Shiraz Dossa

28/10/05, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at Tehran Conference (translation), Source.
02/06/06, Jonathan Steele, If Iran is ready to talk, the US must do so unconditionally, Source.
11/06/06, Ethan Bronner, Just How Far Did They Go, Those Words Against Israel?, Source.
14/06/06, Jonathan Steele, Lost in translation, Source.
13/12/06, Editorial, A denial-fest in Tehran, Source.
14/12/06, John Ibbitson, Even a scholar's academic freedom has its limits in Canada, Source.
14/12/06, CAUT/APCCU, Statement on the controversy over Professor Shiraz Dossa, Source.
14/12/06, Raymond J. Lahey, The Dossa debate, Source.
14/12/06, Caroline Alphonso, University embarrassed by professor's Tehran visit, Source.
15/12/06, Frederick Sweet, Dr. Dossa: round two, Source.
16/12/06, Allan Greer, The light of truth, Source.
28/12/06, John Ibbitson, The responsibility of freedom, Source.
06/07, Shiraz Dossa, The Explanation We Never Heard, Source.
28/05/07, Michael Valpy, Professor who attended Holocaust conference blasts critics as Islamophobes, Source.
29/05/07, Letters, Russell Maynard, The professor and the Holocaust, Source.
29/05/07, Letters, Cal Bricker, The professor and the Holocaust, Source.
29/05/07, Letters, David Schatzky, The professor and the Holocaust, Source.
29/05/07, Letters, Michael Benedict, The professor and the Holocaust, Source.
30/05/07, Letters, Abraham H. Foxman, The professor and the critics, Source.
30/05/07, Letters, Ed Morgan & Irving Bella, The professor and the critics, Source.
31/05/07, Letters, Miles Tompkins, The professor and tolerance, Source.


28/10/05, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at Tehran Conference (translation), (Back).

MEMRI - Special Dispatch Series - No. 1013

Iranian President at Tehran Conference: 'Very Soon, This Stain of Disgrace [i.e. Israel] Will Be Purged From the Center of the Islamic World – and This is Attainable'

In advance of Iran's Jerusalem Day, which was established by Ayatollah Khomeini and is marked annually on the fourth Friday of the month of Ramadan, the "World without Zionism" conference was held in Tehran.

At the conference, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke to the representatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, members of the Society for the Defense of the Palestinian Nation, and members of the Islamic Students Union, and an audience of hundreds of students.

In his speech, he described his vision of an age-old confrontation between the world of Islam and the "World of Arrogance," i.e. the West; he portrayed Israel and Zionism as the spearhead of the West against the Islamic nation; and he emphasized the need to eliminate Israel – which, he claimed, was a goal that was attainable.

Speeches were also delivered by representatives of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas leader Khaled Mash'al.

The Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), published the full text of Ahmadinejad's speech. The following is a translation of excerpts from ISNA's report and from the speech. [1]

"Prior to his statement, Ahmadinejad said that if you plan to chant the slogan 'Death to Israel,' say it in the right and complete way.

"The president warned the leaders of the Islamic world that they should be wary of Fitna [civil strife]: 'If someone is under the pressure of hegemonic power [i.e. the West] and misunderstands something is wrong, or he is naïve, or he is an egotist and his hedonism leads him to recognize the Zionist regime – he should know that he will burn in the fire of the Islamic Ummah [nation]…'

"Ahmadinejad articulated the real meaning of Zionism: '...We must see what the real story of Palestine is... The establishment of the regime that is occupying Jerusalem was a very grave move by the hegemonic and arrogant system [i.e. the West] against the Islamic world. We are in the process of an historical war between the World of Arrogance [i.e. the West] and the Islamic world, and this war has been going on for hundreds of years.

"'In this historical war, the situation at the fronts has changed many times. During some periods, the Muslims were the victors and were very active, and looked forward, and the World of Arrogance was in retreat.

"'Unfortunately, in the past 300 years, the Islamic world has been in retreat vis-à-vis the World of Arrogance… During the period of the last 100 years, the [walls of the] world of Islam were destroyed and the World of Arrogance turned the regime occupying Jerusalem into a bridge for its dominance over the Islamic world...

"'This occupying country [i.e. Israel] is in fact a front of the World of Arrogance in the heart of the Islamic world. They have in fact built a bastion [Israel] from which they can expand their rule to the entire Islamic world... This means that the current war in Palestine is the front line of the Islamic world against the World of Arrogance, and will determine the fate of Palestine for centuries to come.

"'Today the Palestinian nation stands against the hegemonic system as the representative of the Islamic Ummah [nation]. Thanks to God, since the Palestinian people adopted the Islamic war and the Islamic goals, and since their struggle has become Islamic in its attitude and orientation, we have been witnessing the progress and success of the Palestinian people.'

"Ahmadinejad said: 'The issue of this [World without Zionism] conference is very valuable. In this very grave war, many people are trying to scatter grains of desperation and hopelessness regarding the struggle between the Islamic world and the front of the infidels, and in their hearts they want to empty the Islamic world.

"'... They [ask]: 'Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?' But you had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved…

"'When the dear Imam [Khomeini] said that [the Shah's] regime must go, and that we demand a world without dependent governments, many people who claimed to have political and other knowledge [asked], 'Is it possible [that the Shah’s regime can be toppled]?'

"'That day, when Imam [Khomeini] began his movement, all the powers supported [the Shah's] corrupt regime… and said it was not possible. However, our nation stood firm, and by now we have, for 27 years, been living without a government dependent on America. Imam [Khomeni] said: 'The rule of the East [U.S.S.R.] and of the West [U.S.] should be ended.' But the weak people who saw only the tiny world near them did not believe it.

"'Nobody believed that we would one day witness the collapse of the Eastern Imperialism [i.e. the U.S.S.R], and said it was an iron regime. But in our short lifetime we have witnessed how this regime collapsed in such a way that we must look for it in libraries, and we can find no literature about it.

"'Imam [Khomeini] said that Saddam [Hussein] must go, and that he would be humiliated in a way that was unprecedented. And what do you see today? A man who, 10 years ago, spoke as proudly as if he would live for eternity is today chained by the feet, and is now being tried in his own country...

"'Imam [Khomeini] said: 'This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history.' This sentence is very wise. The issue of Palestine is not an issue on which we can compromise.

"'Is it possible that an [Islamic] front allows another front [i.e. country] to arise in its [own] heart? This means defeat, and he who accepts the existence of this regime [i.e. Israel] in fact signs the defeat of the Islamic world.

"'In his battle against the World of Arrogance, our dear Imam [Khomeini] set the regime occupying Qods [Jerusalem] as the target of his fight.

"'I do not doubt that the new wave which has begun in our dear Palestine and which today we are also witnessing in the Islamic world is a wave of morality which has spread all over the Islamic world. Very soon, this stain of disgrace [i.e. Israel] will be purged from the center of the Islamic world – and this is attainable.

"'But we must be wary of Fitna. For more than 50 years, the World of Arrogance has tried to give recognition to the existence of this falsified regime [Israel]. With its first steps, and then with further steps, it has tried hard in this direction to stabilize it.

"'Regrettably, 27 or 28 years ago... one of the countries of the first line [i.e. Egypt] made this failure [of recognizing Israel] – and we still hope that they will correct it.

"'Lately we have new Fitna underway… With the forced evacuation [of Gaza] that was imposed by the Palestinian people, they [the Israelis] evacuated only a corner. [Israel] declared this as the final victory and, on the pretext of evacuating Gaza and establishing a Palestinian government, tried to put an end to the hopes of the Palestinians.

"'Today, [Israel] seeks, satanically and deceitfully, to gain control of the front of war. It is trying to influence the Palestinian groups in Palestine so as to preoccupy them with political issues and jobs – so that they relinquish the Palestinian cause that determines their destiny, and come into conflict with each other.

"'On the pretext of goodwill, they [Israel] intended, by evacuating the Gaza strip, to gain recognition of its corrupt regime by some Islamic states. I very much hope, and ask God, that the Palestinian people and the dear Palestinian groups will be wary of this Fitna.

"'The issue of Palestine is by no means over, and will end only when all of Palestine will have a government belonging to the Palestinian people. The refugees must return to their homes, and there must be a government that has come to power by the will of the [Palestinian] people. And, of course those [i.e. the Jews] who came to this country from far away to plunder it have no right to decide anything for the [Palestinian] people.

"'I hope that the Palestinians will maintain their wariness and intelligence, much as they have pursued their battles in the past 10 years. This will be a short period, and if we pass through it successfully, the process of the elimination of the Zionist regime will be smooth and simple.

"'I warn all the leaders of the Islamic world to be wary of Fitna: If someone is under the pressure of hegemonic power [i.e. the West] and understands that something is wrong, or he is naïve, or he is an egotist and his hedonism leads him to recognize the Zionist regime – he should know that he will burn in the fire of the Islamic Ummah [nation]…

"'The people who sit in closed rooms cannot decide on this matter. The Islamic people cannot allow this historical enemy to exist in the heart of the Islamic world.

"'Oh dear people, look at this global arena. By whom are we confronted? We have to understand the depth of the disgrace of the enemy, until our holy hatred expands continuously and strikes like a wave.'"


02/06/06, Jonathan Steele, If Iran is ready to talk, the US must do so unconditionally, (Back).

It is absurd to demand that Tehran should have made concessions before sitting down with the Americans.

It is 50 years since the greatest misquotation of the cold war. At a Kremlin reception for western ambassadors in 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced: "We will bury you." Those four words were seized on by American hawks as proof of aggressive Soviet intent.

Doves who pointed out that the full quotation gave a less threatening message were drowned out. Khrushchev had actually said: "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you." It was a harmless boast about socialism's eventual victory in the ideological competition with capitalism. He was not talking about war.

Now we face a similar propaganda distortion of remarks by Iran's president. Ask anyone in Washington, London or Tel Aviv if they can cite any phrase uttered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the chances are high they will say he wants Israel "wiped off the map".

Again it is four short words, though the distortion is worse than in the Khrushchev case. The remarks are not out of context. They are wrong, pure and simple. Ahmadinejad never said them. Farsi speakers have pointed out that he was mistranslated. The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that "this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" just as the Shah's regime in Iran had vanished.

He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The "page of time" phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon. There was no implication that either Khomeini, when he first made the statement, or Ahmadinejad, in repeating it, felt it was imminent, or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.

But the propaganda damage was done, and western hawks bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews. At the recent annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobby group, huge screens switched between pictures of Ahmadinejad making the false "wiping off the map" statement and a ranting Hitler.

Misquoting Ahmadinejad is worse than taking Khrushchev out of context for a second reason. Although the Soviet Union had a collective leadership, the pudgy Russian was the undoubted No 1 figure, particularly on foreign policy. The Iranian president is not.

His predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, was seen in the west as a moderate reformer, and during his eight years in office western politicians regularly lamented the fact that he was not Iran's top decision-maker. Ultimate power lay with the conservative unelected supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Yet now that Ahmadinejad is president, western hawks behave as though he is in charge, when in fact nothing has changed. Ahmadinejad is not the only important voice in Tehran. Indeed Khamenei was quick to try to adjust the misperceptions of Ahmadinejad's comments. A few days after the president made them, Khamenei said Iran "will not commit aggression against any nation".

The evidence suggests that a debate is going on in Tehran over policy towards the west which is no less fierce than the one in Washington. Since 2003 the Iranians have made several overtures to the Bush administration, some more explicit than others. Ahmadinejad's recent letter to Bush was a veiled invitation to dialogue. Iranians are also arguing over policy towards Israel. Trita Parsi, an analyst at Johns Hopkins University, says influential rivals to Ahmadinejad support a "Malaysian" model whereby Iran, like Islamic Malaysia, would not recognise Israel but would not support Palestinian groups such as Hamas, if relations with the US were better.

The obvious way to develop the debate is for the two states to start talking to each other. Last winter the Americans said they were willing, provided talks were limited to Iraq. Then the hawks around Bush vetoed even that narrow agenda. Their victory made nonsense of the pressure the US is putting on other UN security council members for tough action against Iran. Talk of sanctions is clearly premature until Washington and Tehran make an effort to negotiate. This week, in advance of Condoleezza Rice's meeting in Vienna yesterday with the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia, the factions in Washington hammered out a compromise. The US is ready to talk to Tehran alongside the EU3 (Britain, France and Germany), but only after Tehran has abandoned its uranium-enrichment programme.

To say the EU3's dialogue with Tehran was sufficient, as Washington did until this week, was the most astonishing example of multilateralism in the Bush presidency. A government that makes a practice of ignoring allies and refuses to accept the jurisdiction of bodies such as the International Criminal Court was leaving all the talking to others on one of the hottest issues of the day. Unless Bush is set on war, this refusal to open a dialogue could not be taken seriously.

The EU3's offer of carrots for Tehran was also meaningless without a US role. Europe cannot give Iran security guarantees. Tehran does not want non-aggression pacts with Europe. It wants them with the only state that is threatening it both with military attack and foreign-funded programmes for regime change.

The US compromise on talks with Iran is a step in the right direction, though Rice's hasty statement was poorly drafted, repeatedly calling Iran both a "government" and a "regime". But it is absurd to expect Iran to make concessions before sitting down with the Americans. Dialogue is in the interests of all parties. Europe's leaders, as well as Russia and China, should come out clearly and tell the Americans so.

Whatever Iran's nuclear ambitions, even US hawks admit it will be years before it could acquire a bomb, let alone the means to deliver it. This offers ample time for negotiations and a "grand bargain" between Iran and the US over Middle Eastern security. Flanked by countries with US bases, Iran has legitimate concerns about Washington's intentions.

Even without the US factor, instability in the Gulf worries all Iranians, whether or not they like being ruled by clerics. All-out civil war in Iraq, which could lead to intervention by Turkey and Iraq's Arab neighbours, would be a disaster for Iran. If the US wants to withdraw from Iraq in any kind of order, this too will require dialogue with Iran. If this is what Blair told Bush last week, he did well. But he should go all the way, and urge the Americans to talk without conditions.


11/06/06, Ethan Bronner, Just How Far Did They Go, Those Words Against Israel?, (Back).

Ever since he spoke at an anti-Zionism conference in Tehran last October, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has been known for one statement above all. As translated by news agencies at the time, it was that Israel "should be wiped off the map." Iran's nuclear program and sponsorship of militant Muslim groups are rarely mentioned without reference to the infamous map remark.

Here, for example, is R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, recently: "Given the radical nature of Iran under Ahmadinejad and its stated wish to wipe Israel off the map of the world, it is entirely unconvincing that we could or should live with a nuclear Iran."

But is that what Mr. Ahmadinejad said? And if so, was it a threat of war? For months, a debate among Iran specialists over both questions has been intensifying. It starts as a dispute over translating Persian but quickly turns on whether the United States (with help from Israel) is doing to Iran what some believe it did to Iraq — building a case for military action predicated on a faulty premise.

"Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian," remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan and critic of American policy who has argued that the Iranian president was misquoted. "He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse." Since Iran has not "attacked another country aggressively for over a century," he said in an e-mail exchange, "I smell the whiff of war propaganda."

Jonathan Steele, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in London, recently laid out the case this way: "The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that 'this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,' just as the Shah's regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The 'page of time' phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon."

Mr. Steele added that neither Khomeini nor Mr. Ahmadinejad suggested that Israel's "vanishing" was imminent or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about. "But the propaganda damage was done," he wrote, "and Western hawks bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews."

If Mr. Steele and Mr. Cole are right, not one word of the quotation — Israel should be wiped off the map — is accurate.

But translators in Tehran who work for the president's office and the foreign ministry disagree with them. All official translations of Mr. Ahmadinejad's statement, including a description of it on his Web site (www.president.ir/eng/), refer to wiping Israel away. Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran's most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say "wipe off" or "wipe away" is more accurate than "vanish" because the Persian verb is active and transitive.

The second translation issue concerns the word "map." Khomeini's words were abstract: "Sahneh roozgar." Sahneh means scene or stage, and roozgar means time. The phrase was widely interpreted as "map," and for years, no one objected. In October, when Mr. Ahmadinejad quoted Khomeini, he actually misquoted him, saying not "Sahneh roozgar" but "Safheh roozgar," meaning pages of time or history. No one noticed the change, and news agencies used the word "map" again.

Ahmad Zeidabadi, a professor of political science in Tehran whose specialty is Iran-Israel relations, explained: "It seems that in the early days of the revolution the word 'map' was used because it appeared to be the best meaningful translation for what he said. The words 'sahneh roozgar' are metaphorical and do not refer to anything specific. Maybe it was interpreted as 'book of countries,' and the closest thing to that was a map. Since then, we have often heard 'Israel bayad az naghshe jographya mahv gardad' — Israel must be wiped off the geographical map. Hard-liners have used it in their speeches."

The final translation issue is Mr. Ahmadinejad's use of "occupying regime of Jerusalem" rather than "Israel."

To some analysts, this means he is calling for regime change, not war, and therefore it need not be regarded as a call for military action. Professor Cole, for example, says: "I am entirely aware that Ahmadinejad is hostile to Israel. The question is whether his intentions and capabilities would lead to a military attack, and whether therefore pre-emptive warfare is prescribed. I am saying no, and the boring philology is part of the reason for the no."

But to others, "occupying regime" signals more than opposition to a certain government; the phrase indicates the depth of the Iranian president's rejection of a Jewish state in the Middle East because he refuses even to utter the name Israel. He has said that the Palestinian issue "does not lend itself to a partial territorial solution" and has called Israel "a stain" on Islam that must be erased. By contrast, Mr. Ahmadinejad's predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, said that if the Palestinians accepted Israel's existence, Iran would go along.

When combined with Iran's longstanding support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah of Lebanon, two groups that have killed numerous Israelis, and Mr. Ahmadinejad's refusal to acknowledge the Holocaust, it is hard to argue that, from Israel's point of view, Mr. Ahmadinejad poses no threat. Still, it is true that he has never specifically threatened war against Israel.

So did Iran's president call for Israel to be wiped off the map? It certainly seems so. Did that amount to a call for war? That remains an open question.

Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran for this article.


14/06/06, Jonathan Steele, Lost in translation, (Back).

Experts confirm that Iran's president did not call for Israel to be 'wiped off the map'. Reports that he did serve to strengthen western hawks.

My recent comment piece explaining how Iran's president was badly misquoted when he allegedly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" has caused a welcome little storm. The phrase has been seized on by western and Israeli hawks to re-double suspicions of the Iranian government's intentions, so it is important to get the truth of what he really said.

I took my translation - "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" - from the indefatigable Professor Juan Cole's website where it has been for several weeks.

But it seems to be mainly thanks to the Guardian giving it prominence that the New York Times, which was one of the first papers to misquote Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, came out on Sunday with a defensive piece attempting to justify its reporter's original "wiped off the map" translation. (By the way, for Farsi speakers the original version is available here.)

Joining the "off the map" crowd is David Aaronovitch, a columnist on the Times (of London), who attacked my analysis yesterday. I won't waste time on him since his knowledge of Farsi is as minimal as that of his Latin. The poor man thinks the plural of casus belli is casi belli, unaware that casus is fourth declension with the plural casus (long u).

The New York Times's Ethan Bronner and Nazila Fathi, one of the paper's Tehran staff, make a more serious case. They consulted several sources in Tehran. "Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran's most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say 'wipe off' or 'wipe away' is more accurate than 'vanish' because the Persian verb is active and transitive," Bronner writes.

The New York Times goes on: "The second translation issue concerns the word 'map'. Khomeini's words were abstract: 'Sahneh roozgar.' Sahneh means scene or stage, and roozgar means time. The phrase was widely interpreted as 'map', and for years, no one objected. In October, when Mr Ahmadinejad quoted Khomeini, he actually misquoted him, saying not 'Sahneh roozgar' but 'Safheh roozgar', meaning pages of time or history. No one noticed the change, and news agencies used the word 'map' again."

This, in my view, is the crucial point and I'm glad the NYT accepts that the word "map" was not used by Ahmadinejad. (By the way, the Wikipedia entry on the controversy gets the NYT wrong, claiming falsely that Ethan Bronner "concluded that Ahmadinejad had in fact said that Israel was to be wiped off the map".)

If the Iranian president made a mistake and used "safheh" rather than "sahneh", that is of little moment. A native English speaker could equally confuse "stage of history" with "page of history". The significant issue is that both phrases refer to time rather than place. As I wrote in my original post, the Iranian president was expressing a vague wish for the future. He was not threatening an Iranian-initiated war to remove Israeli control over Jerusalem.

Two other well-established translation sources confirm that Ahmadinejad was referring to time, not place. The version of the October 26 2005 speech put out by the Middle East Media Research Institute, based on the Farsi text released by the official Iranian Students News Agency, says: "This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history." (NB: not "wiped". I accept that "eliminated" is almost the same, indeed some might argue it is more sinister than "wiped", though it is a bit more of a mouthful if you are trying to find four catchy and easily memorable words with which to incite anger against Iran.)

MEMRI (its text of the speech is available here) is headed by a former Isareli military intelligence officer and has sometimes been attacked for alleged distortion of Farsi and Arabic quotations for the benefit of Israeli foreign policy. On this occasion they supported the doveish view of what Ahmadinejad said.

Finally we come to the BBC monitoring service which every day puts out hundreds of highly respected English translations of broadcasts from all round the globe to their subscribers - mainly governments, intelligence services, thinktanks and other specialists. I approached them this week about the controversy and a spokesperson for the monitoring service's marketing unit, who did not want his name used, told me their original version of the Ahmadinejad quote was "eliminated from the map of the world".

As a result of my inquiry and the controversy generated, they had gone back to the native Farsi-speakers who had translated the speech from a voice recording made available by Iranian TV on October 29 2005. Here is what the spokesman told me about the "off the map" section: "The monitor has checked again. It's a difficult expression to translate. They're under time pressure to produce a translation quickly and they were searching for the right phrase. With more time to reflect they would say the translation should be "eliminated from the page of history".

Would the BBC put out a correction, given that the issue had become so controversial, I asked. "It would be a long time after the original version", came the reply. I interpret that as "probably not", but let's see.

Finally, I approached Iradj Bagherzade, the Iranian-born founder and chairman of the renowned publishing house, IB Tauris. He thought hard about the word "roozgar". "History" was not the right word, he said, but he could not decide between several better alternatives "this day and age", "these times", "our times", "time".

So there we have it. Starting with Juan Cole, and going via the New York Times' experts through MEMRI to the BBC's monitors, the consensus is that Ahmadinejad did not talk about any maps. He was, as I insisted in my original piece, offering a vague wish for the future.

A very last point. The fact that he compared his desired option - the elimination of "the regime occupying Jerusalem" - with the fall of the Shah's regime in Iran makes it crystal clear that he is talking about regime change, not the end of Israel. As a schoolboy opponent of the Shah in the 1970's he surely did not favour Iran's removal from the page of time. He just wanted the Shah out.

The same with regard to Israel. The Iranian president is undeniably an opponent of Zionism or, if you prefer the phrase, the Zionist regime. But so are substantial numbers of Israeli citizens, Jews as well as Arabs. The anti-Zionist and non-Zionist traditions in Israel are not insignificant. So we should not demonise Ahmadinejad on those grounds alone.

Does this quibbling over phrases matter? Yes, of course. Within days of the Ahmadinejad speech the then Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was calling for Iran to be expelled from the United Nations. Other foreign leaders have quoted the map phrase. The United States is piling pressure on its allies to be tough with Iran.

Let me give the last word to Juan Cole, with whom I began. "I am entirely aware that Ahmadinejad is hostile to Israel. The question is whether his intentions and capabilities would lead to a military attack, and whether therefore pre-emptive warfare is prescribed. I am saying no, and the boring philology is part of the reason for the no."


13/12/06, Editorial, A denial-fest in Tehran, (Back).

To have Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad play host to an international conference on the Holocaust is like having a jackal play host to a conference on the protection of wounded animals. It was clear from the start where the two-day conference (which ended yesterday) would head, and no surprise that it attracted the world's most enthusiastic Holocaust-deniers -- from France, Robert Faurisson, who has called the fact of the Nazi extermination of six million Jews and millions of others "a historical lie," or, from Australia, Fredrick Toeben, who says the death toll in the Holocaust has been wildly overstated. President Ahmadinejad, after all, has himself called the Holocaust "a myth," one more stink bomb in the verbal arsenal he regularly fires at Israel, which he has said should be wiped off the map. This week, he added that "just as the Soviet Union was wiped out, and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out."

If there is a myth, it is Iran's pretense that this was a scholarly effort to examine a historical event that -- another myth -- has been woefully underresearched. Rasoul Mousavi, head of the Iranian Foreign Ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies, said the conference was designed to permit a discussion of the Holocaust "away from Western taboos and the restriction imposed on them in Europe." Yes, if you're searching for open and honest intellectual inquiry into major world events, who better to trust than a government that regularly closes newspapers, imprisons journalists and persecutes its critics, driving them out of the country or -- as in the case of Canadian-Iranian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi -- torturing and killing them. Free expression and the Ahmadinejad regime are antonyms.

Among the delegates to the conference -- 67 people from 30 countries, by Iran's count -- was David Duke, former head of the racist U.S. Ku Klux Klan, who holds that the gas chambers used in the Holocaust did not exist. British Prime Minister Tony Blair neatly incorporated Mr. Duke into his denunciation of the Tehran confab. "I mean, to go and invite the former head of the Ku Klux Klan to a conference in Tehran which disputes the millions of people who died in the Holocaust . . . what further evidence do you need that this regime is extreme?"

Particularly unsettling for Canadians was to find, among the names of those speaking at the event, Shiraz Dossa, who teaches political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. Mercifully, Prof. Dossa says he is not a Holocaust-denier and was unhappy to find himself in the company of so many deniers, neo-Nazis and the like. But his very participation in the conference was sorely misjudged, since the presence of a Canadian academic from a respected university gave the organizers of a fake conference a chance to claim legitimacy.

He must have been aware of the views of President Ahmadinejad. He certainly should have had misgivings about who was organizing a conference on the Holocaust theme. Even if he styled himself as a David in the lion's den, he was deluding himself. St. Francis Xavier should be wincing at the thought that one of its own would be a key participant in so foul an exercise. Mr. Ahmadinejad, dangerous and delusional, deserves no encouragement.


14/12/06, John Ibbitson, Even a scholar's academic freedom has its limits in Canada, (Back).

A Canadian university professor attends a conference of Holocaust deniers, disgracing himself, his profession and his university.

This is not academic freedom. Indeed, it may be grounds for dismissal.

Shiraz Dossa is a political scientist at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. A brief review of his writings quickly reveals that Prof. Dossa belongs to that school of intellectuals who believe “the Zionist strategy is one of aggressive ethnocide” against Palestinians and that “development” is “quintessentially developmental imperialism.” His writings on the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, though controversial, have received critical praise.

Some of his students have apparently complained to a rate-my-professor website that the professor's classes include watching satirical American television shows and trash-talking George W. Bush. Others, however, praise him for standing up to Western imperialism and insist that he is not at all anti-American; they say his lectures are worthwhile.

Prof. Dossa does not deny the Holocaust, though he finds it ironic and tragic that its victims are persecuting Arabs just as they were persecuted by the Nazis. His loathing of what he believes to be America's war of terror against Islam and his solidarity with those who resist American imperialism led him to accept an invitation to attend this week's Tehran conference on the Holocaust.

Prof. Dossa, in an interview with The Globe's Doug Saunders, insisted he had no idea the conference would be rife with Holocaust deniers. He must not have read the agenda of the conference, which contains such topics as “Gas Chambers: Denial or Confirmation,” and “Holocaust: Western Media and Propaganda.”

So a man with a PhD is invited to a conference on the Holocaust. In Iran. With that agenda. Hosted by the President of Iran, who has repeatedly called the Holocaust a myth. And this man with a PhD is shocked to find anti-Semites, neo-Nazis and other Holocaust-denying rabble at the conference.

There are only two possibilities: Either Prof. Dossa is lying, or he's an idiot.

Sean Riley, the president of StFX, acknowledged yesterday in an interview that “from the university's point of view, it was an embarrassment” for Prof. Dossa to attend the conference. But Mr. Riley is far from ready to say what, if any, action his administration will take.

“I will have to take a careful look at all of the facts, and I certainly wouldn't rush out to state at this point that the university will make any particular decision,” he said.

That's understandable. The university's administration should deliberately and carefully weigh all the facts. But one hopes they will decide to fire him.

The ancient principle of academic freedom was designed to protect the university from persecution by the state, not to protect the lazy, the mediocre and the irresponsible.

Prof. Dossa may be neither lazy nor mediocre, but he is irresponsibility personified. He was invited to attend what Foreign Affairs Minister Peter McKay rightly described as “this despicable, provocative conference” because of his credibility as a professor at St. Francis Xavier.

If you were invited to a conference because of the position you held in a corporation or organization, and you embarrassed that corporation or organization by your presence or your acts, then that corporation or organization would have the right to discipline you. If St. Francis Xavier University surrenders that right, it surrenders any right to defend its own name.

If he is fired, Prof. Dossa may sue for wrongful dismissal. This wouldn't be a bad thing. It could prompt a long-overdue debate about tenure, academic freedom, the power of faculty unions, and whether academics are truly immune to the disciplines to which the rest of us are subject.

But if Shiraz Dossa is allowed to get away with this, without so much as an apology, then it's pretty clear that, in Canada, the only limitations on the rights of tenured faculty are contained in the Criminal Code.


14/12/06, CAUT/APCCU, Statement on the controversy over Professor Shiraz Dossa, (Back).

(Ottawa – December 14, 2006) The controversy over St. Francis Xavier Professor Shiraz Dossa’s attendance at a recent conference held in Iran raises fundamental questions about academic freedom. For example, John Ibbitson, in his Globe and Mail column of December 14, called for Professor Dossa to be fired. This is deeply troubling. Academic freedom was not, as Ibbitson claims, “designed to protect the university from persecution by the state.” Academic freedom is to protect the right of academic staff to speak the truth as they see it without repression from their institution, the state, religious authorities, special interest groups or anyone else. Many of the earliest challenges to academic freedom came from universities’ attempts to suppress or censor their faculty members for unpopular viewpoints, precisely what Mr. Ibbitson is calling on St. Frances Xavier to do to Professor Dossa.

Universities can only serve the public interest through the advancement of knowledge if they are places open to the widest diversity of viewpoints and perspectives – places where criticism and debate, not silencing and suppression, are the response to perspectives with which one disagrees. Universities are a community of scholars that depend on vigorous and open debate to advance knowledge and understanding. Getting rid of those academics who have inconvenient views may appeal to many, but the price is destruction of the foundation of our universities and ultimately weakening our democratic society.


14/12/06, Raymond J. Lahey, The Dossa debate, (Back).

Bishop of Antigonish, chancellor of St. Francis Xavier University

Antigonish, N.S. -- As chancellor of St. Francis Xavier University, I should like to commend you for your editorial concerning the Tehran conference on the Holocaust and the participation there of a professor from our university (A Denial-Fest In Tehran -- Dec. 13).

That editorial read in part: "St. Francis Xavier should be wincing at the thought that one of its own would be a key participant in so foul an exercise." We are more than wincing at the thought. I am certain that the Xaverian community is shocked that a faculty member should have taken part in this conference in any capacity.

The conference was widely regarded in advance as an attempt by the current Iranian government to minimize the Holocaust and to undermine the existence of the state of Israel. Both those objectives are clearly unacceptable and, more than that, are worthy of contempt.

St. Francis Xavier University has a long and proud record of endeavouring to advance the cause of justice and peace. We have been active in promoting positive relationships between Christians and Jews. Our motto is Quaecumque sunt vera -- "Whatsoever things are true." Truth demands that we acknowledge the reality and the devastation of the Shoah, however difficult that may be for us. Participation in this conference by any Canadian hardly promotes truth but, indeed, promotes the contrary.


14/12/06, Caroline Alphonso, University embarrassed by professor's Tehran visit, (Back).

Shocked St. Francis Xavier distances itself from meeting of Holocaust deniers.

St. Francis Xavier University is embarrassed that one of its professors attended a gathering of Holocaust deniers in Tehran, but the institution's leader says it is too early to tell what action will be taken, if any.

"My main feeling is it's just an embarrassment for the university. I think it's an embarrassment for Canada to have lent any credibility, no matter how thin, to that particular conference with that very hurtful agenda," university president Sean Riley said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Among those speaking at the two-day conference earlier this week was Shiraz Dossa, a political science professor who has spent 18 years at the university in Antigonish, N.S.

Dr. Dossa told the Globe and Mail that he is not a Holocaust denier, and called those who deny the Holocaust "hacks and lunatics." Still, his presence at the conference, sponsored by the Iranian government and featuring speeches by anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers, has raised eyebrows on campus and has been condemned by some university officials.

Yesterday, the university distanced itself from Dr. Dossa's decision to attend the conference, which has been roundly denounced internationally. Dr. Riley said faculty members have the right to free speech, but stressed that Dr. Dossa isn't receiving any university money to be in Iran.

"Despite all that, it's still our name and he still works at our university," he said. "So I want to make it very clear . . . that the university is not lending any credibility, not an ounce of credibility, to the exercise that occurred in Tehran."

He added: "I think there's going to be a lot of discussion about the appropriateness of attending the conference, that's for sure. I'm already expecting to have different things suggested within the university community. It's not appropriate at this point to map out any specific things that will happen."

Raymond Lahey, bishop of Antigonish and the university's chancellor, said in a letter to The Globe and Mail that the institution was stunned to learn of Dr. Dossa's attendance.

"We are more than wincing at the thought," he wrote. "I am certain that the Xaverian community is shocked that a member of faculty should have taken part in this conference in any capacity."

A university spokesman said the political science department was aware that Dr. Dossa was attending a conference in Iran, but not the nature of the gathering.

Dr. Dossa, the only Canadian at the event, said he willingly accepted Tehran's invitation to present his paper on the abuse of Holocaust imagery.

At the university, he teaches courses such as History of Political Thought, and Third World Politics. People claiming to be his students on ratemyprofessor.com have both praised and complained about his teaching style.

As news of his presence at the conference spread around campus, students posted messages on the student union website. Some defended him.

". . . The man is emphatically not a Holocaust denier. He is a serious academic, anyone in any of his classes that didn't need to be spoon-fed regurgitated textbook crap could see that. I'm sure he was thoroughly embarrassed when he found out who some of the other guests at the conference were," one person wrote.

Elaine MacLean, president of the St. Francis Xavier Association of University Teachers, defended academics' right to attend such conferences. "Certainly academic freedom ensures that our members have the freedom to teach, to discuss and to criticize," she said.

But at least one attendee is likely to face legal action for his role at the conference, where he denied the Holocaust during a speech. Revisionist academic Robert Faurisson might be brought to court, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said. France has a statute making it illegal to deny the existence of the Holocaust.


15/12/06, Frederick Sweet, Dr. Dossa: round two, (Back).

Toronto -- John Ibbitson is flat-out wrong (Even A Scholar's Academic Freedom Has Its Limits In Canada -- Dec. 14). The vast majority of Canadian academics, engaged as they are in highly specialized research, never require the shelter of the privileges of tenure. It's professors such as Shiraz Dossa who represent the primary case for academic freedom.

However reprehensible his action may have been, he was entitled to exercise his professional prerogative to attend the Tehran conference without jeopardizing his job.


16/12/06, Allan Greer, The light of truth, (Back).

Department of History, University of Toronto

Toronto -- Using the Shiraz Dossa case as his pretext, John Ibbitson has launched a frontal attack on academic freedom (Even A Scholar's Academic Freedom Has Its Limits In Canada -- Dec. 14). In arguing that a university ought to behave like a private corporation and fire a professor whose views it finds disagreeable or embarrassing, Mr. Ibbitson strikes at the very essence of that freedom.

Individual professors do not speak for their institutions. They can be criticized and they are -- severely and justifiably in this case -- but they are not disciplined as though they were corporate spokespersons.

Follow Mr. Ibbitson's advice if you want Canada's universities to resemble the well-regulated institutions of learning usually found in a police state.


28/12/06, John Ibbitson, The responsibility of freedom, (Back).

What price academic freedom?

Two weeks ago, this space condemned the decision of Shiraz Dossa, a political scientist at St. Francis Xavier University, to attend a conference in Iran that turned out to be a front for Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.

Some university professors, writing in response, asserted that academic freedom meant nothing unless it protected Prof. Dossa's right to go where he pleased.

Michiel Horn, of York University sent along his book Academic Freedom in Canada: A History, which offers a defence of academic freedom and of tenure: the right of a professor to guaranteed employment until retirement, barring egregious misbehaviour.

These rights, Prof. Horn concluded, "may protect people whom others regard as undeserving and who may in fact be so . . . [who] have turned out to be mediocre or worse in accomplishment, or wanting in some important aspect of their work. But these drawbacks are the price that must be paid to protect the innovative, the outspoken, the unconventional, and the unpopular."

Really?

To insist that tenure and academic freedom (for one is impossible without the other) are superlatives, that they must be embraced entirely or not at all, is naive.

Most of us believe that university professors should be free to research, teach and speak as they will, without fear of reprisal. We agree that everyone benefits when scientists and scholars know they can go where their research takes them, without having to look over their shoulder. This is a value that needs to be protected.

But there are other values that also need to be protected. One is value for money. Taxpayers fund universities through their governments, students through their tuition, private and corporate donors through their contributions.

Taxpayers, students and donors know that their funding does not entitle them to say who should teach or research what. But they must also have confidence that their money is being well spent, because it is always within their power simply to withdraw funding, at which point the university would cease to exist.

Leaving aside the Dossa affair, academics do themselves a great disservice when they rush to defend irresponsible or incompetent professors. In every university there are a small number of these free riders. Their teaching is execrable, their research is shoddy, they embrace empty and intolerant ideologies devoid of mental rigour.

Their hard-working colleagues chafe at these lazy or loony bones, increasing their own teaching loads and sacrificing their own research time to compensate. This, they tell themselves, is the price they must pay for their own tenure, and their own freedom to research what they will.

But the corrosive effect of a small number of malcontents and freeloaders can be very large. It can lower the reputation of the university in the eyes of the community, just as Prof. Dossa lowered the reputation of St. Francis Xavier when he lent his name and theirs to that conference.

Prof. Dossa's defenders insist that academic freedom gives him the right to do as he pleases. But governments, students and donors can do as they please as well. They can avoid funding, attending, or contributing to the university. Does the university not have a right to defend itself from the consequences of Prof. Dossa's actions, by condemning those actions and by imposing sanctions?

No it doesn't, some argue. Academic freedom carries a high price because it is a precious commodity. Lose it, and you open an uncloseable door to the corporate-owned campus, the degree mill, the police state.

To which some of us reply: Don't be absurd. The academy exists within the community. The community is willing to defend the academy's freedoms; the community asks the academy to behave responsibly in turn.

Freedom and responsibility necessarily exist on opposite sides of the democratic scale. All of us have a duty to try to keep the scale in balance. That includes newspaper columnists. And it includes professors, too.


06/07, Shiraz Dossa, The Explanation We Never Heard, (Back).

Literary Review of Canada
Volume 15, Number 5
June 2007
Pages 3-4

The Explanation We Never Heard

Six months after attending a controversial Tehran conference, a Canadian professor charges the media and his own university with ignorance and intolerance.

AN ESSAY By Shiraz Dossa

It would be a shocking event in any university. It was doubly so in a university that takes pride in its “Catholic character.” Last December, St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, authorized a small Spanish Inquisition of its own to denounce a St. FX Muslim professor. It was launched by two Jewish professors and the Christian chair of the political science department (Michael Steinitz, Samuel Kalman and Yvon Grenier). My sin: I attended a conference in a Muslim nation on the Holocaust entitled The Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision. It took place in Tehran, Iran, in December 2006, and it was widely—and erroneously—described in the western media as a “Holocaust-denial conference.”

I have never denied the Holocaust, only noted its propaganda power. Yet my university tolerated this assault on me. I was stunned by the university’s illiteracy and bias. I was appalled by President Sean Riley’s attack on my reputation and his spurious comments on the conference. In his December 13, 2006, statement he insinuated that the “conference” was bogus and that it revealed a “deplorable anti-Semitism” that the “St. FX community” found “deeply abhorrent” and contrary to its “traditions.” Riley left little doubt that I was guilty of sullying my school’s reputation. St. FX in effect sanctioned a crusade against a Muslim Holocaust scholar, who also happens to be an outspoken critic of Israel’s brutality in occupied Palestine.

What follows is my view of the events of last December, and my interpretation of the responses to them in the media and at my university.

Two Fallacies
The anti-intellectual storm at St. FX was driven by two fallacies pushed by the media and the literati. The first is that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has dismissed the Holocaust as a “myth” and threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” In fact, Ahmadinejad has not denied the Holocaust or proposed Israel’s liquidation; he has never done so in any of his speeches on the subject (all delivered in Farsi/Persian). As an Iran specialist, I can attest that both accusations are false. U.S. Iran experts such as Juan Cole and UK journalists such as Jonathan Steele have come to the same conclusion.1

As Cole correctly notes, Ahmadinejad was quoting the Ayatollah Khomeini in the specific speech under discussion: what he said was that “the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time.”2 No state action is envisaged in this lament; it denotes a spiritual wish, whereas the erroneous translation—“wipe Israel off the map”—suggests a military threat. There is a huge chasm between the correct and the incorrect translations. The notion that Iran can “wipe out” U.S.-backed, nuclear-armed Israel is ludicrous.

What Ahmadinejad has questioned is the mythologizing, the sacralization, of the Holocaust and the “Zionist regime’s” continued killing of Palestinians and Muslims. He has even raised doubts about the scale of the Holocaust. His rhetoric has been excessive and provocative. And he does not really care what we in the West think about Iran or Muslims; he does not kowtow to western or Israeli diktat. Such questioning and criticism are not new: Jewish scholars such as Adi Ophir, Ilan Pappe, Boas Evron, Tom Segev and Uri Davis have been doing it for two decades. None of this is Holocaust denial.

The second western fallacy is that the event was a Holocaust-denial conference because of the presence of a few notorious western Christian deniers/skeptics, a couple of a neo-Nazi stripe. It was nothing of the sort. It was a Global South conference convened to devise an intellectual/political response to western-Israeli intervention in Muslim affairs. Holocaust deniers/skeptics were a fringe, a marginal few at the conference. The majority of the papers focused on the use and abuse of the Holocaust in Arab, Muslim, Israeli and western politics, a serious and worthy subject for international academic discussion.

Out of the 33 conference paper givers, 27 were not Holocaust deniers, but were university professors and social science researchers from Iran, Jordan, Algeria, India, Morocco, Bahrain, Tunisia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Syria. In attendance were five rabbis (anti-Zionist rabbis, to be sure) who agreed with Rabbi Dovid Weiss of New York that Israel’s occupation policy was “evil” and un-Jewish, and the Holocaust could never justify it—but who insisted, like me, that the Holocaust was a reality. None of us knew that a few deniers/skeptics would be in attendance. This is not at all unusual in the Islamic world. In southern conferences, one rarely knows who will be appearing until one gets there.

The Iranian Institute of Political and International Studies (IPIS), an elite school of advanced politics and policy studies that offers MA and PhD programs, sponsored the Iran conference. It was not sponsored by the Iranian president Dr. Ahmadinejad; he did not attend or participate in the conference. It was not a Holocaust-denial conference by any stretch. That’s all false.

President Riley and his supporters at St. FX bought the denial fallacy that had been concocted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish Defense League, and peddled by media outlets such as The Globe and Mail. On December 11, 2006, the Simon Wiesenthal Center sent out a condemning press release about “Iran’s Holocaust Denial Conference” to news media in the U.S. and Canada.3 It was the Zionists and the neo-Nazis who, for very different, self-serving reasons, depicted it as a Holocaust-denial conference and sold it to willing, anti-Iranian Islamophobes.

Comparative Appearances
Coincidentally, on December 11, 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice officially welcomed Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to Washington on behalf of the U.S. government. Lieberman also met Senator Hillary Clinton and ex-President Bill Clinton. The Americans were not at all troubled by their guest’s stance on the Palestinians. Avigdor Lieberman is committed to ridding Israel of its Arabs—in effect, to ethnic cleansing. In the Israeli media (Ha’aretz), he has openly been labelled a racist and a fascist. U.S. critics have called him the Israeli David Duke.

Canada silently acquiesced in Lieberman’s inclusion in the Israeli cabinet. And in January 2007 Peter MacKay addressed the Herzliya Conference in Israel affirming Canada’s attachment to “freedom and democracy,” “values” that “make Canada and Israel so close.” He was there in his official capacity as Canada’s foreign minister. MacKay refused to meet with the leaders of the new elected Palestinian government (Hamas). The government of Canada is not concerned that an anti-Arab ethnic cleanser is Israel’s deputy prime minister. Canadians do hypocrisy rather well.

Consider also, in this connection, an event held at St. FX in September 2006, just three months before the Tehran conference. St. FX and the Religious Studies Department hosted a conference on Catholic-Jewish dialogue. One of the invited speakers was Rabbi Richard Rubenstein, a “distinguished” academic, according to his hosts. He did little to advance the Catholic-Jewish dialogue.

Instead, he launched a vicious attack on Islam, its Prophet and Muslims in the West as a fifth column corroding Christian civilization from within. The good rabbi declared that “genocide” and the “murder” of non-Muslims lay at the heart of Islam. Rubenstein seemed to believe his views would be well received. And apparently they were—by the largely Catholic-Christian audience.

St. FX chancellor Bishop Raymond Lahey and I were on the response panel; I condemned Rubenstein’s anti-Muslim tirade and his labelling of Islam as “Islamo-Fascism,” which in my view is as offensive, racist and false as denying the Holocaust. Bishop Lahey, in his comment, said nothing about Rubenstein’s anti-Islamism. This was a St. Francis Xavier University conference that occurred with the blessing of university president Riley and university chancellor Bishop Lahey, and St. FX provided a public platform to an anti-Muslim, anti-Iranian racist rabbi. My point in making the comparison is that this was still a scholarly, enlightening conference although tainted by Rubenstein’s hate-speech. So was the Iran conference on the Holocaust, although tainted by the presence of a few western, Christian Holocaust deniers.

Islamophobia
So how and why did this attack on my reputation occur?

The Globe and Mail fired the initial shot in its editorial on December 13, 2006. It was followed by a declaration of war on me by its “pundits” John Ibbitson and Rex Murphy, dilettantes extraordinaire on the Holocaust and the Middle East. Neither of these journalists has credibility in either field. Ibbitson hectored me in his usual CNN mode, got most things wrong and casually libelled me in the process.4 Since 9/11, he hasn’t let up on Islam or Muslims. Murphy, in his column “Eichmann in Tehran,” displayed his cerebral deficits and his ignorance of Islam, Iran and Hannah Arendt with enviable facility.5 Like Ibbitson, Murphy impresses those intellectually just a cut above the Trailer Park Boys. It is worth noting that these Christian boys have unlimited latitude in The Globe and Mail to trash Muslims even as they defend “civilization,” Israel and Jews.

My university joined the assault on me forthwith. Chancellor Lahey assured The Globe and Mail’s readers, in his letter to the editor on December 14, 2006, that the conference and my attendance were “contrary” to the “[promotion of] truth” and indeed “worthy of contempt.” It is significant that Riley and Lahey have no scholarly expertise on Islam, Iran or the Holocaust either. I believe they wanted to assure the white, mainstream Canadian community, including Canadian Jews, that “Catholic” St. FX was on their side, and this desire far outweighed their obligation to defend academic freedom. Since I was in Iran as a Holocaust expert, and not representing St. FX or Catholics, I found this a bizarre response. Are Riley and Lahey at the helm of a university committed to the academic freedom of its entire faculty, which includes Muslims? Or is St. FX’s hyped “inclusiveness” only for Christians and Jews? I have been a St. FX professor for 18 years, a full professor since 1996.

Was it an accident that I was swarmed—by petition—by Jewish and Christian professors, with the blessing of St. FX’s Catholic leaders? The petition oddly defended my “academic freedom … to espouse any views that he pleases,” but then negated my right to do so by being “profoundly embarrassed by his participation in the Holocaust-denial conference held in Tehran.” It garnered a fair number of signatures from current and retired professors—about 24 percent of the total faculty at St. FX. But surely these righteous folks are not racist? Surely this could not happen at St. FX, a Catholic institution with its Coady International Institute tradition of decency? It is crucial to stress that many townspeople were incensed by St. FX’s behaviour, among them Miles Tompkins, a direct descendant of Coady’s founder, J.J. Tompkins, and of Moses Coady. In a letter to the local paper, The Casket, on March 21, he chastised St. FX’s conduct and also noted that my “political science department’s response was an embarrassment to the University.”

Was this then an un-Christian lapse, an un-Catholic aberration? It would seem not. We tend to forget that Catholic anti-Semitism has always had two strands, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish. The anti-Jewish strand has been dominant in western culture for several centuries. In the post-Holocaust period, however, the anti-Muslim strand, which survived the Crusades, got a new lease on life and quickly superseded anti-Jewish anti-Semitism for obvious reasons. As a result, Muslims now bear the brunt of western anti-Semitism and Islamophobia is de rigueur in the liberal Christian West, in support of our war on the “Axis of Evil,” including Iran. The anti-Iranian, anti-Muslim current at St. FX is not accidental; it is the distilled voice of Canadian Islamophobia in these times.

Final Thoughts
Universities are places of discontent; they provoke disputes, they offer critiques of conventional and, often, false views. A university that tailors its teaching and research to the prejudices of its alumni or corporate backers is a travesty. Academic freedom is not conditional on the approval of the university or of university colleagues. Nor is the reputation of the university as an institution tied to the scholarly focus of its faculty or to the controversial subjects that faculty may pursue in their field of expertise.

Iran’s elites have protected Jews since Cyrus ruled West Asia. Anti-Semitism is a Euro-American problem, not an Islamic one. Iranian opposition to Israel and its wars on Muslims/Palestinians is ethical and political; it has absolutely nothing to do with hating Jews qua Jews. It is a great pity that Sean Riley and Bishop Lahey ignored St. FX’s motto, an injunction to first ascertain Quaecumque Sunt Vera, Whatsoever Things Are True, and instead tolerated the assault by St. FX’s ignorant crusaders on the reputation of their Muslim colleague.

I would be remiss if I failed to note that two St. FX officials behaved honourably, with the kind of Catholic decency that befits our university, throughout the course of this episode of academic McCarthyism. Academic Vice-President Dr. Mary McGillivray and the Dean of Arts, Dr. Steven Baldner, tackled the controversy with integrity and respect for the liberal values that St. FX symbolizes. As well, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) strongly supported my academic freedom. In his letter to The Globe and Mail on December 14, 2006 (which the paper did not print), Executive Director Jim Turk stated that “academic freedom is to protect the right of academic staff to speak the truth as they see it without repression from their institution, the state, religious authorities, special interest groups or anyone else.”6

Notes
1. Jonathan Steele, “If Iran Is Ready to Talk, The US Must Do So Unconditionally,” The Guardian, June 2, 2006, and “Lost in Translation,” The Guardian, June 14, 2006.
2. Juan Cole, “Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the Orientalist; And, ‘We Don’t Want Your Stinking War!’,” “Informed Consent,” May 3, 2006 www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html
3. Simon Wiesenthal Center, “Holocaust Survivors in Three Cities Across North America Join Together to Confront Iran’s Conference of Holocaust Deniers and Revisionists,” News Release, December 11, 2006.
4. John Ibbitson, “Even a Scholar’s Academic Freedom Has Its Limits in Canada,” Globe and Mail, December 14, 2006, page A7.
5. Rex Murphy, “Eichmann in Tehran: Horror Revisited,” Globe and Mail, December 16, 2006, page A31.
6. Canadian Association of University Teachers, “Statement on the Controversy over Professor Shiraz Dossa,” News Release, December 14, 2006 www.caut.ca/en/news/comms/20061214dossa.asp


28/05/07, Michael Valpy, Professor who attended Holocaust conference blasts critics as Islamophobes, (Back).

A Canadian political scientist excoriated for attending what was widely labelled a Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran has retaliated with a blistering published attack on his university president and his colleagues for being illiterate Islamophobes.

Writing in the influential Literary Review of Canada, Shiraz Dossa, a tenured professor at Nova Scotia's St. Francis Xavier University, said that his academic integrity and academic freedom were grossly impugned by the university administration, an assault on his reputation that he said has yet to be remedied.

He accused the president and chancellor of authorizing a "small Spanish Inquisition" to denounce him - a campaign he said was initiated by two Jewish professors and the Christian chair of the political science department.

Prof. Dossa also wrote that the attack on his reputation was launched by The Globe and Mail's editorial board and by columnists John Ibbitson and Rex Murphy, whom he described as being "intellectually just a cut above the Trailer Park Boys" and ignorant of the Middle East.

James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, likened the treatment of Prof. Dossa to the 1950s McCarthy period in the United States when academics and others were subjected to intense pressure not to attend events that were unpopular.

This is the first time Prof. Dossa has spoken out since the storm erupted over his attendance at the Tehran conference in mid-December.

His two-page essay appears in the issue of the LRC that will be posted today on its website, http://www.reviewcanada.ca. Although the monthly publication's circulation is small, it is widely read in the academic, journalistic, political and public-service communities.

In an interview, Prof. Dossa said he wrote the essay because he wanted to set the record straight and because he still hasn't received an apology from either St. FX president Sean Riley or chancellor Raymond Lahey, the Roman Catholic bishop of Antigonish where the university is located. He also said he has refused to speak to his department chair, Prof. Yvon Grenier, since December.

He wrote that the university administration uncritically accepted the Holocaust-denial label "concocted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center [a Jewish human-rights organization] and the [U.S.] Jewish Defence League and peddled by media outlets such as The Globe and Mail."

Prof. Dossa, a Muslim, teaches political theory and comparative politics at St. FX. His focus as a scholar has been on the Holocaust and its aftermath. He abruptly dismisses any suggestion that he is a Holocaust denier. Rather, he said, his interest has been in what use of the Holocaust has been made to promote Zionism - the right of Jews to a national homeland - and to support the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

In both his essay and in a telephone conversation, he makes a compelling case for why he attended the two-day Tehran conference, titled "The Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision."

It was a conference for scholars in the global South, said Prof. Dossa, who wanted to examine the Holocaust and its significance unrestrained by the lenses through which it is viewed by the West, and "to devise an intellectual [and] political response to Western-Israeli intervention in Muslim affairs."

The global South generally refers to the nations of Africa, Central and Latin America and most of Asia.

He wrote in the LRC: "I was appalled by president Sean Riley's attack on my reputation and his spurious comments on the conference. In his Dec, 13, 2006, statement, he insinuated that the conference was bogus and that it revealed a 'deplorable anti-Semitism' that the 'St. FX community' found 'deeply abhorrent' and contrary to its 'traditions.' Riley left little doubt that I was guilty of sullying my school's reputation.

"Riley and Lahey have no scholastic expertise on Islam, Iran or the Holocaust. ... I believe they wanted to assure the white, mainstream Canadian community, including Canadian Jews, that 'Catholic' St. FX was on their side and that this desire far outweighed their obligation to defend academic freedom.

"Are Riley and Lahey at the helm of a university committed to the academic freedom of its entire faculty, which includes Muslims? Or is St. FX's hyped 'inclusiveness' only for Christians and Jews?"

The conference became controversial the moment it was announced by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Prof. Dossa readily concedes that the President's rhetoric about the Holocaust - particularly his questioning of its scale - "has been excessive and provocative."

The conference was organized by the Iranian Foreign Ministry's Institute of Political and International Studies, which is respected internationally and has run United Nations conferences in the past. More than 1,200 people attended.

There were 44 speakers and 33 papers presented - five of which were given by notorious Western Holocaust deniers.

The other presenters were scholars examining the Holocaust from a global South perspective.

Prof. Dossa said the presenters, himself included, were invited, but he said he had no idea in advance that Holocaust deniers were on the list. He said that, until his arrival in Tehran, he did not see an agenda, something he said is not uncommon for global South conferences.

He described the presentations by the Holocaust deniers as absurd. At the session Prof. Dossa attended where one of the Holocaust deniers spoke, the presentation was torn to shreds afterward by the largely Iranian audience.

He said he would not have attended a conference entirely of Holocaust deniers because it would have held no scholarly or intellectual interest for him. But a conference with five Holocaust deniers was of academic interest for him to see what kind of reception they'd be given.

James Turk of CAUT said: "In this case, there was an aggressive attempt based on very little information to denigrate Prof. Dossa and to vilify him."


29/05/07, Letters, Russell Maynard, The professor and the Holocaust, (Back).

Vancouver -- It was exciting to read the truth about the Holocaust conference and Shiraz Dossa. Good on The Globe for going this far. Do the right thing and go all the way with an apology.


29/05/07, Letters, Cal Bricker, The professor and the Holocaust, (Back).

Toronto -- Pity poor Shiraz Dossa, the St. Francis Xavier University professor who feels he's become the victim of racist and churlish criticism over his attendance at an Iranian-sponsored conference on the Holocaust (Professor Who Attended Holocaust Conference Blasts Critics As Islamophobes - May 28). His motives for attending were pure. He just wanted to get out the word on how the "West" uses the Holocaust to leverage special status for Israel. The calumnies to which he has been subjected on returning to Nova Scotia are proof positive that Canada is teeming with uneducated Islamophobes - Christians and Jews, of course - who aren't as learned as the good professor.

Well, I think there are plenty of folks at least as educated as the obscure Prof. Dossa who were outraged not only by his attendance at what was well known to be a racist forum set up by Iran but at his prevarications on returning. He didn't know, for example, that there were at least five notorious Holocaust deniers in attendance - no, he did know, but he just wanted to see how they would be treated by the audience. Which one is it, Prof. Dossa?

I'm all for academic freedom, but Prof. Dossa is surely the iconic example of the price we pay for it.


29/05/07, Letters, David Schatzky, The professor and the Holocaust, (Back).

Toronto -- Academics can be so intellectual and theoretical they miss the "real life" impact of words on human and political activity. Shiraz Dossa appears to be blind to the danger in the Iranian President's anti-Holocaust rhetoric. But surely no professor should be excoriated for going to meetings to exchange ideas on this subject.


29/05/07, Letters, Michael Benedict, The professor and the Holocaust, (Back).

Toronto -- Shiraz Dossa may not be a Holocaust denier, but he does rewrite history in the same spirit. Defending his participation at the controversial conference in Tehran, he says no one knew in advance that Holocaust deniers would be in attendance. Who did he think would be speaking on the topic "Gas Chambers: Denial or Confirmation?"


30/05/07, Letters, Abraham H. Foxman, The professor and the critics, (Back).

National director, Anti-Defamation League

New York -- Shiraz Dossa shamelessly tries to justify his attendance at last year's Holocaust-denial conference in Iran by whitewashing both the proceedings and the Iranian President's history of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. There is no doubt that the conference was specifically convened to promote the view that the Holocaust is a hoax that Jews invented and imposed on the entire world. To our knowledge, Prof. Dossa was the only scholar from a mainstream Western university to attend. No doubt the organizers were delighted by the prestige his institutional affiliation lent the proceedings.


30/05/07, Letters, Ed Morgan & Irving Bella, The professor and the critics, (Back).

U of T, York University, and 11 other professors

We were surprised to read that the Canadian Association of University Teachers was so outspokenly supportive of Shiraz Dossa, the St. Francis Xavier University professor who attended the Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran (Professor Who Attended Holocaust Conference Blasts Critics As Islamophobes - May 28). Prof. Dossa's complaint, as we understand it, is that he has been subject to much criticism, not to discipline. Academic freedom and freedom of expression do not render any of us immune from being criticized. Prof. Dossa attended a conference whose Holocaust revisionist theme - whether or not Prof. Dossa agrees with that theme - was advertised by the organizers worldwide.

One speaker was David Duke, former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. If Prof. Dossa, who labels himself a scholar of "the global South," was not previously familiar with Mr. Duke's call for revisiting the accepted history of the Holocaust, he might have been familiar with Mr. Duke's call to revisit the accepted history of the transatlantic slave trade, which, in Mr. Duke's view, was a salvation rather than a nightmare for Africans.

The position taken by CAUT that Prof. Dossa was being admonished for attending a conference expressing "unpopular views" is, quite frankly, offensive. As an academic, Prof. Dossa had a right to attend this event, but we would hope academics of good conscience would condemn it.


31/05/07, Letters, Miles Tompkins, The professor and tolerance, (Back).

Antigonish, N.S. -- I take exception with Ed Morgan, Irving Abella and Abraham Foxman (The Professor And The Critics - letters, May 30). Denying the Holocaust deniers the publicity they crave seems to be the crux of the issue. We should be exposing and challenging the David Dukes, David Irvings and Avigdor Liebermans of the world with all the knowledge we have in our possession. If universities can't dig down to the roots of misconceptions, we can hardly expect it to occur in the political arena. We will find ourselves led by those who have their own agenda, be it neo-Nazis, revisionist Zionists or Islamic extremists.

I want wisdom from my university, not oracles. St. Francis Xavier himself, and the founders of the Nova Scotia university, never sat idly by waiting for wisdom to be served to them on a white tablecloth.

Mr. Foxman says Shiraz Dossa was the only scholar from a mainstream Western university to attend. The fact that he went that distance to come away calling the deniers the idiots they are should be something to celebrate, not condemn.

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