The Finlayson Affair: My Trial by Bureaucratic Fire

In 130 years have we morally progressed? No, we have not.

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J’accuse: 2025 Edition

Dear reader,

“I accuse,” wrote Émile Zola in 1898—J’accuse…!—the most incendiary headline in French history. His target? Not merely the corrupt generals who railroaded Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer falsely convicted of treason, but the entire machinery of institutional rot: the military, the press, the judiciary, the public—and above all, their complicity. Dreyfus wasn’t convicted of espionage. He was convicted for existing: a Jew in uniform, competent, inconvenient, and conspicuously misaligned with the prejudices of the elite.

Zola’s courage lay in naming things. Not “oversight.” Not “systemic failure.” No: injustice, cowardice, antisemitism.

So, a century and a quarter later, what have we learned?

I’m not on Devil’s Island. No one’s ripped my epaulettes off in the town square. But I’ve been professionally disappeared for a single, inconvenient utterance. The robes have changed; the sanctimony hasn’t.

My offence? A single sentence, typed in reply to a man publicly calling for the elimination of Israel. I said—flatly, historically, and not without cause—that to stand with Hamas is to stand with Nazis. Not at a podium, not in a lecture. A private response to a genocidal wish.

And for this—for this—I was suspended, gagged, defamed, and cast into procedural oblivion and not merely accused but publicly smeared with baseless allegations of paedophilia, assault, sexual misconduct, racism, and Islamophobia—without a shred of evidence.

The university, undaunted by its slander, never referred any of these accusations to the police. I did. I asked the Toronto Police to investigate me. They refused, because, of course, there was nothing to investigate. I turned myself in for crimes I hadn’t committed, but the spectacle was too useful to let die.

The university didn’t want justice. It wanted silence. When I asked a staff member, Vashti Bagot, to stop calling me a criminal, she objected. And then, astonishingly, I was warned by Public Safety Officer Deason that if I asked again, I could be reported for criminal harassment.

This is not a parody. This is policy.

I had entered the baroque, Orwellian oubliette of Canadian academic justice: no charges, no hearing, no rules—just a choreography of euphemisms. “Administrative leave.” “External investigation.” “Protective restrictions.” “Institutional gossip and slander.” What comes next, I wondered? Craniometry?

It would be comic if it weren’t so dangerous. Or perhaps its absurdity is what makes it dangerous. You don’t need a crime in 2025. You need only a climate. A vibe. A bad look.

And here’s what I’ve learned: it wasn’t about what I said. It was about what I was presumed to be. Jewish. Zionist. Defiant. Unapologetic.

Not merely out of step, but unbent. And in the catechism of today’s universities, that’s the one mortal sin: a Jew who will not bow.

The Jewish professor who practically cowered under his desk and advised me to do the same? Untouched. I, on the other hand, was the problem. You could feel it in the room: the murmur beneath breath—“He’s one of them.” The discomfort that emerges not when a Jew is quiet, but when he speaks.

To advocate Jewish continuity or to support Israel is to desecrate the new secular mezuzah of DEI orthodoxy. And so, inevitably, I was purged.

The Dreyfus comparison is not a flourish—it’s a mirror. Dreyfus wasn’t convicted on evidence but on suspicion. He fit the role. He was guilty of being guilty. And when repeated by bureaucracies, assumptions become doctrine.

So too here. I was a well-liked professor with a spotless record, known and respected by my students. Then a single student unearthed a comment defending Israel, naming Hamas for what it is. The phrase “Hamas are Nazis” was clipped, decontextualized, and spread like contraband.

An altered post, weaponised. The call went out: Report him. And the administration, ever alert to optics but never to integrity, obeyed. Not to investigate—that would imply doubt—but to judge. I was declared unclean.

Enter the farce in full: Vice Provost Melanie Spence Ariemma, shrieking with her ever-present ally Wael Ramadan, a man whose X feed reads like a Hamas press release edited by Goebbels. I had never contacted him. I had never met either of them. I didn’t know his name. But he’d been watching, and more to the point, he had connections.