Robin Matthews
Global Research
4 December 2017
Featured image: Professor Anthony Hall (Source: Defending Professor Anthony Hall’s Facebook Page)
Freedom of Speech battles in
universities often mirror problems in the larger community, and the one
being fought at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, is no exception.
It is conducted, on one side, by convinced believers as a response to
alleged Anti-semitic positions which have surfaced there and which, the
believers think, need relentless, radical, extreme responses.
Conversely, the conflict
looks, to some others, perhaps, as a program to create a huge
smokescreen behind which representatives or friends or sympathizers of
the State of Israel can attempt to cut off any examination of that
State’s activities which might bring it into disrepute. And the quickest
method is to brand any adverse references to the accounts of history
held by the State of Israel as well as to any of its actions and
policies as acts of Anti-semitism.
Forces wishing to dominate and to dictate inquiry and to control “freedom of expression” always seek to repress certain kinds of knowledge, investigation, and expressions of opinion.
In the late 1980s I was proposed
for a year’s exchange with a professor in Simon Fraser University’s
English Department – at the time dominated by U.S. immigrants holding
U.S. citizenship. They rejected my presence at SFU – and were backed
belligerently by SFU’s Canadian president who was quoted in the
Vancouver Sun saying that he wouldn’t have Robin Mathews on his campus
and he didn’t know a university president in Canada who would! (Amusing
slander, but slander nonetheless.)
(If William Saywell’s comment sounds like an utterance by present University of Lethbridge president Michael Mahon
it may be because both men appear to have fallen to thinking they could
dispose of human persons in any way a passing whim suggested … and to
make no bones about it!)
The
U.S. citizen chair of the SFU English Department wrote me a letter
saying that many people in the Department disliked my views on literary
and cultural nationalism in Canada and did not want to give me a place
at SFU to utter them. That was a ban on free (scholarly) expression. I
took it to mean, also, that U.S. citizens intended to decide what
Canadians could say to Canadians in British Columbia.
There
was a battle. It was long … months and months. The national faculty
body (the CAUT) was strong. It declared SFU in violation of academic
freedom. At that point, SFU admitted it had lost. The intensity of the
battle is hard to think of now – the basis of it is so apparently minor.
Reports, however, were that “grown men” at SFU interviewed on the
matter almost burst into tears. And, indeed, passions were running so
high the SFU Administration asked me if I would teach from the Centre
for Canadian Studies rather than from the bent, bleeding, and
discountenanced English Department.
That battle was won at
SFU for freedom of expression and inquiry! But the personal victory was
muted because president Saywell and a few of his closest underlings, I
believe, did everything they could in the next years to limit my
effectiveness. No surprise. “The fortunes” one might say “of (academic)
war”.
At the University of Lethbridge
twenty-six-year professorial veteran of Native American Studies, Liberal
Arts, Globalization Studies … and more … Anthony Hall
has responded with invention, far-reaching research, and creativity to
the hugeness of the body of knowledge he has taken as his province. In
two large, scholarly, and fascinating works (The American Empire and the Fourth World (2003), and Earth Into Property (2010)
Hall traces the oppression and exploitation of the globe’s indigenous
peoples since the historic voyage to “the new world” of Christopher
Columbus in 1492.
As a result of his wide-ranging
research (and travel) Anthony Hall couldn’t fail to see the power and to
observe the participation of the U.S.A. in what he names “imperial
globalization”. Nor could he evade the intimate ties between the State
of Israel and the U.S.A. Nor, of course, could he fail to see the huge
influence the State of Israel has upon U.S. policy in the Middle East (a
region populated with indigenous peoples, like the Palestinians).
He
is, moreover, a scholar who believes genuinely that no subject worthy
of study can be declared ‘off limits’ – whether Canadian culture and
literary nationalism or the complex “Holocaust” in Nazi Germany operated
preceding and during what we choose to call The Second World War
(1939-1945). Donning the apparel of true scholars everywhere, Professor
Hall accepts that there is no historical, scientific, or cultural fact –
however apparently sunk in concrete – that cannot be revisited,
re-opened, re-weighed, re-examined, reassessed.
Closer
to home, professor Hall has paid attention to the rising tide of voices
in the U.S.A. and Canada which claims the “official” account of 9/11
(of, that is to say, the destruction of the Trade Towers in New York on
September 11, 2001) was, has been, and is the product of a huge
Conspiracy by complex powers (involving U.S. government) producing a
Conspiracy Theory created to mislead everyone and to place the
blame for the event on people of Islam, especially in the Middle East …
people, incidentally, who have become, it would seem, ‘by the accident
of history’, enemies – in fact – of both the U.S.A. and the State of
Israel.
And so … if more and more
authentic voices are saying “the official account” of 9/11 was created
by government and Secret Intelligence Conspiracy Theorists wanting to
pin onto Islam the guilt of 9/11 … a question forces itself forward. If
the formally accused did not … then who did organize and carry out the
destruction of the buildings of the World Trade Centre (and of the
building which, a little later, simply appeared to collapse into rubble
without any apparent cause)?
Also, since September 11, 2001
an increasing number of so-called “terrorist” events and attacks have
occurred all over the Western World and have (by persistent and often
careful and scholarly non government-approved examination) been called
by investigators arising in the population “faked events” or what is
called “False Flags” undertaken (it is alleged) to terrify innocent
Western populations and to condition them to accept “Islam” (in a
hundred different forms) as the over-arching enemy of the peace-loving
and (mostly) Christian West. In answer to the very active, very
numerous, and wholly ‘un-government’ on-going operations and
investigations into those “terrorist” events, Anthony Hall has found
himself a co-host of “The False Flag Weekly News”.
It is hugely relevant to the whole subject (and especially to Canadians) that in July, 2016, Madam Justice Catherine Bruce
in the B.C. Supreme Court declared that an apparent attempted “Islamic
Terrorist Event” at the B.C. legislature grounds on July 1, 2013, was,
in fact, wholly the work of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, [a major
False Flag event] entrapping socially challenged converts to Islam,
counselling them, coaching them, assisting them, giving them money, and
delivering them to the terrorist site … and then arresting them as
terrorist criminals … caught in the act! For all those who say that people questioning terrorist
events are ‘conspiracy theorists’ making up lies – the highly organized
RCMP criminal action proves absolutely that at least one State – Canada
– has engaged in a major False Flag event in order to slander Islam. It
did so employing hundreds of RCMP and millions of dollars of Canadian
taxpayers’ funds (during the Conservative government led by Stephen Harper).
Subsequently,
in answer to a call for a Public Inquiry into the RCMP, (Liberal)
Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, Ralph Goodale, responding for the Liberal, Justin Trudeau
cabinet, expressed, in effect, approval of organized criminal activity
on the part of the RCMP… what he calls in his letter the RCMP’s “major
crime technique”. Nowhere in the letter does he refer to the request for
a Public Inquiry, instead urging understanding and support for the
Force he gives evidence of accepting as a criminal organization….
If
the officially declared Islamic men did not plan, organize, and carry
out what we call 9/11 … then who did? All possibilities are open for
consideration. One of them was that the State of Israel could have been
involved. While that claim may be completely false, the hosts running
The False Flag Weekly News, Kevin Barrett and Anthony Hall, would
nonetheless air the possibilities (among many others) on their weekly
program. And they did … and, apparently Professor Hall was not
unsympathetic to the idea that the State of Israel could have had a hand
in the events of 9/11.
Then: in an astonishing event on Friday, August 26, 2016 when Anthony Hall was out of Canada, someone placed
a despicable, violently Anti-semitic cartoon on his Facebook Page …
completely unknown to Hall. With truly remarkable speed, organizations
and individuals, some apparently supporting the State of Israel went to
work as if Anthony Hall was wholly guilty of the posting on his Facebook Page. People
from outside the University, a few who would normally be thought of as
related to the State of Israel in one way or another, pressed upon the
University Administration, the police, officers of the Alberta
government…and more. (The Alberta government, it seems, has insisted
upon keeping secret some of the names of those complaining.)
If one were to suggest the
possibility that a carefully staged campaign was unleashed against
Anthony Hall, one might not be wrong to so suggest. The University
Administration filed a complaint against Hall with Alberta Human Rights.
The complaint was rejected. And so the University Administration filed
another one.
In
an action (some believe) marked by intemperance and folly – without
having exchanged a single word with Professor Hall, a senior academic
colleague – president Michael Mahon of the University
of Lethbridge ordered Hall off every University of Lethbridge campus and
suspended him without pay. He did those things while completely
ignoring ALL carefully constructed processes within the university for
managing complaints against professorial staff. The processes are
written into almost every university faculty/administration agreement in
Canada and have been honed and improved over many decades.
Slander and libel filled the
Lethbridge air to match the wholly unacceptable actions of the
University of Lethbridge Administration and Board of Governors.
Nonetheless, the national faculty body, the Canadian Association of
University Teachers CAUT), and the local Faculty Association held firm –
the CAUT naming the University of Lethbridge in Violation of Academic
Freedom, not a light designation in the university world in Canada. In a
court procedure weighing the actions, a little later, the
Administration of the university won over neither the judge presiding
nor the Alberta government represented at the process.
And so on November 23, 2017, the
University of Lethbridge Administration reinstated Professor Hall,
lifting all sanctions against him and announcing it would also withdraw
its complaint against him to Alberta Human Rights. After fifteen months
of attempted Jackboot Justice, the Administration at the University of
Lethbridge agreed to use the processes long set up to provide fair and
impartial judgments of complaints against faculty members. At one level
the return to civility by the University of Lethbridge Administration is
a victory for democratic forces in Canada. But at another level its
long hold-out, a period filled with injustice to Anthony Hall as well as
being filled with violent language and slander, will long remain a
scandal in the Canadian Academy.
On the same day – November 23,
2017 – a top B’nai Brith official declared that B’nai Brith is
“outraged” at Professor Hall’s full reinstatement which is coupled with
the move to due process in the examination of complaints against him.
Robin Mathews is renowned Canadian poet and university professor
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