“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”
Fourteen months into a professorial suspension because I called Hamas Nazis: Some reflections, some bald truth, a ton of depression, packs of wolves in sheep's clothing and red lines. But no paywall.
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“The first thing we will do, let’s kill all the lawyers1,” says Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry VI. Dick didn’t mention university administrators, but he never came to Canada.
Buried waist-deep in an external investigation by a pair of $600/hour lawyers whose lawyering isn’t lawyering; it’s the lawyerly art of creating an appearance of due process while at the same time doing everything they can to deny due process - it has been quite unpleasant.
After fourteen months of suspension for calling Hamas Nazis and questioning the idea that Gazans are all poor souls, just like us, somehow cowering under the subjugation of the party they elected with an enthusiasm that the uber-popular Pierre Poilievre has no hope of reaching in the next Canadian election2, where 82% 3 of Gazans approved of the massacres of Oct. 7, where Palestinians rejoiced at the sight of teenage girls my daughter’s age, blood dripping down their legs because Hamas savages had raped them, where random Palestinians, not Hamas warriors, joined the Oct. 7 invasion, delirious at the prospect of killing a Jew - I have no regrets and am not sorry.
I am not softening my position.
The University of Guelph, this nice vet school, their brochures full of lab-coated women holding puppies, working in labs and attending to the occasional ill bovine, fully supports an administrator who signed as the Claimant on a perverted human rights claim that is full of whining about how calling Hamas Nazis equals insulting the poor besieged Muslim; she is indignant how her fellow traveller, and old professor friend who publically tosses paeans for Hamas as “noble warriors,4” not to mention simping before Hezbollah and the Houthis had his feelings hurt. And she thinks my career, reputation and sanity are a fair price to pay for my grave crime.
At the U of Guelph (and Sheridan College, as accuser Wael Ramadan teaches there, too), their moral compass, broken beyond repair, ignores basic moral polarities and has no issue with ongoing radical support for terrorism and calls for the destruction of a nation. They have no issues with their professor running down Jews in class. It does violate their speech code, but I doubt they have read it; they don’t seem to show any knowledge of a free speech policy either, or they are too gutless to enforce it because this shameless anti-Semite is a personal friend of the Vice Provost, a woman after his own heart.
Jewish students (sorry, revenue units) must be taught by a man who publically says he wants them dead. They have to hold that in their heads as they sit before him.
And I suspect these principled administrators are also afraid of losing those hard-to-find bums in seats, especially the Muslim ones, but shush; we can’t speak about that; you don’t want to know how the academic sausage is made.
But I wanted to speak about red lines.
Red lines are not red lines that send us to the garage to find a brush and paint can. We need to set them as a society, and although I have never been handy, I’m pulling out the brush.
When a nasty anti-semite professor calls for the death of my Jewish friends in Toronto and Israel, I get my dander up.
When he supports an organisation that is honest enough to say that they want our entire society destroyed, this construction hundreds of years in the making that so many hate yet never want to leave, I am not going to nod politely in some display of mad multicultural fealty.
As far as the red line?
I’m looking at you, the University of Guelph, and you, Humber College, and the hired guns from Sherrard Kuzz LLP, the cowardly obstructionists, those who believe that silence is a response, those bookkeepers and memo writers who have already spent $300K pursuing me, supporting their poor persecuted professor, a Muslim Fagin of sorts, who, with his gang of witless keyboard warriors and embittered ex-students who are still upset about a 65% I gave them years ago, now think lying and stirring the pot is some sort of magic kitchen game, and that my career and reputation are trifling incidental damage from their culinary blunders?
It’s easier for the University to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars than admit they were wrong.
Oh yes, the red line.
Firing the man with an unblemished record, the top-rated business professor, on the complaints of a radiology tech who worked her way up to Vice Provost and her longtime bald professor friend, a man who, despite multiple human rights complaints filed against him, as well as verified witnesses telling of him running down Jews in class; despite these mysterious affiliations and tens of thousands who follow him on LinkedIN and despite that even today he cannot contain his Jew-hatred and finds it amusing to post pictures of Jews with Hitler moustaches and accusing those evil Jews of killing four million Ukrainian souls - (see below) his feelings are still sacrosanct.
The anti-semitic professor’s prejudices are ignored, and the university thoughtlessly moves forward, spurred on by the exertions of lawyers and subordinates hiding behind their laptops. Together, they march toward a dangerous red line.
Crossing it means that anti-Semitism is the official position of the University of Guelph and Humber College.
Say you stand with Israel, and they want to fire your ass.
So that is my red line. Maybe no one else cares, but I’m still pulling out the brush.
My well-paid inquisitors, handpicked by management, don’t even try to hide their hatred, snarling at me when I pointed out the hundreds of anti-Semitic posts of my accusor and then accusing me of recrimination and time travel (I went back in time before I knew my accuser and planted posts on his LinkedIN, just ask them).
But the case against him isn’t on the plate; it was dismissed months ago. Jewish students and staff should keep off X and LinkedIn unless they want to take a class from a guy who has enthusiastically and publically voiced his support for the terrorists who want them dead.
But I’m supposed to be all nice and servile around my inquisitors as they cheerfully eviserate due process; but doing so leaves me feeling liked I just showed the burglars where the family silver was or invited the hound with the muddy paws up on the couch.
The defamation and threats from this self-confessed civilized crew have left me with a WSIB-verified PTSD. My dog barks in my ear, and I freak out and go into Defcon two; I hide from checking email and keep the phone on the ‘leave me alone’ mode setting most of the time.
Injustice is corrosive to the spirit.
More than one person has said, "No one cares about your problems; shut up already." But Substack hasn’t told me to shut up. This essay might be more like a lock-and-key diary entry than I know. That’s okay.
I have faced job loss before, and I have experienced grief, but injustice is a different beast. The experts call my university experience institutional betrayal.
I have never been a big fan of talking about ‘mental health’, but with some research, I would say that external investigators are modern-day Salem interrogators whose aim is to destroy the will to fight. Mental health is the bystander who gets shot. The only difference is these lawyers don’t wear stupid hats.
Macbeth said it well, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.”5 He was echoing the chat of the witches who celebrated moral inversion and confusion. The Bard was not referring directly to lawyers. Still, I have heard it's a good fit when you go into the word’s Latin origins and stick your hand in the steaming etymological entrails of the beast.
It is a disorienting experience to be told one thing - non-partisanship - while enduring another - partisanship.
Foul is fair, and fair is foul.
These lawyers politely defy the rule of law, natural justice, and due process. They write ‘nonpartisan’ reports; if management isn’t happy, it returns them, and the investigators make the report more vicious and defamatory—whatever makes the client happy. It’s a service industry.
In my case, I am allowed an appeal, but the person reading the appeal is the same person who is the official complainant. This is an appalling conflict of interest. Oddly, this layperson can see the violation, but three lawyers missed it. Billable hour invoices must be blocking their view.
Fair is foul. Foul is fair.
The Salem witch trials of 1692 - 85 years after the Bard wrote Macbeth - were marked by mass hysteria, baseless accusations, and a disregard for due process, leading to the execution and imprisonment of many innocent people.
The witches lost their lives, but I’ve had 50,000 idiots on social media call for my ouster. The teacher Samuel Paty in Paris had student gossip run out of control and was decapitated by Muslim fanatics who thought that their bloody hands were the hands of God.
Malicious gossip ain’t always sticks and stones.
I hope it doesn’t happen to me, but the university doesn’t seem to care if it goes that way. It's funny when the human rights officer who decided to escalate this case against me looks at real violations - my accuser’s classic hate speech - and dismisses it.
DEI officers shouldn’t be anti-semites. Anti-semitism is not very inclusive.
After all, I called Hamas Nazis, and the death to Israel gang; the screaming “F**** Zionists” in the hallway gang, and those who cheered when a student unfurled a Palestinian flag at the convocation had their feelings hurt. Poor dears.
It is strange when Assad killed 4,000 Palestinians at refugee camps and murdered 590,000 Syrians since 2011, not to mention the injured, those terrified souls pulled from their families in the middle of the night to have their toe nails ripped off - all of this, it doesn’t seem to bother the human rights gang at all.
Not a peep. Strange.
Fair is foul. Foul is fair.
These lawyers have met with me once in the last thirteen months and produced a two-page document called a statement of allegations. It is a convoluted and utterly dishonest amalgam of hearsay and emotion. It offers no identifiers, no evidence, and no dates and times. I love the “two girls said you talked to them” accusation. To vagaries like this, I must mount a defence.
No, a 10th-grade student who just got a D in law class didn’t write this; this is Sherrard Kuzz’s finest.
It is like being told that you are going on trial while you are allowed no lawyer and no defence; you stand behind a thick black felt curtain and get abuse thrown at you. “Violent,” “threat to children”, “racist,” “Islamophobe,” 'and echos of “heretic”.
It has no more due process than the Salem witch trials.
I called Hamas Nazis, and I have fellow employees I have never met sending me threats; if I contact anyone at the university and ask them to stop calling me a criminal, public safety says I can be arrested for criminal harassment, and the school lawyers send letters dripping in venom, threatening me with unknown punishments and defamation charges for articles I didn’t write.
I love the one accusing me of contacting John Ibbitson at the Globe and Mail. I don’t think John would deal with riff-raff like me, but we have never spoken or met.
But the issue is the stress, the sense of betrayal, the compulsive drive to exonerate, the omnipresent silence, the refusal of ex-colleagues to respond, the headaches, the silence, the fact that I know everyone is tired of my story and the primal scream that I keep muzzled that has become my life.
I isolate myself, I cannot bear to be around humankind, family relationships are fractured, the stress, the doctor’s visits and the growing list of medications, and I realise that once again, my employer has cut off my benefits, of course, they are not allowed, but what can I do?
I researched what had happened to others going through the same in a university setting; there were suicides, and it was ugly. It’s not just me.
These lawyers have never mentioned law, free speech, or human rights; they are not hired for that. They are professional gaslighters. They know that there are no rules, and they invent accusations.
God, I am so with you, Dick the Butcher. You were right about the lawyers.
I cannot cross-examine my accusers, and I don't know if they really exist or are just being made up. There is no way I could find out, and there can be no victory. My best hope is two losses.
The back side of this defiance is anxiety, terrible ideations, and abandonment. It is lying awake in bed at night and wondering how many people will come to my funeral. I count them, and the numbers are now down to the low twenties. I told my wife I didn’t want a funeral; it would not make sense; my reputation has been so assailed I wait till it is dark to walk my dogs but still wear a ball cap.
The relentless torment of the Jew-haters at my work, the knowledge that tens of thousands have been told I am a violent racist, the fact that those who are supposed to support me are worse than ambivalent, they are actively fighting me.
I am filled with anger. The more I search, the more facts I find that should exonerate me; the greater the pain, the greater the sense of futility. But the obsessive hunger for self-redemption has ensnared me, and I cannot let it go.
I know it is killing me. I found out that some of the witnesses say that their testimony to the human rights examiner has been misconstrued and even falsified, but what can I do? Nobody cares. I am on a paid suspension, but they are not responding and not paying me.
A former student who has been one of the main propagators of defamation has now decided that she will add sexual violations to her pot of lies. What can you do when you are falsely accused? Defamation, lawyers, good luck.
Society does not function if everyone lies; lawsuits are expensive and tortuous.
The details are leaking out slowly, like gas escaping a dead, bloated wild pig left on the side of a Mississippi highway in July.
Human rights complaints are open forums for defamation. It is built into them. When the first staff members and faculty invented assault allegations and began pulling people aside to persuade them, I was indignant, but now, when I hear it, I shrug; I am exhausted; my reputation was destroyed months ago.
It is so easy to destroy a reputation. You tell both parties they cannot communicate. As the good book says, whispering this or that to staff, students, and faculty is easy; it only takes a few sparks of malice and lies to start the fire6. I am not allowed to be there to defend myself.
My experience is not unique.
Case Study 1: Amin Abdullah, United Kingdom
Amin Abdullah, a nurse at Charing Cross Hospital, took his own life in 2016 after being dismissed following an external investigation into a patient complaint. Critics described the investigation as unfair and excessively punitive, ignoring Abdullah’s prior exemplary service. The stress of the investigation and its aftermath led to his mental health deterioration, culminating in his tragic suicide.
Case Study 2: An Academic at the University of Illinois, USA
In a widely publicized case, an academic at the University of Illinois was subjected to an external investigation based on politically charged accusations. The investigator’s report, criticized for its selective use of evidence, led to the academic’s dismissal. The prolonged stress contributed to a mental health crisis, resulting in hospitalization. This case underscores how investigations often become vehicles for ideological purges rather than impartial fact-finding.
Case Study 3: European Workplace Tragedy
In a case from Germany, a corporate employee took their own life after being subjected to an external investigation into alleged workplace misconduct. The investigation relied heavily on hearsay and failed to provide the employee with adequate opportunity to respond. The lack of procedural safeguards and the adversarial nature of the process were cited as factors contributing to the employee’s suicide.
The Adversarial Nature of External Investigations
In his article for the National Post, Howard Levitt, famed employment lawyer and counsel to Jordan Peterson, aptly notes that "external investigations are inherently flawed due to their adversarial nature, lack of transparency, and frequent bias in favour of the employer."
Levitt critiques how such investigations often bypass natural justice, using examples where the accused were denied access to critical information or meaningful defence. He writes, "What’s masquerading as impartial inquiry is, more often than not, a kangaroo court designed to justify managerial decisions.7"
Foul is fair, and fair is foul.
External investigations are deeply flawed tools that serve managerial interests at the expense of justice and employee well-being.
A grating irony of this is that my accuser, if you just take the human rights complaints against him and take the one against me, and upload the collective agreements and the human rights policies, and just tell AI to do an assessment, it says that because of his posts, he rates a 9/10 on the scale representing the severity of violations and I rate a 1/10. That’s with no input from me, just the documentation.
But nobody will listen and Chat GPT doesn’t run the investigation.
Management hates Jews and doesn’t want to offend Muslims.
If these investigators said, “We are hired by management, and management has no legitimate reason to fire you, but we want to help them invent one,” I would have more respect.
But they feign impartiality. The trials of the Spanish Inquisition are a good historical parallel. These 15th-century trials tested Catholic orthodoxy and were coincidentally used against Jewish converts. How many major miscarriages of justice do you have that don’t target Jews? The problems with the inquisitors included:
1. Secrecy of Accusers:
2. Invented Evidence:
3. No Obligation to Verify Evidence:
4. Lack of Witness Credibility Checks:
5. Arbitrary and Harsh Punishments:
6. No Defense Rights:
7. Assumed guilt.
It sounds familiar. Seriously. While modern management and external investigators don’t send anyone to their death, modern inquisitions have the same flaws.
However, they are lucrative for the legal community, and the regulators are lawyers. If there is one cross-cultural norm that is ageless, group members tend to look out for their own.
Cases like mine, Amin Abdullah's, and others illustrate the devastating consequences of these processes. Without systemic reforms to ensure fairness, transparency, and accountability, these investigations will continue to harm employees' careers, finances, and psyches and undermine trust in institutions.
As Howard Levitt warns, "No one gets out of these processes unscathed."
And for me, I will not stay forever in this lawyerly world of bad faith, where private intent clashes with public words, where university officials empty the public purse for private vendettas, where sparks of slander and libel are cradled and protected to produce a flame, where antisemitic passions fuel the flames and create a wicked conflagration.
Foul may be fair, and fair may be foul today. But in this smoky world of ambition and moral inversions, sometimes obstacles appear quickly, and one may trip, fall and become injured; perhaps this fire created by this coven, these weird sisters, will not end as well for them as they now so confidently predict.
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But I only ask that when you choose your coffee, please choose mine. Cheers.
This is a literary reference in case some illiterate lawyer tries to pretend it’s an incitement to violence. Regardless, it is staying; call the police, Sherrard Kuzz hacks.
God, please let it be soon; enough of Trudeau.
According to a poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) in December 2023, 82% of Palestinians believed that Hamas’s decision to launch the October 7 attack was correct.
His public Twitter (X) and LinkedIN
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, Simon & Schuster, 2013, Act 1, Scene 1.
James 3:5-6 (NIV):
“Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.”
https://financialpost.com/fp-work/howard-levitt-investigations-workplace-firing-squads
I’m reminded of an old joke: what’s the difference between a lawyer and a rooster? A rooster clucks defiance. Here’s another: what do you call 100 lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.
What a horrific ordeal!