshots freely sent to me, don't worry I didn't respond, where employees swear they witnessed me beating up a first-year student in a class that I didn't even attend; they also have witnesses that I drove out to a student and harassed their family, even though I have been at home begging my doctor to give more refills on my Lorazepam prescription.
Jesus. As if I could beat up anyone, these first-year students would kick my ass; I get out of breath going up the stairs. But my name is now toxic, and no, I haven't had the strength to write; the fear and humiliation that the administration has put over me has left me weak.
But I am fighting back. I have an excellent lawyer, and this is not over. Even though my efforts might be futile when university employees swear that they have had their boss declare in a Reaganesque "Tear down the wall" conviction, "Trust me, Paul Finlayson will be terminated."
But don't you love it when someone has a process that beats the crap out of you, and then as you lie bleeding on the floor, they remind you that out of their immense compassion, they have kept your benefits active so you can now seek medical attention.
Of course, I shouldn't write this, but I'm mad; let's see how things turn out. I want to teach again and like being with my students.
I am thankful that my beloved father, whose picture shows Malibu, my little terrier who just turned two, will always sit above my bar. I am grateful he did not live to see the humiliation his favourite son brought the family.
Dad was a mathematician, and he managed to get through 50 years of university research and teaching without pissing anyone off. You can tell I'm adopted.
He passed away two years ago last Sunday. I miss him terribly.
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Paul Finlayson writes with wit and insight: “I just love the tactics of HR (that's human rights or human resources - they share the acronym) that create a process to abuse you; they banish you from the community you love, they allow students (and staff and faculty) to circulate wild rumours.” They also fabricate or distort allegations and deprive one of natural justice, such as the right to call witnesses or test their witnesses.
The more I read about your Kafkaesque experience in Academia,the more it sounds like exactly the kind of case that employment lawyer Howard Levitt, writing in the Financial Post, said he would take pro bono. He was talking more about acting for any employer who wanted to fire a Hamasshole, but your case is the exact mirror image, wrongful dismissal BY Hamassholes. I’m sure he might be interested in your case. Hell, ABC had to pay Trump $14 million to settle his defamation suit. Your case should be a layup in comparison.
I was once involved in a lawsuit in Alberta way back in the early 1980s (long story, back when I was in the oil bidness and my friends called me Dry Hole Harry) and I found the best strategy was to show up for the discovery accompanied by the meanest, toughest, scariest, most rabid mad dog SOB lawyer in the entire oilpatch. Before I went out there, I called a friend who was a lawyer in Calgary and asked him who he’d least like to have to face in court. He gave me a couple names, and some oilpatch pals gave a few more. When I told my lawyer friend later who I’d hired, he said, “Him? You hired that prick?” And I thought, perfect! So we get in a room with a court stenographer, and my lawyer leans back in his chair and puts his cowboy boots up on the table, and when the rookie lawyer from some white shoe law firm walks in, representing the oil company that was suing me, and sees my guy the pit bull, I’m pretty sure he peed himself. Then my guy lights a cigar(!) and the other lawyer says, “Do you mind not smoking?” And my guy responds, “Yes, I do,” and kept on puffing away. The whole thing took less than an hour, and I never even had to answer a single question, while my guy mercilessly grilled the CEO of the company suing me. They ended up dropping the lawsuit in exchange for us agreeing to not countersue them (which I hadn’t even thought a possibility). I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since.