Not My Brother’s Keeper: The Viral Defamation of a Professor and the Triumph of Selfish Apathy

When institutions don’t just permit the mob—they are the mob: injustice by HR decree, reputations shattered by digital stone-throwing

June 30, 2025

If you believe in the importance of free speech, subscribe to support uncensored, fearless writing—the more people who pay, the more time I can devote to this. Free speech matters. I am a university professor who was suspended due to a free speech issue, so I am not speaking from the bleachers.

Please subscribe to receive at least three pieces /essays per week with open comments. It’s $6 per month, less than USD 4. Everyone says, "Hey, it’s just a cup of coffee," but please choose my coffee when you come to the Substack counter. Cheers.

In the annals of human cowardice, few spectacles rival the methodical destruction of a man by lies, not because the lies were clever, but because no one cared enough to stop them. This is not merely a tale of injustice; it is a dissection of a society so steeped in selfishness that it has abandoned the very concept of moral responsibility.

At the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, Ontario, a professor dared to utter two sentences: “I stand with Israel.” “Hamas are Nazis.” For this, he was defamed, gagged, banished, and professionally immolated. But the true villain is not the defamation itself—vicious though it was—nor even the institutional bloodlust that fueled it.

It is the silence of those who watched, shrugged, and turned away, muttering under their breath, “Not my brother’s keeper.” This is the cancer beneath the skin of our civilisation, and it is terminal.

The Viral Plague: Defamation as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Let us begin with the mechanics of this savagery, for it reveals the cold precision of modern character assassination. On November 27, 2023, a staff member—a Vashti Bagot, widely perceived as a mouthpiece for senior administration—methodically pulled student after student aside, telling them the professor had assaulted one of their own, been handcuffed, arrested, and was a long-standing menace the university ached to purge. These were lies, not exaggerations, of course, but lies with wings. Within hours, the professor was suspended, gagged, and barred from campus.

Staff and students were ordered to report any contact from him to Human Resources, as if he were a leper whose very words carried contagion. The university had not merely silenced him; it had engineered his erasure.

To quantify this horror, we turn to the SEIR-OM model, an epidemiological tool repurposed to track the diffusion of slander in a closed system. The numbers are damning: within 13 days, the lies infected 4,080 individuals—roughly 68% of the university’s population. The initial vector consisted of just six staff and faculty members, but on a single-building campus, the conditions were ripe for a pandemic.

The defamation mutated—assault became sexual misconduct, then threats, then paedophilia—each iteration more lurid than the last. Belief peaked at 86%, and unlike a virus that exhausts its hosts, this one lingered. Eight months later, over 60% still swallowed the poison whole. The university refused to retract a syllable. The professor told the liar to stop. A thug in Public Safety threatened the defamed professor with police referral if he dared to ask for the defamation to stop. The lies must run unimpeded the Vice Provost and her sychophatic enablers proclaimed or at least inferred.

Silence, it seems, is not just policy—it’s gospel.

This dynamic aligns with the SEIR-OM model’s findings, which account for individual heterogeneity in rumour diffusion. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychology demonstrates that trust and information-seeking behaviour amplify rumour spread in ideologically aligned groups, as seen here, where the campus’s hostility to the professor’s views created fertile ground for falsehoods.

The model predicts that without intervention—such as refutation or transparency—rumours can achieve near-total saturation, as occurred at Guelph-Humber. Contrast this with Ohio State University, where a similar scandal was met with transparency and accountability; belief in rumours there collapsed within three weeks, as noted in a 2025 Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics article. At Guelph-Humber, the half-life of truth is infinite because truth was never permitted to breathe.

The Information Cascade Model (ICM) further illuminates this catastrophe. Described in a 2018 chapter from Cooperative and Graph Signal Processing, the ICM shows how rumours cascade through networks when individuals rely on others’ actions rather than verifying facts.

At Guelph-Humber, the staff member’s initial lies, amplified by students and faculty, triggered a cascade where students and colleagues accepted the narrative without question, driven by the perceived authority of the source. Screenshots captured staff members spreading these lies during work time; students confirmed that professors repeated them in class, students howled at their professors, “it’s true, there are witnesses, we are sure.”

This was not gossip—it was a calculated campaign. When the affected professor begged management to intervene, their response was a sneer: “Let it run. We are busy getting grades in.”

When he dared to challenge the lies, they threatened him with police arrest. Reasoned appeals were tossed back unread, as futile as throwing parchment to a wolf as it devours your kin.

Social network analysis, as applied in a 2017 study on the spread of gossip, underscores the role of network centrality. The staff member and key faculty acted as central nodes, rapidly disseminating the rumour through the campus’s tight-knit structure. The study found a non-monotonic relationship between network size and spread, suggesting that smaller, cohesive networks—such as a single-building campus—can amplify rumours faster than larger, more diffuse ones. This explains the rapid infection rate at Guelph-Humber, where the lies reached 68% of the population in under two weeks.

Institutional Bloodlust: The Machinery of Malice

The university’s response was not incompetent; it was maliciously clad in bureaucracy. The professor’s pleas were met with gag orders and threats: speak, and face the consequences of the law. His appeals to Humber College and the University of Guelph were returned unopened—unread by humans too consumed with Jew-hatred to feign reason. Investigator Gita Anand admitted on April 15, 2024, that unless he signed her gag order, she would “not provide a defence.” She coerced him into it, making the signature invalid anyway, but she also did not provide him with a defence. Not a single one of his witnesses was called; this was no investigation; it was a Stalinist show trial minus the formality of a stage. She demanded that he turn over all his communications with “Those Jewish organisations.” He declined, of course.

President Rene Van Acker of the University of Guelph—whose commitment to due process appears to have been borrowed from the Salem Witch Trials—told a rabbi on or about March 5, 2025, that the professor in question should “start looking for a new job.” Not after an investigation. Not after a hearing. Not even after reading the evidence. No, this declaration of professional death came four months before their so-called “judicial process” had reached its foregone conclusion.

But why stop at kangaroo courts when you can have the sentence before the charge is even laid? Vice Provost Melanie Spence Ariemma, clearly auditioning for the role of both judge and jubilant hangman, reportedly told staff on the very day of the suspension, “What he said was disgusting; he will be terminated.”

No investigation, no facts, no particulars—just the satisfying clunk of a moral guillotine being hoisted into place.

So much for presumption of innocence. This wasn’t a process; it was a purge. The only mystery here is why they bothered to stage the farce of an investigation at all, when the script had already been written and the axe already gleamed.

The administration didn’t merely tolerate the defamation—they cultivated it. Two faculty members, apologists for Hezbollah, the Iranian mullahs, Assad, and Putin, spewed anti-Semitic venom—Holocaust libel, Nazi inversion, calls to eradicate Israel, calling Jews filth—without reprimand. When the professor reported this hate propaganda to the Human Rights Office, they yawned. A ‘Human Rights’ office is nakedly anti-Semitic.

Yet when the professor voiced support for Israel, they pounced. The double standard was not hypocrisy; it was policy. Senior management, including the Vice Provost, sanctioned the lies, bragged about poisoning the workplace, and revelled in the bloodlust of crushing a “Jew-lover.” No precedent, no logic, no appeal could halt their savagery. They were animals, not stewards of reason.

This aligns with a 2022 Current Psychology study, which shows that low trust in authority amplifies the impact of rumours, as administrative complicity erodes credibility.

At Guelph-Humber, the administration’s refusal to counter the lies—coupled with gag orders—created an information vacuum, fueling the rumour’s persistence. The 2024 Nonlinear Dynamics study further notes that institutional interventions, such as education on rumour identification, can reduce the spread; however, Guelph-Humber chose the opposite, actively fostering the narrative.

And now we arrive at the theatre of procedural justice, that exquisite charade beloved by cowardly institutions desperate to appear lawful while being anything but. At the University of Guelph-Humber, the process was not merely flawed—it was intentionally designed to fail. One would expect, even in a banana republic, that an investigation into serious allegations would involve the investigator speaking to at least one of the accused witnesses. Not here. Not one.

Not a single individual in possession of exculpatory evidence was contacted, questioned, or acknowledged. Not one shred of contrary testimony was considered. The so-called complainants, who offered nothing more than incoherant rage and offense, nor even the decency of a consistent narrative, were uncritically believed. Why? Because belief was the point. The truth was irrelevant.

The “investigator,” a paid marionette from Sherrard Kuzz LLP, whose strings were pulled by preordained conclusions, didn’t so much as skim the 100+ pages of defence material submitted. And here lies the sinister brilliance: when you don’t read, you don’t need to lie. You can say, with hand on heart and a straight face, “I didn’t know.” Willful ignorance is the perfect shield. To know and then to act against the facts would be perjury. But to not know—well, that’s just “process.” And in this farce, the half-truth reigns supreme: the technically accurate statement that cloaks a moral atrocity.

She conducted an “investigation” and “submitted her findings.” Technically true. Spiritually and intellectually bankrupt. This was not a pursuit of fact—it was the curation of a narrative—a cherry-picking exercise in bureaucratic sadism. An exonerating witness might have disrupted the story. A timeline might have disproven the script. Better, then, to keep the eyes shut and the ears plugged. One cannot contradict what one never hears. It was a report with no evidence, no particulars, no names, and no dates; not a single one. Hearsay was absurdly presumed to contradict a primary source. Technically, one cannot appeal a document that contains no evidence; you cannot refute what you are not told. But in the Kafkesque world of Guelph-Humber no matter.

What came next was the “final report” a document so fraudulent and absurd, festooned with “do not copy, do not share,” not to protect any investigation, but to protect the inquisitor, a woman who made Torquemada look like a paragon of due process, and protect her paymasters from the world seeing their sham, a document so embarrassingly flimsy, that even the most hardened apparatchik would blush.

Everyone knew it. These so-called “external investigator reports”—as famed employment lawyer Howard Levitt rightly skewers them—are not independent inquiries; they are bespoke hatchet jobs, commissioned to provide institutional cover while absolving administrators of accountability.

And still, we tumble deeper into the abyss. Two “appeals” were permitted—ceremonial offerings to the gods of due process. One was returned to the very author of the original decision—imagine appealing a judge’s ruling to the judge herself. That is the University of Guelph policy. The other? Sent off to an anonymous official who never so much as acknowledged the 30 pages of painstaking legal reasoning attached. Hundreds of arguments—meticulous, documented, reasoned—discarded without comment, as if procedural fairness were a used tissue to be flicked into the nearest bin.

So when truth, evidence, and reason are the only weapons the accused possesses, and the institution not only refuses to engage with them but openly mutilates the very idea of fairness, what, exactly, is one to do?

This was never about justice. It was about blood. The hunt was on. The torches were lit. The accused wasn’t facing an investigation; he was facing a mob in academic robes. One does not present defence documents to a wolf circling your fire—you reach for the gun, and you pray. My appeals are unread. My evidence, unseen. Not because it was unconvincing, but because it was never meant to be seen. There was no case to answer—only a sacrifice to be made.

I was not facing a tribunal of reason, but a primitive bloodlust that dressed itself in the robes of HR protocol and called it righteousness. And it happened not in a failed state, not in a backwater dictatorship, but in a university.

A university.

Pity.

Anti-Semitism: The Polite Hatred of the Well-Dressed

This was no mere workplace spat; it was a pogrom in academic robes. The professor’s sin was not just dissent—it was standing with Jews. His accuser, a professor with ties to anti-Israel activism, rallied 320,000 zealots to demand his head, their emails flooding the university like a digital lynch mob. Management capitulated, not out of fear, but delight. Faculty were allowed to call Jews “filth,” “subhuman,” “devil worshippers,” and blamed them for the Holodomor, they were allowed to celebrate Oct. 7, to say those Jews had it coming—hate propaganda that primes a mob for slaughter.

The Human Rights Office shrugged. Yet a man who called Hamas Nazis—historically accurate, given their Muslim Brotherhood roots and Nazi affiliations—was deemed a threat.

This is not the anti-Semitism of torchlit marches; it’s the kind that attends interfaith breakfasts, posts “Happy Hanukkah” on X, and marches or likely shows up late just to take an IG selfie, at Walks With Israel—then turns a blind eye to Jew-hatred on its doorstep. It dresses well, speaks softly, and wields power with a smile. As Hitchens once wrote of such duplicity: “The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant of this.” The university’s actions scream what its words deny: hatred of Jews is not fringe—it’s foundational.

The 2018 Science study on false news diffusion highlights how external networks, like the anti-Israel organisation, amplify rumours by exploiting emotional triggers. Here, mobilisation of 320,000 activists mirrors the study’s findings that false narratives spread faster when framed as moral imperatives, such as “justice” or “safety.” This external pressure, combined with internal complicity, created a perfect storm of defamation.

The Cancer Beneath: Selfishness as the New Creed

But the fatal blow was not the lies, nor the institutional malice, nor the anti-Semitism. These were mere symptoms of a deeper rot: the triumph of selfishness over conscience. The professor was not felled by slander alone; he was felled by the silence of those who knew better. Colleagues saw the lies spread—screenshots in hand, classroom slanders confirmed—and did nothing. Students believed he’d been carted off in cuffs and asked no questions. Staff obeyed orders to shun him, forwarding his messages to HR like obedient drones.

This was not cowardice—cowardice at least wrestles with duty.

This was apathy, pure and unadulterated, the ethic of “If it doesn’t affect me, I don’t care.”

“I didn’t go down because of the viral nature of a planted defamatory disease,” the professor said. “Nor because the university can’t distinguish a liberal democracy—where 20% of Israel’s population are Arabs with more rights than anywhere in the Middle East—from a theocratic death cult. Nor because reason failed, or because of fringe radicals sipping Starbucks, plotting to pick and rubbish the fruit of the Enlightenment.

“I didn’t lose my job because of false moral binaries that ally us with a man who eats of the West’s fruits yet pines for a seventh-century theocracy—a man so deluded he scapegoats only Jews and America for his society’s failures, who loves dictators everywhere, who is blind to centuries of post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment toil that built our rule of law.

“These were wounds, but not mortal. What killed me was the cancer beneath: a society that says, ‘I am not my brother’s keeper.

This is worse than cowardice. Cowards feel shame; the selfish feel nothing. Selfishness is blind—it cloaks itself in self-awareness, muttering, “Injustice stresses me, and I must love myself.”

It’s a delusion, a madness that builds cathedrals to the self while the world burns. The professor’s colleagues didn’t fear reprisal; they simply didn’t care—until, perhaps, the noose nears their necks. By then, it’s too late.

The Organisational Rumour Scale for Educational Institutions, developed by Dağlı and Han (2018), provides a tool to measure this apathy. Its 24 items assess rumour prevalence across dimensions like Socialisation and Cynic Effect, revealing how faculty and students internalise false narratives when institutional trust is low. At Guelph-Humber, the scale would likely show high Cynic Effect scores, reflecting a culture where apathy thrives because no one expects justice.

Philosophical Roots: From Cain to Kant

This ethos echoes Cain’s ancient dodge: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Every moral tradition worth a damn answers yes. Kant demanded we treat others as ends, not means—a categorical imperative now replaced by a conditional shrug: “I’ll care when it’s me.” Nietzsche might have admired the new man’s will to power, but even he’d recoil at this spineless solipsism. John Donne knew better: “No man is an island… the bell tolls for thee.” Yet our society has embraced a creed where the bell’s clang is ignored unless it’s our funeral.

The professor’s plight reveals a truth: laws and institutions—Canada’s, Britain’s, America’s—wither without communal pressure. The free market is glorious, but it’s not enough. Rules of law don’t enforce themselves; they demand a culture that says, “We hold these values—not just for profit, but for justice.”

When that culture dissolves into “I’ll mind my own business,” tyranny creeps in. In Canada, we get a PMO office that is moving toward authoritarianism. Nobody says anything.

The university’s thugs acted lawlessly because they knew no one would push back. The new man doesn’t protest until the noose is his own—and by then, the hangman’s won.

Moral panic, as described in a 2012 Psychological Science in the Public Interest study, explains how framing the professor’s suspension as a “safety” issue metastasised the lies. The study notes that misinformation persists when official sources fail to counter it, precisely what happened here, as the administration’s silence legitimised the narrative.

The Road to Tyranny: When Apathy Becomes Doctrine

This is no isolated tragedy; it’s a blueprint for despotism. When institutions defame and destroy with impunity, and the response is a collective yawn, the stage is set for ‘might to make right’. The professor’s workplace was poisoned not by accident but by design—gagged, isolated, defamed with lies so vile they’d make a saint blush. Management wanted it; faculty bragged about it. Yet no one objected.

“I don’t want to get involved,” they’d say, as if indifference were a virtue. It’s not fear—it’s selfishness, and it’s the key to tyranny’s lock.

Hitchens once quipped: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” But here, it’s worse: good men felt nothing. They weren’t paralysed by dread; they were anaesthetised by disinterest. The university could gag him, ban him, threaten him with fines and arrest—$10,000 if he stepped on campus, a lawyer’s letter if he spoke—because no one asked, “By what right?”

Students and staff obeyed like sheep, not because they believed the lies, but because they didn’t care to disbelieve them. The rule of law became a dead letter, and power reigned supreme.

The 2024 Nonlinear Dynamics study’s simulations show that timely refutation can reduce the half-life of a rumour. Yet, Guelph-Humber’s refusal to act prolonged the defamation’s impact. This institutional failure mirrors broader societal trends, where apathy enables unchecked power.

Conclusion: The Death of the West

This is not about Israel, Hamas, or even anti-Semitism—though they’re threads in the tapestry. It’s about the death of conscience, the rise of the new man who says, “I’ll turn away until the noose is around my neck.”

The professor’s career is rubble, PTSD affirmed by the Workers Compensation Board with the University deemed fully responsible. His reputation ash, his appeals unread, his voice a whisper in the wind—the university marches on, smug and unaccountable. But something has died: the belief that we are our brother’s keeper.

Defamation is not merely a weapon—it is a superweapon, the dirty bomb of institutional cowardice. You inject it into the bloodstream, gag the victim, and then sit back with bureaucratic detachment as the infection spreads. It is a masterstroke of malice: How does the defamed gather evidence to defend themselves when the very act of seeking truth violates the gag order? You are ordered not to speak, not to question, not to breathe—lest your breath disturb the sanctity of a narrative built on lies.

It is the architecture of perfect evil: an accusation you can’t hear, a trial you can’t attend, and a sentence passed before the sun rises on your defence.

And it worked—not because the lies were clever, but because the silence was deafening. Not one hand was raised. Not one voice cried foul. His supposed supporters? They furrowed their brows and muttered into their sleeves, thinking that a sombre headshake constituted solidarity. And his Jewish friends—God bless them—they found more courage in donor dinners than in defending a man ruined for standing with his people. The organisations built to fight antisemitism? They opted, as ever, for a well-catered luncheon over a real fight. You see, it’s hard to fundraise when you’re accused of standing with a “controversial” Jew. Better to keep feeding the crocodile, hoping it eats someone else first.

And so ethics, the rule of law, decency—those cherished shibboleths of civil society—don’t merely fail in moments like this. They must die. They must be disembowelled in full view, and no one will object—not until the lie is about them. That’s the terminal rot: not fear, not ignorance, but the rotting stench of selfishness in a culture that won’t care until it’s personal.

By then, of course, it’s far too late. This is the West’s decay: not from machetes or manifestos, the evil is within the gates, it will die from a culture that glorifies self-interest and encourages apathy’s quiet march. Selfishness and prioritising only what affects me do not directly harm the rule of law and procedural justice; they undermine it.

Until we reject this selfish madness, the noose tightens—for him today, for us tomorrow.

Of course the professor is me. But turn away, turn away, do nothing, say nothing, it doesn’t affect you.

My point exactly. Shame.

If you found value in this article and wish to support my ongoing work, especially during my 18-month suspension, please consider leaving a tip. Your support helps me continue producing uncensored content on critical issues.