More on the Sabotage of Canadian Universities

The Sabotage of Censorious Zionists and Other Israel First Zealots.

In a recent essay in Canada’s The Conversation, Grant MacEwan Sessional Instructor Dr. Regan Lipes, includes a brief smear directed at me. As I see it, this essay essentially puts forward on behalf of University administrators in Canada the same abhorrent arguments meant to sabotage academic freedom in US institutions of higher learning starting with Columbia University.

The US rule treats any criticism of Israel from faculty or students as the equivalent of antisemitism. The pattern will soon apply to all corporations and citizens in the USA if the ultraZionists so heavily represented in the Trump administration get their way. We live in dangerous times when the dominant Zionists at the top of the pyramid of command and control have become become pervasive, vindictive, hugely influential and full of desperate determination.

To be so accused of antisemitism is also to be classified as a “terrorist” and “anti-American” with all that means for future job prospects, travel and such. Canada has not gotten to this destination quite yet, but that is where things are headed if the University administrators represented by Dr. Lipes and the The Conversation get their way.

Here is the relevant passage in Dr. Lipes’ essay.

"After all, Alberta was the province where James Keegstra first began teaching Holocaust denial to high school students in the 1980s. After Prof. Anthony Hall of the University of Lethbridge finally retired in 2018, it seemed like Holocaust denial and baseless vilification of Zionism was on the decline in Alberta. As reported by CBC, in 2016 Hall was suspended without pay for “allegedly promoting conspiracy theories and denying the Holocaust in online articles and videos.”

https://theconversation.com/how-im-teaching-holocaust-literature-in-light-of-canadian-recommendations-around-combatting-antisemitism-247747

My Response to the Dr. Lipes and Ms. Kim Honey

Ms. Kim Honey,

CEO/Editorial Board

The Conversation

Academic Journalism Society

77 Bloor Street W.,

Suite 600

Toronto Ontario, M5S 1M2

ca-editorial@theconversation.com

Dear Ms. Kim Honey

Re:

https://theconversation.com/how-im-teaching-holocaust-literature-in-light-of-canadian-recommendations-around-combatting-antisemitism-247747

I am writing to fill in a couple of the crucial blanks in the essay in The Conversation authored by Regan Lipes, Sessional instructor at Grant MacEwan University. Before I get to the subject of the essay’s omissions and misrepresentations, I notice a fairly crucial inconsistency between Dr. Lipes description of her teaching responsibilities in the relevant course and the description detailed in the essay's title. Ms Lipes writes,

"I research and teach Jewish literature with a focus on Holocaust narratives."

The author of the title in The Conversation writes

"How I'm Teaching About Holocaust Literature in Light of Canadian Recommendations Around Combating Antisemitism"

Is the focus of the MacEwan College course, "Jewish literature" or "Holocaust literature?" Or is an assumption being made by The Conversation's editor that Jewish literature and Holocaust literature are pretty much the same thing?

As far as the addition of the issue of "Canadian recommendations around combating antisemitism," where are these recommendations coming from? Was there any debate about the subject along the way before arriving at the conclusions?

The author chooses to couch her essay in the following loaded statement:

"With rising tensions on both sides of the Israel-Hamas War, and 24 hostages still in captivity, Canadian communities feel the continued conflict domestically."

Does the "domestic conflict" envisaged by the author extend to the 2 million + number of Palestinian refugees in their own ancestral lands who have been incarcerated for decades in the world's most notorious open air prison? Do these domestic concerns in Canada extend, in the eyes of the author and editor, to the indiscriminate and multi-faceted ongoing genocide?

This genocide is presently the subject of formal charges by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court? Do the concerns extend to whether or not the government of Canada as well as our corporate sector is in conformity with the international rule of law as outlined especially in the Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide (1948)?

Stuck in the midst of the extremist commentary by the sessional instructor are the following unsubstantiated statements:

"After all, Alberta was the province where James Keegstra first began teaching Holocaust denial to high school students in the 1980s. After Prof. Anthony Hall of the University of Lethbridge finally retired in 2018, it seemed like Holocaust denial and baseless vilification of Zionism was on the decline in Alberta. As reported by CBC, in 2016 Hall was suspended without pay for “allegedly promoting conspiracy theories and denying the Holocaust in online articles and videos.”

The only other person I have ever seen attempting to compare my case to that of Jim Keegstra, is Bernie Farber. Farber's rather notorious role in Canadian history runs through the Canadian Jewish Congress, close ties to CSIS and Canadian Heritage Front, as well as a founding role in the so-called Canadian Anti-Hate Network.

The case of Jim Keegstra and my case are totally different in format and substance. Keegstra was a municipal politician and a teacher in the public school system who grew up in Alberta grounded in the local Social Credit heritage.

In 2016 the forgery and disinformation experts at B'nai Brith Canada decided to go after me, initially on the basis of a trumped up fraud, briefly planted on, and then removed from, my then-Facebook page during the afternoon of August 26, 2016. B'nai Brith Canada, the Canadian branch of the US-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL), was then joined in overseeing a widespread media smear campaign by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs led by Shimon Koffler Fogel. The smear resulted in many dozens of unsubstantial allegations about me reproduced in MSM and social media venues around the world.

Without ever talking to me once about the flood of accusations directed my way without evidence, the University of Lethbridge President. Dr. Mike Mahon at the behest of the Board of Governors completely abandoned their fiduciary responsibilities to protect academic freedom. Obviously the bias imposed on my case in the period from 2016 to 2018--- and essentially to this day in the Dr. Lipes essay-- is the same bias that projected into the collaboration connecting Ms. Honey and Ms Lipes.

This bias comes into play when university administrators attempt to distance themselves from their faculty associations and their faculty colleagues. The Conversation should explain to their readers this covert aspect of their publications on university matters, a big part of the underlying political landscape beneath the Dr. Lipes essay in the digital magazine.

The administrators minus the organized faculty associations as well as the largest groupings of academic staff form a very imperfect basis for administrative pronouncements regularly featured on The Conversation.

The Conversation is basically a one-sided conversation systematically biased against the requirements of academic freedom. The Conversation is exclusionary rather than inclusive. It makes dictates while pushing the agendas of opportunistic politicians posing as objective academics..

I have participated in the professorial activity of my school of higher learning from 1990 until today in the spring of 2025. I am currently in good standing as Emeritus Professor of Liberal Education and Globalization Studies. In 2016 I had become during that era a senior tenured full professor who dared to advocate for open debate on all subjects, including The Holocaust.

Zionism and Campaigns to Shut Down and Criminalize Discussion of Whole Sections of the Curricula at Universities. When Universities Lack Academic Freedom They Essentially Become Vehicles of Political Cronyism Rather Than Institutions of Higher Learning

Rather than follow the rules of our faculty-administration collective agreement, I was indeed suspended without pay in mid-term in the autumn of 2016. After having been exposed to whatever incentives were offered ( threats? money?), the Board of Governors gave itself over to the direct intervention on campus by B’nai Brith Canada. The University of Lethbridge Board of Governors fell in behind Dr. Mike Mahon.

On October 4, 2016 Dr Mahon tried (illegally) to declare me a “former” professor not subject to the rules of conduct in the collective agreement between the Faculty Association and the Board of Governors. Dr. Mahon wandered away from his responsibility as a participant in the collective agreement between faculty and administration. Dr. Mahon took it further, declaring me with the flourish of a pen to be a trespasser on the campus where I had, at that point, been teaching Native American Studies among other subjects for the previous 26 years.

My Ph.D. is in Canadian history from the University of Toronto. My thesis specialization is Canadian Indian policy. My big, peer-reviewed books include Earth into Property as well as The American Empire and the Fourth World, both published by McGill-Queen's University Press.

Sessional instructor Ms. Lipes ornaments her language by calling my criticism of Zionism, "baseless vilification of Zionism." Of course Zionism has evolved and diversified since its inception in the late 1800s. Zionism has, for instance, secular and religious branches as well as socialist, liberal and fascistic branches. When Israel was created the socialist branches were dominant. Now the same is true of the more fascist branches.

Over more than a century, the ideology of Zionism has been subject to many forms of criticism from inside and outside Judaism. That propensity remains true to this day. Generally speaking the most vociferous by far of Zionism's critics are Jews.

As many conservative rabbis see it, Judaism is a religion, not the basis of a constitution for a country. The word ‘Zionism” should not be used as if it is one uniform thing as the junior teacher of Jewish literature implies. At one time some prominent Zionists made a point of seeking negotiations with Palestinians in a shared or partitioned Palestine. Israel prime ministers who take this position risk being assassinated by their own people for seeking peace.

Since 1948 and especially in recent years, the overwhelming impulse of most Zionists and Christian Zionists is to advance the de-Palestinianizing of Israel by eliminating native Palestinians through carpet bombing, starvation, dehydration, torture, psychological warfare, destruction of infrastructure and the promotion of sickness including by the elimination of sewage systems, hospitals, medical practitioners, humanitarian supply workers and reporters. This list is far from complete.

Nowadays it is no secret that an extremely messianic and genocidal form of Zionism has seized hold of a controlling role in the governance of Israel. This phenomenon has persisted for a year and a half.

Most Israelis seem to want to "finish off the job" by backing the IDF in its campaign to kill as many Gazan inmates as possible and then by forcing any survivors to vacate the territory by making it uninhabitable. US President Donald Trump has gone as far as to make a grotesque video celebrating this outcome to culminate in the building of a Riviera-style resort in Gaza replete with casinos and golden statues to honor Netanyahu's great buddy.

Unfortunately the Jewish citizens of Israel have mostly embraced this genocidal objective but there are, of course, some decent Israels who want the hostages back and show some compassionate identification with the prospect of protecting those on the receiving end of the supremacist impetus to kill and expel Native Palestinian survivors.

Can Dr. Lipes explain what she means by classifying my criticism of Zionism as uniformly "baseless." What is her evidence? How can such a simplistic generalization, given without any evidence or illustrations whatsoever, be afforded credence of worthiness from a would-be literary critic with the backing of a very influential politicized gang behind her?

Is “Sessional Instructor” (?) Lipes really speaking on behalf of administrators who are under great pressure to see that no criticism of Israel should be permitted at Canadian campuses. Are Dr. Lipes and Ms. Honey delivering the Canadian equivalent to the censorious positions of US universities when it comes to criticism of Israel?

Can Ms. Lipes and Ms. Honey clarify what they mean when they invoke the onerous phrase "Holocaust Denial." Does Holocaust Studies Professor, Deborah Lipstadt, have the final word on this subject? In many circles her academic reputation is far from revered. What are the implications of shutting down and criminalizing discussion of whole sections of university curriculum?

Picture Above. Dr. Lipes with fellow students and teachers, with Dr. Deborah Lipstadt. Dr. Lipstadt Popularized the Term, “Holocaust Denier,” with Her Book in 1993, Denying The Holocaust. The Controversy She and Historian David Irving Aroused in their Contentions Is the Subject of a Major Hollywood movie.For more background please see my essay at the following:

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Not surprisingly, Dr. Lipstadt was cast as the sympathetic star of the movie and David Irving was cast as the bad guy. At his peak David Irving was the most celebrated and popularized original research historian in Great Britain. Dr. Lipstadt incorporated in Denying The Holocaust her hatchet job on David Irving with his two major biographies, one on Hitler and the other on of Churchill. See the movie trailer that presented Prof. Lipstadt as if she is a sympathetic character and Irving not. Some would see it as a horribly biased Hollywood fantasy backed by the fortunes of Steven Spielberg and Leslie Wexner to guarantee the dominance of Deborah Lipstadt over the British courts.

In her one paragraphs about me, Dr. Lipes inadvertently parrots Bernie Farber, B'nai Brith Canada's Amanda Hohmann's, Ryan Bellrose, the late Michael Mostyn as well as CIJA's CEO, Shimon Koffler Fogel. These non-academics with jobs in the Israel Lobby's deplatforming business regularly bully and defame critics of Israel with the goal of removing jobs and livelihoods from those public intellectuals who dare criticize any aspect of the Genocidal State of Israel.

See the following

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Why is it that every other country and ideology can be criticized, except Israel and Zionism? This kind of toxic discrimination has much to do with why the Israel Lobby has become such a ruthless enemy of academic freedom. That Lobby has no interest in "open debate" and I have the wounds to show for it.

Has Sessional Instructor Regan Lipes looked into the history of the agendas she is promoting with her unsubstantiated smear? Does she seek to be a genuine scholar or a highly-paid propaganda agent?

Dr. Lipes left out a lot of things in her brief history of the treatment of the Jewish question in Alberta.

The one link Dr Lipes draws upon, supposedly of her own accord, involves a very different source than that underlying the case against Jim Keegstra. When my case went to court I was reinstated to the academic faculty at the University of Lethbridge whereas whereas Jim Keegstra was given a railway ride on Alberta’s notorious kangeroo court system.

The cases of the late Jim Keegstra together with my still-unresolved case— both main cases in the field where Dr. Lipes makes an unsubstantiated display of her supposed expertise, is based on parroting the conclusions of others. Was Dr. Lipes given directives of what to write in the dense list of defamatory smear assertions she produced under Dr. Lipstadt’s direction as the author’s role model and mentor.

Ms. Lipes refers to one CBC article in 2016 as the sole source to back the same old litany of smear cliches. I doubt if Dr. Lipes has studied much that is substantive about the Keegstra case. Neither does it seems likely Dr. Lipes studied the role of the Keegstra case in determining the nature of the free speech rights as articulated in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Similarly, I doubt if Dr. Lipes has much understanding at all of the significance of her referring to an ongoing US-Israeli genocide as the "Hamas-Israel War." I would be just fine if Dr. Lipes was to prove me wrong in my suspicions. I would see that proof as a happy outcome to ease my legitimate questions believing that Sessional Instructor Lipes is not telling us her full story.

Given the unnuanced case Dr. Lipes has chosen to put on record, however, I have to wonder if Dr. Lipes has the depth of knowledge necessary to teach a credible university course on a subject as complex and many-faceted as Jewish literature and the Holocaust narrative with special reference to Alberta. What are the chances that in the story she has outlined, Dr. Lipes has been guided by advice from Israel Lobby protagonists?

Please prove me wrong Dr. Lipes. I am hoping that your can reply credibly and in your own voice. My intentions towards you are collegial. I have so far experienced nothing of the collegial from you and your editor Kim Honey. Why did Dr. Lipes not make any effort to contact me directly before writing her accusation-heavy diatribe. It comes from the same vacuous space empty place where Amanda Hohmann, the Head of the B’nai Brith League of Human Rights, made her invasive incursion all the while xeroxing and publicizing the hateful polemic of Dr. Lipstadt.

The supposed philanthropies of the Israel Lobby can issue give tax write offs for money donated. B’nai Brith Canada, like CIJA, should have report to the Canadian governments as agents of a foreign power.

The main oversight of Ms. Lipes is her failure to report that Alberta’s Court of Queen's Bench ordered in the summer of 2017 my reinstatement to my tenured job at the University of Lethbridge. Me, my U of L Faculty Association, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) won the case. Dr. Mike Mahon and the University of Lethbridge Board of Governors lost the case. That’s a pretty strategic part of what happened for you to leave out from your narrative.

It is really a mark of an inexperienced "researcher" to highlight unproven allegations that began a process without reporting on the verdict handed down farther along the road of the process. Of course I have come to see that this kind of selective cherry picking and censorship in Dr. Lipes' account is typical of the Israel Lobby style of smear campaigns.

I could easily give citations on where to look for the relevant rulings and other primary source documents. Let's see, however, what Dr. Lipes can come up with by way of some genuine independent research of her own. Or let's see what Ms. Honey can do about distancing herself from Bernie Farber's dubious operations whose biggest triumph lay in the dramatic deplatforming in Alberta of Jim Keegstra many years ago.

Yours Sincerely,

Dr. Anthony James Hall,

Emeritus Professor

University of Lethbridge

For more information on my case seeFor more Writing In Alberta Jewish News from Dr. Regan Lipes.

https://albertajewishnews.com/preserving-the-substance-and-memory-of-jewish-poland/

On the Facebook fraud, the role of Joshua Goldberg in the course of my case please see the following: