A Galileo for our times ...

"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. . . . 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.”

Holocaust Denial and Academic freedom, as not so masterfully spinned by a whining Shiraz Dossa, the professor of political science at Canada’s St. Francis Xavier University who attended Iran's Holocaust Denial conference to deliver a "scholarly" paper:

"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....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."

It's not about historical truth, the denial of one genocide and preparing the warrant for the next one. No. It's just Islamophobia and Zionists running the world and persecuting the heralders of "new enlightenment" such as Dossa himself . . .

Consider the man's confusion when he says:

"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.”....

By his own formulation, he explains that his right for academic freedom was "negated" by his critics. How was his right "negated"? By critics explaining how they lack sympathy for such academic projects as he participated in. No one threatened him, or punished him for his ill-informed, immoral positions. He was castigated, verbally, in editorials and possibly by the frowns of his colleagues, for showing such poor judgment. How does that exactly "negate" his fundamental right to say what he pleases about the Holocaust? Perhaps the good professor does not understand what "negate" means:

"to deny the existence, evidence, or truth of, to nullify or cause to be ineffective,
to be negative; bring or cause negative results. "

Negating a right means refusing that right, causing it to be removed, taking it away.

I would suggest that Dossa's understanding of his "negated" rights has about the same ring of credibility and validity as his understanding of Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial conference and plans for Israel.

The question is, of course, why would Dossa misunderstand these issues?