In Defence of My Father

By Sophia Finlayson and family

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Preface

How sad it is that in this very paper, I am afraid to say where I attend university for fear of institutional and personal retribution.

Isn’t this Canada?

In Canada, the professor who publically calls Jews filth, sub-human, devil worshipers, deems Hamas noble warriors and calls for the elimination of Israel is supported by management, no sanction, and on his word, they defame, abuse, suspend, and attack, and have said they plan on firing the man who said he stands with Israel and that Hamas are Nazis. This man is my father.

This is a dangerous red line at a university.

What has happened to this country?

The institutional attack on my father by the University of Guelph-Humber is intensely personal for my brother and me, my mum and my grandmother.

If our dogs could speak, I’m sure they’d send a few growls Guelph-Humber’s way. We have seen the effects on my father up close.

My dad said he stood with Israel and called Hamas Nazis to a stranger in Pakistan on LinkedIn. This anti-Semite was calling for the extermination of Israel.

One bitter student took my dad’s response post without consent, altered it, and began to find fellow travellers to join her new radical professor friend and the Vice Provost on a malicious pathway that led to my father.

The university's investigator who found my father guilty said my dad’s response post was widely distributed to the student body.

Her absurd judgement provides management with what they paid for - a guilty verdict that supports the verdict proclaimed 17 months ago, the day he was suspended, a month before the “Human Rights” Manager even presented him with charges.

Evidence? She didn’t try to verify this accusation; there was not a whit of evidence, all accusers were anonymous, and fourth-hand rumours were treated as gospel, no times, nothing; it read more like the last place entry in a fiction writing contest than any legal determination.

She had as much interest in truth and justice as a cat has in a bath. University investigators don’t investigate; they find new and exciting ways to explore confirmation bias.

Is one person “widely?”

When one student takes it, and when she, bursting with malice, puts defamatory comments above it and shows it to half the University - is that distribution? This student and professor should be charged with defamation and prosecuted.

The University has the wrong person(s) on the docket; there is nothing judicial about their process; it is clear they are not interested in justice; they are simply interested in using University resources to pursue their private anti-semitic prejudices.

But these malicious staff, students, management and faculty were on the same political team as the executive, so all was forgiven.

And that is what matters, being on the right team, right and wrong, old fashioned ideas - ethics?

I mean, the the University mandates a course on ethics, but apparently, faculty must just mindlessly read off the PowerPoint because the institution itself does not have any interest in behaving ethically.

And lawyers?

Lawyers are all about getting away with breaking the law and protecting thugs.

Don’t believe the propaganda you see on TV; they are about bullying and frustrating the law-abiding; they are thugs in nice clothing; they think justice and truth are mythical Greek heroes that were put to death thousands of years ago.

To their shame and our disgust, my dad’s university community, a place that should be devoted to reason and fairness, showed little love of reason or procedural justice when it came to my father.

They showed duplicity, and an utter contempt for natural justice, only indifference, cowardice and a fierce devotion to self preservation.

My dad was suspended violently, without charges, kicked off campus, and banned from speaking to anyone affiliated with the University of Guelph, Humber College or the University of Guelph-Humber (a collaborative project between the U of Guelph and Humber College). Management refused to respond to him.

He was shunned, silence weaponised.

Students, faculty and staff were told not to speak to him. The institution deliberately made him look like a criminal; their lies were well executed.

He had said he stood with the Jews. At the University of Guelph-Humber, this looks to be a firing offence.

Yes, in Canada.

On the same day that the Vice Provost, in a dual role as judge and prosecuter (as she was the Human Rights Claimant), suspended my dad without charges and before my dad knew why - that information came a month late - the Human Rights Officer and their enablers needed more time to campaign for more anonymous complainants - if they exist as there is no evidence - a plan was instigated to slander and libel my father.

It was not organic gossip.

When staff pulls students aside one by one to tell them three distinct lies about my father, and faculty tells lies to students alleging my dad assaulted a student (a complete and utter lie with not a seed of truth), you know the rot runs deep, and what you have is not gossip run amok, but an organisation that, with management support and collusion, is actively and criminally trying to destroy the reputation, career and livelihood of my father.

Why? He stood with the Jews. You can’t do that at Humber College or the University of Guelph. Or, if you do, you need to keep it under your hat. Publically? Off to the cancel culture career killing room.

Damn right, this is personal for my family; I have seen his blood pressure monitor read 185/115. This is hurting him. He is my father. I only have one.

For oddly, the Assistant Vice Provost (AVP) and the Vice Provost (VP) didn’t tell my dad what he was charged with; the AVP said, “I have no idea why I am suspending you, something about social media.”

My dad showed me the suspension letter.

So they kicked my dad off campus and gagged him, but they had already begun, behind his back, besmirching his good name to staff and faculty.

What kind of organisation behaves like this? And they have known this for seventeen months now; all they have tried to do is delay, obfuscate, and refuse to answer while all the while maintaining an absurd facade of procedural justice - being abusive but bizarrely claiming victimhood.

Their true mandate was and is always to hide their own offenses and the offenses of their politically aligned professor and other friends while attacking my father. My dad’s union has said they will not support him. They unions have power to stop him from receiving any severance, or a pittance, and who can, without his permission, sign away his right to sue and to speak publically on this. In Canada.

Shockingly, staff and faculty weren’t just gossiping based on information deliberately leaked to them by either the Human Rights Manager or other senior managers.

It was organised; staff and faculty told the same distinct and bizarre lies. They approached students one by one and said that my father had assaulted a student, ripped off his shirt and was arrested, handcuffed and led away by police.

It was a scandalous story, except it was a malicious lie and not a lie invented by students. Indeed, it was only students who came to my dad’s defence.

The defamation started from the management suite.

And that lie about the “assault?” That was only the first of the lies.

A few staff also said he had been on the edge of termination for five years and had almost been fired.

The truth? He had amongst the highest student ratings in the department, the most publications, and the most votes when students were solicited to do “shoutouts” for their favourite professor. And my dad was the only one in the department who had developed three courses.

Many students said he was the best professor in the department.

But management, and the most ardent Jew-haters, one faculty member in particular, and a few staff members invented lies; my dad couldn’t defend himself, and management knew that with him no longer being allowed to show up to classes with no official explanation it would make him look guilty.

Furthermore, with everyone being told they were not to speak to my dad, the forest bed, tinder dry, was well prepared for the fires of defamation.

Jew-hating faculty, staff, students, and management knew they only needed to light the spark of defamation and with my dad gagged and off campus, the fire could burn freely.

Yes, staff, apparently while on the job, methodically pulled aside students to inform them of these invented allegations, and faculty lied to their classes, saying there were witnesses of my dad assaulting a student in a classroom.

It was absurd; the place was crawling with cameras, and students all had cameras on their phones, but people loved the juicy morsels of slander and gossip.

But this was not exaggeration or gossip that had gone awry; they were well-constructed lies by staff and management with references to “inside knowledge” and “many witnesses”.

My father had said he stood with Israel. That was unforgiveable. At the University of Guelph-Humber if you align with Israel and do not hide your position, you should fear losing your job.

Indeed, my dad was approached by a Jewish professor who said they wanted to support my dad, but people didn’t know they were Jewish and they needed their job, and couldn’t risk losing it, and thus needed to separate themself from my dad in the best interests of earning a living and feeding and taking care of their family.

Did you note that I must use the ambiguous pronoun to describe this excellent Jewish professor? That is to protect them.

Because one radical anti-Semite professor (his thousands of public anti-semitic posts have been given the institutional thumbs up by the University of Guelph, Guelph-Humber and Humber College) and his friend, the Vice Provost, were so triggered by the audacity of my father to affiliate himself with “those Jews” they invented lie after lie; they threatened him with police arrest if he dare ask anyone to stop lying, they trespassed him when he tried to go to the union office, they threatened him with defamation for articles he didn’t write; lawyers warned of mystery punishments, they threw out the potential of a $10,000 fine if he stepped foot on campus.

Note that the offences of that radical professor are a clear violation of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario and both the University of Guelph and Humber College human rights guidelines, their own rules say he should be immediately suspended and fired.

But when it comes to the Jews, the University takes a pass on their own rules.

All of this is documented, with no speculation.

For my father? Calling Hamas Nazis had apparantly made him a safety threat, violent, a threat to children, a predator, and they came damn close to calling him a paedophile. Just ask his accusers.

The University set out to destroy his reputation and physical and mental health - to break him.

It has been seventeen months. The ripples of pain, abandonment, anxiety and betrayal have spread to our family.

(Only the dogs look remotely accurate )

But today, my mother, brother and grandmother want to be clear. We stand by my dad.

He said he stood with Israel. We will not be bullied, defamed, shunned, or threatened by their lawyers into silence and acquiescence.

This is Canada. He did no wrong.

I stand with my father.

The institution, when hearing vile accusations of violence or accusations of him being dangerous to children, all without a scintilla of evidence or truth, embraced the accuser.

The University made a choice: they chose the “I stand with Hamas and want Israel destroyed¹” professor over the “I stand with Israel” professor.

It is that simple.

The truth needs to be told on this. This is a small Substack but please do not let them win. I pray that it is not only Jewish people who care.

The University of Guelph, Humber College and the University of Guelph-Humber have had seventeen months to back down from their un-Canadian and radical position. They are killing my dad; they have weaponized silence, they have destroyed his reputation, and they have thrown him to the curb like a piece of garbage.

My dad pleaded with them to issue a retraction email for all the lies management, staff, faculty, and students had told, but they did not refuse. They just ignored him.

This is always the way, they never say no, they never respond.

Human Rights knew that their partners in the human rights complaint against my father, Wael Ramadan and Melanie Spence Ariemma, were behind the defamation, but they did not respond to requests to tell faculty and staff to stop the lies.

The Humber Human Rights office, in reality, is essentially a weapon that is locked and loaded and used by the VP and all her anti-Zionist/Semitic collaborators to attack those who would dare condemn Hamas and stand opposed to their anti-Semitic hate.

The office that pretends to stop hate is now the University of Guelph and Humber’s primary weapon of hate.

Where they could have sought peace and understanding, they sought war; where they could have sought reconciliation, they chose to bully, threaten and intimidate.

Where these institutions could have chosen to support the only democracy in the Middle East, they chose to fall behind the man who supports three terrorist organisations, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis and who publically called for the eradication of Israel.

So be it. But they must not be allowed to hide behind lies, lawyers and obfuscations.

They have dug their heels in. My father has dug his heels in.

My father stands with Israel. The University of Guelph-Humber, Humber College and the University of Guelph stand by the man who has called Hamas “Noble Warriors” and expressed praise for other terrorist organisations.

Were the executives that gathered to hear the anti-semitic professor rant all anti-Semites? Was their hatred that extreme? Were they just cowards, afraid of being called racist? Or were they afraid that if they did not join in this malicious professor’s attack on my dad, they might lose their base of Muslim students? Nobody knows.

But in a moment of decision where they could have chosen loyalty, decency, due process and natural justice, they capitulated and, lacking the humility to back down, they doubled down and threw hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of legal intimidation at my father.

Instead of defending my father, instead of hearing him speak, they, to the contrary, hid and slandered him; when they heard lies they knew were lies, they were too cowardly to stop them; they lit the match and watched it burn.

And now they try to wash their hands of it by hiding behind lawyers. A lot of dirt remains.

Yes, this is personal.

This university has not only gone to war against my father, they have gone to war against the Finlayson family.

I took a human rights course last semester; I thought I would apply critical thinking to my dad’s situation.

So as I write this, I speak for my brother, grandmother, and mother.

I love my father; he has not a discriminatory bone in his body.

My friends have taken his courses. At Guelph-Humber, he was known as the professor who loved to teach.

I have been going to visit my dad at his university since I was a little girl. We would bring our dog.

Years ago, it was Nika; later, it was Toby and Malibu. The last time Malibu was a puppy, she pooped on the floor and got kicked out by security, but we still had a great time. I considered attending Guelph-Humber, but of course, now that is unthinkable.

Why would anyone who knows what they have done attend the University of Guelph-Humber?

He called Hamas Nazis.

He has been suspended now for seventeen months, and the administration is at war with him, with an intrusion of lawyers² at taxpayer expense - all fiercely dedicated to working with management to destroy his career and his livelihood - they have already, through deliberate lies, destroyed his academic reputation.

The university pays their lawyers, his accusers get free legal support, while my father has to pay for his own out of pocket.

He needs to spend thousands on lawyers - it is not the money; it is the lies, the idea that never responding is different than saying I refuse to help.

The unions that he has paid dues to for fourteen years and that have barely helped in any way have now, in his time of need, refused to help. OPSEU 562 sent a note two days ago saying they will no longer support their member. It is a direct violation of the collective agreement, but when there is nobody to enforce rules, the bullies take over.

It is not a surprise - both CUPE and OPSEU have multiple human rights complaints against them for antisemitism; the head of CUPE, Fred Hahn, is famous for his anti-Semitism, and the flags of OPSEU fly next to Hamas flags at rallies in Toronto.

Both unions have refused to meet or talk since day one. His OPSEU Local President accused my dad of a hate crime. It's nice to know that on day two, your union is against you and is making idiotic, unschooled comments on issues miles beyond their competency. Recently, CUPE sent him a letter in which they spoke of other locals calling for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions on Israel in light of the many atrocities that the Israeli military has committed against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. That’s not their debating position. That’s them acting like their opinion is automatically true.

No judge with the extreme prejudices of these unions could judge in a trial concerning Israel, it would be unthinkable.

Still, my dad’s only legal representation comes from two groups who publically have stated they hate a country that my dad loves and believes in.

Of course, OPSEU has done nothing, and CUPE next to nothing, and both seem more pro-management than pro-member. They are too myopic to see beyond their prejudices.

It has come at a psychological cost, and it is not cheap.

It is paid for in anxiety, heartache, sleepless nights and dangerously high blood pressure. He has developed PTSD, and a WSIB claim against the University has been approved, with the University being deemed by the WSIB fully responsible.

The University of Guelph, according to his WSIB Claims Manager, has fought bitterly against the WSIB on the issue of the WSIB providing my dad therapy for PTSD.

Yes, the University of Guelph is fighting the WSIB and my father - trying to stop him getting therapy for injuries they are responsible for.

How much lower can they go?

The system is set up so that the person who filed the wild accusations against him is also the person who will be set up as the judge against him. Imagine a court where the judge and the prosecuter were the same person.

While he is officially on paid suspension every semester, he has had to get a lawyer or a Labour Board action to be paid; they claim to have lost contracts or emails or just do the age-old favourite and don’t respond.

His health benefits have never been less than 30 days late and only reclaimed after hours spent tracking down human resources. Of course his supervisor and everyone in HR refuses to return emails.

They have teaching materials that he owns the rights to, but they refuse to release or even allow him to see his payroll records - the Business Department Head makes up rules on the fly, rules he applies to nobody else.

The institutions are so mean-spirited and bitter that they would rather pay a lawyer thousands to fight my dad than allow him to access his payroll records. It would take them two-minutes, they have done it many times for him in the past, but in the past he had not said he stood with the Jews.

His first lawyer, Kathryn Marshall, said that, for his health, he might do well to quit.

My dad said she understood him right away.

But my dad is stubborn when he digs his heels in on principle.

Marshall was kind, and Dad said she saw the toll the university’s abuse was taking on him.

The University of Guelph, Humber College and the VP are at war with him. They do not follow their own rules. They fight to stop him from receiving the smallest acknowledgement that he is still faculty, and strangers in administration treat him disrespectfully.

When management, faculty and staff have created rumours and told people he is a criminal and a racist, what hope does he have?

He called a terrorist organization, so designated by the government of Canada, Nazis. And Hamas has its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, a group which has documented affiliations and sympathies for the Nazi party.

My dad’s main accuser, according to students, contacted an extremely left-wing organisation, and they sent out a tweet that implicitly called for my father’s termination and provided contact information for readers to write the university to call for my dad’s ouster while making sure to insult my dad and imply he was a Nazi.

3.2 million people saw that. Such numbers create a physical threat to my family. It only takes one nut case to come after us.

His accuser seems to have also arranged another organisation to defame him; this one was sent to 20K strangers and called him ‘the racist teacher.’

The university knows all this, but what is their response?

They are standing on the side of the man who says he stands with Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, who says he wants Israel eliminated.

They are attacking the man who said he stood with Israel.

They have declared their alliances and made their position clear. It is as simple as I have stated above.

What else is this other than institutional anti-semitism?

Below are a few of the thousands of posts of my dad’s accuser, who has faced no sanction despite his vulgar posts violating human rights and speech code. All human rights complaints against him were immediately dismissed. He also has complaints about him running down Jews in the classroom.

He has taught at Sheridan College for years and has a long-standing relationship with the current Guelph Humber VP from her many years at Sheridan College. All complaints at Sheridan College have also been ignored, like at Guelph-Humber; he seems protected by management. Nobody knows why. Here is a Rate My Professor rating on him.

The University of Guelph-Humber’s social accounts were, or were until they were caught, connected to anti-semitic sites - also see below. This is no surprise.

The University of Guelph and Humber College lawyers are there not to defend my dad but rather to attack him, to support a Vice Provost and her professor friend, the latter an unashamed hater of Israel and Jews, a man who posts twelve times a day, his LinkedIN and X a sick, obsessive mix of death porn, and anti-semitic bile.

My father and his father, my recently deceased grandfather, were professors who loved Israel and always supported the Jews.

If my grandfather were alive today and visited us in Toronto, he would attend the weekly rallies for Israel at the corner of Bathurst and Sheppard.

But my father has paid a dear cost for his beliefs over the last sixteen months.

He has been betrayed by friends and abandoned by students, staff and faculty; he has seen administrators and an obscure part-time lecturer, who nobody but the Vice Provost seemed to know, mobilise university resources, lawyers and partisan “human rights” staff to attack him, all because he called Hamas Nazis and said that he stood with Israel.

Institutional betrayal is an established pattern of behaviour; it has led to suicides and hospitalisation; it is institutionalized sadism.

My dad was responding to a stranger in Pakistan who was calling for the elimination of Israel.

Today, all these university people who persecute my dad do not even return emails, let alone look him in the eyes. They hide behind a Potemkin signage of justice and truth, hurling snide comments and defamatory bombs at my dad. Even President Van Acker, the President of the University of Guelph, has joined in.

I have seen my father up all night, unable to sleep; I have seen him bury his head in his hands, shunned, ridiculed and attacked by an institution to which he had given his heart.

He writes really bad songs on AI. The music is lame, but the words are good, and they are his. This tells how he has felt so much of the time.

The song is called Defamation.

“But I stand in the silence

Where my laughter used to be.

The flames have long since faded,

But there’s nothing left of me.”

University students, staff and faculty have deliberately destroyed his reputation.

They accused him of assaulting a student; I saw the messages from the staff member, all lies, all seemingly directed by the administration. The administration was somehow aware enough not to report the false criminal rumours to the police.

Still, they were not motivated to stop staff, faculty, and students from spreading them, nor were they willing to issue a retraction email.

What is that other than evil?

My father stood on the opposite political side; they abandoned him; if they were not defaming him themselves, they allowed lies to be deliberately spread unchecked.

I had visited Guelph-Humber many times; I remember going there as a little girl. My cards were in my dad’s office, and my Lego from when I was five was on his shelf.

But they threw my father out, and without even talking to him, they trashed and boxed up everything in his office, all my cards, papers from my grandfather, and my Lego from when I was little, and hid it. Dad found out through a student. This administration works in secret.

What kind of people do this?

I know the truth. I talked to students, and they all said he was the best professor who cared about the students. I saw videos of students singing their praises.

I stand by my father as he stood by his father.

My dad told me that my grandfather as an associate professor had refused a promotion. He said an Indian colleague was clearly more worthy and my grandpa refused to take the promotion. This lowered his salary and pension for life.

But standing on principle runs in the Finlayson family. The apple does not fall far from the tree.

Introduction

Universities are meant to be sanctuaries of intellectual freedom, where ideas clash and truth emerges victorious. Yet, in recent years, the administration of human rights on campuses has devolved into a Kafkaesque nightmare.

Imagine a system designed to protect the vulnerable, now twisted to serve the agendas of the powerful. In Canadian academia, human rights offices have become instruments of control, silencing voices and being used to settle scores under the guise of fairness.

Unchecked power has transformed human rights from a safeguard into a weapon, stifling debate and punishing dissent.

Universities have morphed into the most restrictive institutions in Western society, leading the charge in silencing dissent while hiding behind the words ‘human rights’ but with no interest in the genuine article.

What was meant to be a noble shield against oppression has become a blunt instrument wielded by unqualified bureaucrats to crush free thought, settle political scores, and enforce rigid ideological conformity.

My dad's case —ensnared in a nightmarish web of subjective human rights complaints—exposes how these systems are weaponised when handed to managers who wouldn’t hear the call of justice if it screamed at them on the street.

History reveals a troubling pattern: far from defenders of democracy and freedom, universities have often been early adopters of totalitarianism and tyranny, a legacy that persists today.

The Fall of the Bright City

Universities should be bright cities on the hill³, guiding society toward truth through the fearless clash of ideas. They were meant to champion free speech, where even the most uncomfortable truths could be spoken and debated.

George Orwell said in 1984: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

But today, that liberty is on life support, suffocated by human rights offices that have abandoned their noble purpose. Instead of protecting the vulnerable, these offices have become instruments of control, enforcing strict political agendas under the guise of fairness.

My dad’s ordeal is a glaring example of this betrayal, and it’s time to expose how subjective standards, unchecked power, and biased procedures have turned rights into wrongs, transforming campuses into echo chambers where dissent is a crime.

This trend echoes a historical pattern where universities, rather than resisting tyranny, embraced it—setting the stage for today’s oppressive academic climate.

Historical Roots: Universities as Early Adopters of Totalitarianism

The notion that universities defend democracy is a myth shattered by history. Far from being bastions of freedom, they have often been early adopters of totalitarianism and tyranny.

Take the University of Heidelberg in Nazi Germany during the 1930s.

Once a prestigious centre of learning, it became a breeding ground for Nazi ideology under the Third Reich. In 1933, the university’s rector, Ernst Krieck, a fervent Nazi, purged Jewish professors and intellectuals, aligning the curriculum with Hitler’s racial doctrines. The infamous book burnings of May 10, 1933, saw students and faculty destroy works by Freud, Einstein, and Marx, heralding the suppression of free thought.

Heidelberg’s human rights office equivalent—under the guise of “racial purity” policies—actively enforced this tyranny, expelling dissenters and turning a once-great institution into a tool of the regime.

Similarly, the Soviet Union’s Moscow State University under Stalin offers a chilling precedent. In the 1930s and 1940s, it became a hub for indoctrinating students into Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Professors who deviated from the party line, such as Nikolai Vavilov, a renowned geneticist who opposed Lysenkoism, were silenced or imprisoned.

The university’s administration, far from defending academic freedom, collaborated with the NKVD (Soviet secret police) to purge “counter-revolutionary” thinkers, aligning with Stalin’s totalitarian control.

This historical betrayal of intellectual liberty mirrors today’s campus climate, where universities lead the charge in restricting speech rather than fostering it.

Closer to home, McGill University in Canada during the Cold War era provides another example. In the 1950s, amid McCarthyism’s influence, McGill’s administration cooperated with Canadian security forces to monitor and blacklist professors suspected of communist sympathies.

Historian Frank Scott, a prominent academic, faced investigations and censorship for his socialist views despite advocating for civil liberties. The university’s human rights mechanisms, rather than protecting Scott, were weaponised to enforce a strict anti-communist agenda, stifling dissent and aligning with the era’s authoritarian overreach.

These historical cases reveal that universities have long been complicit in tyranny, a legacy that has evolved into the modern misuse of human rights offices.

The Finlayson Fiasco: A Case Study in Absurdity

Paul Finlayson, my father, a lecturer with the courage to speak plainly, responded to someone calling for Israel’s extermination with a blunt truth: “If you stand with Hamas, you stand with Nazis.”

It’s a fair point—Hamas’s charter explicitly calls for Israel’s destruction, and they’re an internationally recognised terrorist organisation with a documented history of anti-Semitic rhetoric.

(Note: My dad teaches at another university, and the same crew that attacked him at Guelph-Humber came after him there and tried to get him fired.

That university looked at my dad’s post and said, “This is free speech,” they didn’t even deem it necessary to meet my dad. I can’t name that university; it would be like waving a red flag before the proverbial bull of well-connected radicals.

So, some Canadian universities have principles and an understanding of free speech, not to mention a local union that looks out for its members, regardless of political leanings. Guelph-Humber has too much Jew-hatred at the top to be like this.)

But back to Hamas - they came out of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that organisation and their leaders were great fans of Nazism.

It’s called history, but perhaps we are not allowed to speak of history anymore if it is a story that makes a few professional victims uncomfortable.

But here’s where it all goes off the rails. An algorithm sent my dad’s comment to a student with a grudge over grades. This bitter student, looking for vengeance over not getting an A in my dad’s Consumer Behaviour course, then collaborated with this same militant professor and the Vice Provost of Guelph-Humber to file a human rights complaint.

They painted my dad as a violent racist threat to children; the violence, racism and children thing? Pure malice and defamation, not a hint of reason or evidence.

And where are the so-called leaders who should be stopping this?

They are the ones propagating the rumours; they are the arsonists who stand proudly watching the house they just filled with gasoline go up in flames.

And the University of Guelph and Humber College are fully supporting them! They don’t even dare to stand up for this disgusting defamation; they hide and play passive-aggressive games.

It is a claim so absurd it would be laughable if it weren’t so devastating.

The University is responsible for this defamation but still has the insane hypocrisy to talk to my dad about ‘guarding privacy’ and scolding him. Their moral blindness and malice are awe-inspiring, but it is the awe one sees as one looks at a great mountain of delusion.

Defamation isn’t a violation of privacy; it’s infinitely worse.

This led to an entire graduating class crossing the convocation stage, believing that my dad wasn’t there because he was fired for criminal activity and perhaps incarcerated.

But the school, while banning my dad from attending, coddled the student who unfurled a Palestinian flag during her walk across the stage.

It was very strange that the wording in the human rights complaint against my dad and the defamation that was spread by faculty and staff on the same day he was suspended was so similar - it was one month before my dad even got the noted human rights complaint so he didn’t know himself.

My dad has the text messages, and multiple alarmed students called him, horrified by what they were hearing; they had more courage than the administration.

Strange? You’d think this was an organisational effort, wouldn’t you?

Both speak to wild, unfounded accusations of violence. Strange that two disparate groups, one staff and one his accusers, all parties who did not know each other, would each invent the same unfounded lies?

It’s like winning a horrible lottery, or is it?

There is a probability formula called the Bayes formula that can be used to calculate the odds of where rumours originate; it said there was a 95% certainty they came from the same persons.

Administrators, staff and faculty spread the poison before my dad even had a chance to respond.

My dad couldn’t see the evidence or defend himself, and when he tried to counter the defamation, he was threatened with legal action.

His objections were considered “criminal harassment”, and he was warned; an angry public safety officer he had never met threatened that if he spoke out again, they would contact the police and have him arrested. He has the letter; this isn’t speculation.

My dad spoke with the police, and the police were furious with Humber Public Safety for using empty threats like this to abuse their employees.

It is classic institutional abuse by the University of Guelph and Humber College. It is a classic institutional betrayal.

My dad was told he couldn’t speak and then accused, and he was given no details—just accusations of him doing things with no evidence, time, or dates.

When is protecting privacy really nothing more than allowing bad faith actors unlimited powers to defame their enemies without legal reprecussions, with their identity shielded by their friends in administration?

People who said they heard something, classic hearsay, just rumours and lies, were deemed more important than the original person who said he didn’t say what the rumourmonger had repeated.

But regardless, my dad was found guilty.

This is in Canada.

This isn’t justice; it’s a kangaroo court cloaked in human rights rhetoric, a stark reminder that universities are no longer bastions of free thought but oppressive institutions leading the charge in restricting speech, echoing their historical role as tools of tyranny.

Subjectivity: The Slippery Slope to Tyranny

The core issue here is the shift in human rights from clear, objective standards—like incitement to violence—to vague, subjective concepts like “harassment” or “discrimination.”

When definitions become this slippery, they’re ripe for abuse. My dad’s comment wasn’t a call to arms; it was a factual statement about a terrorist group.

Yet, the human rights office, driven by political bias, twisted it into hate speech.

Orwell saw this coming in Politics and the English Language: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Vague definitions allow bureaucrats to stretch “harassment” to mean anything that offends the wrong person, weaponising the legal system against dissenters. This becomes especially relevant when the offended is friends with the head of the university.

Once in that system, you’re guilty until proven innocent—a complete inversion of natural justice. My dad faces a well-funded institution with no resources to fight back; he is gagged and isolated while his reputation is allowed to be destroyed.

The process has become the punishment, a legal bludgeon that individuals like him can’t escape. The university, though he is on ‘paid suspension’, has tried not to pay him every semester and had to be shamed by lawyers and the Labour Board into doing it; they have withheld benefits, denied access to his textbooks and materials on school computers, and refused to reset his password so he can look at his payroll and tax information.

They are deliberately getting away with everything they can. You can get away with a lot when there is no higher court at a university; you can get away with a lot when management is driving the bus and when you have management that seems to enjoy frustrating their Jew-loving colleague.

Universities today lead the way in suppression, using human rights as a smokescreen to enforce ideological conformity while claiming to protect the vulnerable, a tactic reminiscent of their totalitarian past.

Double Standards and Political Bias: The Revelation

The double standards, in this case, are infuriating. His accuser, the professor who co-filed the complaint against my dad, is a walking red flag.

Documents reveal he posts 12 public anti-Israel rants a day—95% of the thousands of his social media posts obsess over Israel, labelling it an “apartheid state committing genocide” and fantasising about its destruction.

This professor publicly celebrates Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah, never condemning the October 7, 2023, massacre of civilians—babies, teens, and seniors butchered in cold blood. Indeed, on Oct. 7, he posted, “Gaza Resistance – You will never defeat a people striving to be free”. Praising terrorists is a clear violation of the HRTO code, but when you have the right friends and your hateful views align with management and the Human Rights department, it will be overlooked.

This professor brags about how well Hamas treated their hostages, while the truth is those monsters strangled the baby Bibas boys in their coffins and shot hostages in cold blood.

The professor even shares posts from John Mearsheimer, a favourite of white supremacists like David Duke, and jokes about Jews killing their children to save money. It is odd how white supremacists and anti-semites are now bedfellows.

If you put the human rights code of Ontario and that professor’s posts together in Chat GPT, your screen will blow up.

But my dad’s accuser is friends with the right people; he has 70K followers on LinkedIn, and my dad is lucky to break 500, so Jewish students must take courses from someone who publicly has said he wants them dead.

This man is shaping young minds, yet when a Jewish student filed a complaint against him, it was dismissed faster than you can say “hypocrisy.”

This isn’t human rights—it’s a political hit job dressed up as justice. Universities, once defenders of open discourse, now use human rights offices to advance strict political agendas, silencing critics while shielding those who peddle hate under the guise of protecting rights, a pattern rooted in their historical complicity with tyranny.

The Kafkaesque Process: Where Justice Goes to Die

The process my dad has endured is straight out of Orwell’s 1984: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

His truth-telling landed him in a system where guilt is assumed, evidence is secret, and defence is impossible. There are no hearsay rules or obligation to consider exculpatory evidence—just a shadowy pair of greasy investigators churning out convictions.

Human rights offices seem to think procedural justice is optional.

They claim to protect “anonymous complainants” (or VPs with agendas), but in doing so, they trample the rights of the accused. Winston Churchill’s words ring true: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

We’ve outsourced that vigilance to bureaucrats who’d rather gag than listen, who are looking to do favourites for management and think that freedom of speech means the freedom to agree with them. If not, it’s a hate crime.

Far from being shining cities on a hill, they lead the way in dimming the light of free speech, using human rights as a false front to mask their authoritarian tactics.

Weaponised Human Rights: A Broader Pattern of Suppression

My dad’s case isn’t an isolated incident—it’s part of a broader pattern of human rights offices in universities and colleges being weaponised to stifle thought and advance strict political agendas.

Take the case of Jordan Peterson at the University of Toronto in 2016. Peterson, a psychology professor, opposed Bill C-16, a Canadian law adding gender identity and expression to anti-discrimination protections, arguing that mandated pronouns infringed on free speech. The university’s human rights office, backed by student activists, labelled his views transphobic, disrupting his lectures and threatening disciplinary action despite no evidence of harm. This was a clear move to enforce ideological conformity, turning a human rights office into a suppression tool.

Across the border, Evergreen State College in Washington offers another chilling example. In 2017, biology professor Bret Weinstein objected to a “Day of Absence” event where white students and faculty were asked to leave campus to highlight racial dynamics.

The equity office supported student activists who accused him of racism, leading to violent protests with baseball bats and his eventual resignation.

This weaponisation of human rights enforced a strict racial agenda, mirroring totalitarian control over academic discourse.

Closer to home, McGill University in Montreal faced a scandal in 2021.

The Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion investigated a professor for questioning systemic racism narratives in a lecture, citing class-based data.

Despite no incitement, a student complaint led to a months-long suspension and a public “problematic” label. McGill’s equity office suppressed dissent to uphold a dominant ideology, proving that human rights are often tools for enforcing orthodoxy.

Human Rights as Human Wrongs

When human rights abandon objectivity and due process, they become vehicles for injustice. My dad’s case, alongside Peterson’s, Weinstein’s, and the drama at McGill, shows how human rights offices crush free expression, prioritising political agendas over truth.

Reports of anti-Semitic intimidation are ignored while dissenters are fast-tracked for the door. The damage is done: academic records are trashed, students turn hostile, and individuals are powerless.

Orwell warned us: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” By controlling the human rights narrative, these unqualified managers reshape reality to fit their politics, leaving truth and justice in the dust.

Are universities the most restrictive institutions in Western society? Are they leading the charge in silencing dissent while cloaking their actions in the rhetoric of human rights?

Reclaiming the High Ground

How do we fix this disaster? First, anchor human rights in objective standards—incitement to violence, not hurt feelings. Second, restore procedural justice: the accused must face their accusers, see the evidence, and defend themselves openly.

Third, universities must recommit to free speech, even when it’s uncomfortable. Human rights complaints can not be open forums for hidden accusers to slander their enemies with impunity and face no repercussions for lying.

Churchill said, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

Human rights offices have shown neither, choosing power over principle. Suppose universities are to reclaim their role as bastions of intellectual freedom. In that case, they must dismantle the Potemkin front of human rights and stop leading the way in suppression, breaking from their historical legacy of tyranny.

Conclusion: A Call to Arms

The weaponisation of human rights is a betrayal of everything universities once stood for.

My dad’s saga and similar cases prove that subjective standards and broken processes don’t protect rights—they crush them. Historically, universities have been early adopters of totalitarianism and tyranny, a pattern that continues today.

Orwell and Churchill saw the dangers of unchecked power and twisted language, and we’re living their warnings.

If we don’t demand clarity, transparency, and fairness, our campuses will remain tyrannies masquerading as sanctuaries.

Human rights should lift us, not tear us down—let’s make sure they stop being a tool for political harassment and start being a shield again.

The process of hiring external investigators to create political cover for management’s prejudgements and who have no obligation to provide witness names or places, no obligation to allow cross-examination of witnesses, or to differentiate hearsay from its source - this is nothing more than an expensive custom-made scaffold for executives to hang their pre-judgements on, at taxpayer expense.

Recently, the President of Guelph, before receiving my dad’s appeal and never listening to my dad, told a visitor to his office that “Finlayson needs to start looking for a new job.”

That’s procedural justice, U of Guelph style. Just like the queen in Alice In Wonderland who famously said,

“Sentence first — verdict afterwards.”

My dad’s lawyer estimated that the university had already spent $400K to get my dad fired.

External investigators make no effort to provide even the basics of procedural justice. Management pays them, so they supplicate themselves to management’s whims.

My mother and grandmother were born in Russia, and they have spoken of the famed Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

It was Solzhenitsyn who said,

“Let the lie come into the world, even let it triumph. But not through me.”

This is the position of our family. Solzhenitsyn refused to be silent and bow to the brutality of the Stalinist regime. He paid a high cost, spending eight years in a gulag.

Even if the university fires my father, though it will be a gross injustice, we will not be silenced, and we will stand by him, along, I know, with the Jewish community.

My family wants to be very clear on this.

Thankfully, my dad will not be sentenced to a gulag, but no matter - the Finlayson family is clear - even if the university’s lies triumph, their lies will not go through us.

The Finlayson family stands with Paul Finlayson—my brother and I stand with our father, my mother with her husband, and my grandmother with her son-in-law. (This piece was translated into Russian for her.)

And my grandfather stands with his son—one could say watching from heaven or perhaps, as the Russians say, “в сердцах живых он живёт”—in the hearts of the living, he lives.

We love my father, and he is not alone.

_________________

“But I rise from the embers and will not fade away.

They burned my world to blackened dust, but I will find my way.

This isn’t my ending. I won’t bow or break,

Through the smoke and the ruin,

I will stand, I will remake.”

1. You can follow him at @WaelRamadan1948 (WJR). This man, according to three witnesses, recruited anti-semitic organisations to defame my father - but we should give him privacy after he has instigated over three million views of material that lied about my father? The sanctimony and hypocrisy of this “adult” university are earth-shaking and disgusting. What moral authority do they have to lead a public university?

2. The collective noun for cockroaches

3

— Matthew 5:14 (KJV)