Shiraz Dossa was roundly condemned last year for attending a conference in Iran widely characterized as a Holocaust-denial exercise.
Dossa has struck back with an essay in the Literary Review of Canada, laying the blame on a cabal of Christian boys and Jews:
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."
Right. Those darn Jewish professors. It's always the Jews. And their Christian lackeys.
Dossa insists that the conference was an academic exercise:
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. [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad; he did not attend or participate in the conference. It was not a Holocaust-denial conference by any stretch. That's all false.
OK, now for the truth. IPIS might be an elite school, but it is also a department of Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, run by the Deputy of Research and Education:
IPIS major activities are conduced through several Study Centers which cover various issues. Our Study centers are: Center for Legal and International, Center for Europe and America, Center for Asia and Pacific, Center for Africa, Center for Theory and Strategic, Center for Central Asia and Caucasus, Center for Middle East and Persian Gulf, Center for Information and Communications and Center for Publications.
The Institute has a staff of approximately 100, made up of researchers, experts and diplomats. Scholars from different universities also participate in some of the research projects.
Sounds like the intelligence branch of the CIA.
What about the charge that it was a conference about Holocaust denial?
Yesterday the Iranian Foreign Ministry held an international conference. Nothing unusual in that: Foreign ministries hold conferences, mostly dull ones, all the time. But this one was different. For one, "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision" dealt with history, not current politics. Instead of the usual suspects -- deputy ministers and the like -- the invitees seem to have included David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader; Georges Theil, a Frenchman who has called the Holocaust "an enormous lie"; and Fredrick Toeben, a German-born Australian whose specialty is the denial of Nazi gas chambers.
If it goose-steps like a duck...
For Dossa to say that Ahmadinejad did not sponsor it or that he did not attend is just wrong. The conference was chaired by a deputy foreign minister, and not some apolitical academic. And he did deliver a message to the conference being held by his Foreign Affairs Ministry (link is from a neo-Nazi organization in Australia):
Opening Session - 09:00-10:00 - Alborz Hall
Chairman: Dr Manouchehr Mohammadi, Deputy Foreign Minister for Education & Research, Iran
- National Anthem of the Islamic Republic of Iran
- Recitation of Holy Quaran
- Informative Report on the Seminar
- Message of H.E. Dr Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
- Address by H.E. Manouchehr Mottaki, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Islamic Republic of Iran
Alborz Hall is part of the Iranian Center for International Conferences (ICIC), a complex that is part of the Foreign Affairs Ministry. After the prayer and the national anthem, and some introductory remarks, Ahmadinejad kicked off the conference with a message. It is not clear if the message was delivered by videotape or if it was read by another person.
So Dossa is at a Iranian political conference considering the Holocaust. But that ought not to have raised any suspicions. For those, Dossa lays the blame at the feet of some good ol' "Christian boys":
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. 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. 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.
Note that Dossa is not saying that Rhodes Scholar Rex Murphy is on the intellectual level of the pot-smoking idiots that make up the bulk of the characters of the Trailer Park Boys. Instead he says that the sort of people who think Rex Murphy is clever are the sort of people you would meet in the fictional world of the Trailer Park Boys.
Subtle difference. I guess. I wonder what Rex Murphy thinks?
The real problem, as he sees it, is that Catholics are fundamentally anti-Semitic:
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.
What drivel. Anti-Semitism does not, nor has it ever, referred to anger aimed at Muslims. It has always referred to hatred of the Jews, but this bit of linguistic silliness is a classic attempt to make current criticisms of Islam somehow morally equivalent to the wholesale industrial murder of Jews during World War II.
It is an argument unworthy of an alleged professor. Indeed, the word "anti-Semitism" was coined in the 19th century by Germans precisely to refer to systemic anti-Jewish violence. But Dossa counts himself with other Islamic apologists, and tries to blames Islamic violence aimed at Jews on Christians:
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.
Right. Islam is not anti-Semitic. It's those darn Chrsitians, or "Christian boys" as Dossa calls them.
This is not a clever insight of Dossa's, nor is it a bizarre idea unique to him. The idea that Christians are uniquely anti-Semitic and that Muslims have never been anti-Semitic is just garden variety Islamic propaganda. Manouchehr Mottaki, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, delivered an address at the conference Dossa attended, where the same tired old nonsense is trotted out to crowd all too eager to nod their heads in agreement:
I declare explicitly that anti-Semitism is a Western phenomenon, which is peculiar to the Western states. This phenomenon has never existed in Islamic lands. However, we see today that the Islamic Republic of Iran and all those who think that scientific research about a historical event is necessary are subject to some unfounded accusations.
I guess that's the sort of thing Dossa specializes in -- declarations of Islamic moral superiority, which is particularly hard for him, surrounded by Jews and Christians as he is.
Part of that is to make sure that Jewish suffering is never seen to somehow be greater than that suffered by Muslims. Dossa buys into this hook, line, and sinker. At the conference, Mottaki wondered if the Holocaust actually happened:
Even if the prove that the holocaust is a historical fact, the, they should answer if they are not challenging their own claims to promote freedom of expression by arresting scholars and researchers who maintain views different from theirs about the holocaust and also why the Muslim people of this region particularly the Palestinians and the original inhabitants of Palestine should pay dearly for the crimes committed by the Nazis.
Does Dossa believe the Holocaust happened? Simply put, he does not. He does believe the Jews suffered some losses. But the Holocaust itself is political construct. Constructed by whom? Zionists, of course, to justify their evil policies:
In the interview with the Globe and Mail, Dossa said that he did not doubt the Holocaust and said that he had not been pressured to alter his views. He said his paper was about the abuse of imagery of the Holocaust.
"My essential point is that the Jewish loss - which is, of course, a reality, and anyone who denies it is a lunatic - the focus here is on how the Holocaust is a political construct, distinct from the Jewish loss at the hands of the Nazis. And that political construct has been used to justify certain policies by people, some of whom are Zionists. And now that whole issue plays into the war on terrorism, which is essentially a war on Islam," he told the newspaper.
When I first wrote about Dossa, I pointed out that many of his students thought he was a lousy professor. I wondered if he was cleverly attempting to immunize himself against criticism of his professorial qualities by attending this controversial conference. By doing so, he could claim any criticism was politically motivated and so not legitimate.
Indeed, that is what he seems to be doing:
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.”
But academic freedom is something that is enjoyed by academics. That implies a certain level of academic quality, and from what I've seen (and what his students have said), Dossa might not be all the good an academic. His choice on how to exercise that freedom seems similarly lacking in even the most common of common sense, and indeed is driven by his own political and religious agenda.
