Academic freedom and thought crime policing: Hall sues University of Lethbridge administration

Banned in New York! This paper was prepared for the “Thought Crimes” panel cancelled by the organizers of the Left Forum

This is the text of the presentation given today, June 4, 2017, at the “Left Out Forum,” which is made up of four panel discussions that were censored by the Left Forum because of supposed “complaints.” This text was submitted for publication by its author, Prof. Anthony James Hall. The details of the censorship of the Left Forum can be found in my article of May 29, 2017 here. You can read my original article about Prof. Hall’s suspension from the University of Lethbridge here.

By Anthony James Hall (Special to Truth and Shadows)

How ironic to be speaking on a panel devoted to the subject of “Thought Crimes” at an event whose original Left Forum hosts have shown themselves to be repressive thought crime cops disguised as progressive public intellectuals. As I understand it, this panel was initially conceived as a venue where all the presenters were to reflect on the recriminations we are facing due to our attempts to articulate interpretations of fundamental truths inconvenient to power.
Dr. Joy Karega originally agreed to be a member of this panel. Responding, however, to the first round of Left Forum thought policing, Dr. Karega chose to withdraw from this year’s extension of last year’s Deep State proceedings. Dr. Karega has faced much professional maliciousness for her academic integrity. The evidence is now in that she wisely anticipated the further blockages we would encounter from Left Forum gatekeepers.
Dr. Karega’s presentation was to have made specific reference to “contemporary Black scholars who have questioned and/or challenged ‘official’ 9/11 narratives, Black scholars who have advocated for Palestinian rights and actively supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, or Black scholars who have questioned and/or challenged Political Zionism on many fronts.” Dr. Karega’s object was “to provide insight into the ways in which academic freedom and ‘thought crime’ accusations have been imposed upon and experienced differently by Black scholars.”
Of course I’m disappointed not to be sharing this podium with Dr. Karega right now. Clearly our colleague had important information and insights she was happy to share if it had not been for the Left Forum’s incapacity to embrace civil disagreement in the respectful give and take of healthy academic debate. Having articulated this important proviso, I am gratified to be here, virtually in New York in the cyber presence of my close friends and colleagues Dr. Kevin Barrett and Jeremy Rothe-Kushel.

The image below is the original, and above we see the doctored one that was posted on Hall’s Facebook page.

The three of us are much more than colleagues. We have visited one another’s homes, shared time with one another’s families and collaborated on many projects. In recent times we have worked together most closely on False Flag Weekly News. Along with Dr. Barrett, I have conferred in Kansas City with Jeremy and with Steve Woolfolk, director of public programming at the Kansas City Public Library. Steve explained the aggressive police response to a question posed on 9/11 by Jeremy in a public presentation by Dennis Ross, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Part of our discussion involved the possibility of planning some future event to highlight the assault on free speech in public institutions, including in libraries and universities.
At False Flag Weekly News, which Kevin and I co-host with frequent contributions from Jeremy, we covered the Joy Karega case closely. We regularly reported the witch hunt of Zionist thought police who combined forces inside and outside Oberlin Liberal Arts University in Ohio. In a more enlightened time and place, Prof. Karega’s pro-Palestinian activism would have been welcomed in an institution that publicly congratulates itself for the school’s pioneering efforts in abolitionism, racial integration and the early integration of women into the student body and faculty. Unfortunately, however, these are not enlightened times. The smog-laden climate of our mental environment is contaminated with the poisons of toxic psychological warfare essential to the expansionary operations of the Zio-American empire.
As we followed the sad story of Oberlin’s atrocious handling of the Joy Karega case, we widened the discussion on FFWN to look at other violations of the supposed protections of academic freedom. We have looked, for instance, at the professional assaults on the scholarly activities of professors James Tracy, Steven Salaita, Richard Falk, William I. Robinson and others. This spring, Prof. Robinson co-edited We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics. This volume outlines the substance and scope of Zionist attacks on academic freedom. In my article, “Zionist Thought Police Wreak Havoc on Campus,” I drew heavily on Prof. Robinson’s own personal account of the academic onslaught he faced from Israel First partisans at the University of California in Santa Barbara.
https://www.amazon.com/We-Will-Not-Silenced-Repression/dp/1849352763
http://ahtribune.com/in-depth/1147-thought-police.html
Now I find myself among those who are experiencing the professional vandalism of powerful interests seeking to assert control over the hiring, teaching, tenure, promotion, research, publication and community service of academic faculty members. Just days ago the original attack targeting my academic career at the University of Lethbridge was renewed and extended with the censorious actions by the co-directors of the Left Forum. They claimed to be acting on the advice of an unnamed German organization. What German organization was it? Why did our censors withhold the name? Who is being protected and shielded from accountability for their assault on free expression, including the academic freedom of tenured faculty members?

The future of higher education

The core episode in the effort to nuke my career and reputation occurred in early October of 2016. From one day to the next, I was pulled from my teaching responsibilities in mid-term and summarily suspended, initially without pay. These punitive measures were imposed completely outside the terms of the collective agreement with the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association. They were imposed by presidential dictate in the complete absence of any due process of third-party arbitration.
In his letter to me of Oct. 3, University of Lethbridge President Dr. Mike Mahon made vague reference to some possible violations of the Alberta Human Rights Act that he speculated might have taken place. This possible contravention, I was informed, involved my “inferring that Israeli, and hence Jewish individuals, were responsible for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001.” Now that is a pretty explicit description of a thought crime that some powerful interests apparently want to outlaw in the jurisprudence of the academy.
Since October there have been many twists and turns in the matter of the suspension of academic freedom at the University of Lethbridge. Various professional associations have intervened in my defence, including the 68,000-member-strong Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT). In December of 2016 the delegates at a CAUT Council meeting unanimously passed the resolution.

“That CAUT condemn the actions of the University of Lethbridge administration in suspending Professor Tony Hall without due process, and that the CAUT take all necessary measures to pressure the administration to immediately resolve the matter.”

In the letter explaining the resolution to U of L President Mahon, CAUT Executive Director David Robinson concluded,

“CAUT is taking this matter extremely seriously. We will be providing full support to the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association in pursuing all their legal options…. If the matter is not resolved satisfactorily and in a timely way, we will be pursuing other options including imposing censure on your Administration for violations of due process, natural justice and academic freedom and tenure rights.”

CAUT and our Faculty Association at the University of Lethbridge have been working on grievance procedures and on a line of intervention that has already resulted in legislative changes in the province of Alberta. Meanwhile, I have developed, along with my own lawyer, Ron McDonald, QC [Queen’s Counsel], a defamation case. With this presentation at the Left Out Forum in New York, I hereby announce that I am suing the University of Lethbridge President, Board of Governors and Senate.
Our Statement of Claim has been registered at the Judicial Centre of Lethbridge in the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta (File: 1706 00300). The core of our case so far cites three public announcements to the “University Community” written and disseminated widely by U of L President and Vice-Chancellor Mike Mahon, Ph.D. These announcements were published on Oct. 14, Jan. 17, and May 2. Each one of Dr. Mahon’s provocative pronouncements was delivered into a unique set of circumstances. All, however, speak to contentions of the most profound importance for the future of higher education.
Among the key principles at issue are the following: What are universities for? Who decides what is to be taught in the curriculum and who is to do the teaching? How is the fragile process of distinguishing truth from falsehood best advanced through research, publication and teaching? What happens when powerful political lobbies intervene in the process in order to advance self-interested agendas? What are the rules and parameters of the academic requirement that faculty members should perform community service? Do the protections of academic tenure continue as a base line of protection for academic freedom? Are all subjects open to academic investigation and debate or are some subjects off bounds, subject to censorship and the concerted political control of interested parties? When individuals and powerful political lobbies complain about faculty publications, faculty commentaries in the media and such, who should arbitrate such complaints and what procedures should be followed?
Each one of these questions has a deep history that has given rise to various approaches, conventions, policies and procedures. All are relevant to the array of administrative, legal and political processes set in motion by the decision of my university administration to disregard the protections of tenure and to suspend me unilaterally in the absence of formal procedures of prior arbitration.
Let me draw from the initial Oct. 14 statement of Dr. Mahon where he “acknowledges that this issue is distracting for our community, can be divisive and is bringing uncomfortable attention to our University.” In the light of these observations Dr. Mahon explains,

“This action is not focused on Dr. Hall’s published scholarship, driven by the complaints of students, or the demands of external advocacy groups. It is focused on his You Tube based videos and comments in social media that have been characterized as being anti-Semitic, supportive of holocaust denial and engagement in conspiracy theories.”

In this most astonishing statement from a university president, Dr. Mahon claims he was not driven to make his decision to suspend a senior tenured faculty member by the pressure of “external advocacy groups.” That assertion, however, is seemingly contradicted by the CEO’s prevarication in the key sentence where he smears me with the weaponized labels “anti-Semite,” “holocaust denial,” and “conspiracy theorist.” Rather than assuming full responsibility for loading these radioactive, career-killing phrases on me in a very public fashion, Dr. Mahon tries to weasel out of full responsibility for the slander he commits.
Who does the U of L president have in mind as the source that “characterized” me with the onerous labels Dr. Mahon repeats with affirmative verve? Was it, perchance, “an external advocacy group” that so “characterized” me in the original iteration that Dr. Mahon opted to cite? If that is the case, then Dr. Mahon was indeed subject to the heavy influence of “an external advocacy group” in his decision to push ahead with the most ruthless professional assassination attempt I have witnessed since I began my career as a full-time faculty member in a Canadian university in 1982.
For the last 27 of my 35-year run as a university professor I have taught more than a full generation of students at the University of Lethbridge. Dr. Mahon’s extensive list of prohibitions extends to his banning me from stepping foot on the U of L campus. This aspect of his effort to criminalize me within the framework of our own set of academic laws, policies and procedures is, according to my detractor, based on a negative assessment of certain unspecified “You Tube based videos and comments in social media.” What videos does Dr. Mahon have in mind?
Recent developments have eliminated any doubts that the You Tubes Dr. Mahon had in mind as the primary basis of his decision to suspend me unilaterally are those No Lies Radio productions I co-host with Dr. Kevin Barrett. In other words, the very network of collaboration from which emerges False Flag Weekly News and the webcasting of this Left Out Forum have essentially been declared the originators of an academic crime by the administration of the University of Lethbridge.
In trying to distance the University of Lethbridge from this supposed academic crime, Dr. Mahon turns upside down the usual procedures integral to the rule of law. In an academic equivalent to the pre-emptive theory of military intervention, Dr. Mahon took punitive action prior to setting in motion a process designed to give a veneer of justification for his violent professional assault. In his letter to me of Oct. 4, Dr. Mahon introduced language that extends into the academy the Global War on Terror’s embrace of pre-emptive action over the principles of habeus corpus—in other words, innocence-until-guilt-is-proven. With the intent of escaping the disciplinary procedures laid out in section 25 of the collective agreement with the Faculty Association, Dr. Mahon asserted, “The suspension is being implemented as a precautionary, not disciplinary, measure.” What is his “precautionary measure” to guard against?
In my view, Dr. Barrett and No Lies Radio producer Allan Rees and I are doing an important public service with our False Flag Weekly News webcasts. We have been working together on this project since Dr. Barrett invited me to replace Dr. Jim Fetzer as co-host in December of 2015. I see my contribution to FFWN as a part of the community service work that faculty members are required to perform as part of our professional activities. We are often encouraged to look beyond the classroom and the campus to draw on our research and publication in the cause of informative educational interaction with the general public.
As I see it, FFWN advances a public service of a genuinely academic nature. The fact that we publish URL links along with our regular broadcasts demonstrates that ours is a scholarly approach. Those members of our audience who are interested can check our sources to compare them with other theoretical and literary interpretations.
As I see it, both Dr. Barrett and I bring our academic qualifications and achievements to the service of our commentaries on the many current events we cover and assess. According to my understanding, Dr. Barrett and I are academic peers even if events have transpired in ways that have allowed me to extend my career trajectory to the rank of a tenured full professor. Let me reaffirm, as I do often, that Dr. Barrett is my esteemed and accomplished academic colleague who was subjected in 2006 to a form of academic martyrdom for remaining true to his academic mission. In my view, Dr. Barrett was punished for doing his job too well. Some might say I have emulated his good example with the result of bringing on the censorious wrath of the protectors of official narratives.
I was introduced to Dr. Barrett by the late Mohawk activist Splitting the Sky, the 9/11 skeptic who attempted a citizen’s arrest of former U.S. President George W. Bush in Calgary in 2009. This action gave rise to legal proceedings in Alberta that we dubbed the case of Splitting the Sky versus George W. Bush. Dr. Barrett, Splitting the Sky, and I worked closely with Dr. Cynthia McKinney, Joshua Blakeney and former U.S. Attorney-General Ramsay Clark in our effort to activate international criminal law against those who directed the invasion of Iraq in the name of the Global War on Terror.
Our applied juridical activism included frequent broadcasts on Dr. Barrett’s Truth Jihad Radio system as well as the study and generation of text-based media of research and publication. One of my publications, “Should George W. Bush Be Arrested in Calgary Alberta and Charged With International Crimes,” became an exhibit in the court case. We see this litigation, including the exhibit I contributed, as a pioneering part of a transnational effort to hold legally accountable those who commit the highest order of international crimes on the winning side of military confrontation. Somehow we need to overcome the limitation of victors’ justice.
http://911blogger.com/news/2009-03-07/bush-league-justice-prof-anthony-hall
http://www.voltairenet.org/article159233.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/should-george-w-bush-be-arrested-in-calgary-alberta-to-be-tried-for-international-crimes/12586

Hate speech deceptions

Dr. Mahon justifies his suspension of me based largely on the content of No Lies Radio webcasts like this one. In his Oct. 14 statement to the university community, Dr. Mahon also makes a vague, cryptic reference to “comments in social media” as a justification for his action. As I see it, one social media post in particular was deployed to initiate the campaign aimed at ruining my academic reputation and career as a means of stifling the reach and credibility of my voice. The results of this post have shown up again just days ago. The star of infamy invoked by the most weaponized term of all, “holocaust denier,” was pinned on my chest by the Left Forum’s co-director, Marcus Graetsch.
The first time I saw the term “holocaust denier” attached to me was back in mid-September when I began to examine earlier Internet posts by B’nai Brith Canada. This organization is the Canadian branch of the U.S.-headquartered, Israeli-oriented Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. As I learned originally from the B’nai Brith accounts, a virulent Facebook post apparently turned up for a few hours on my Facebook wall on Aug. 26. On that day I was visiting the family home of Laurie, William, and Jeremy Rothe-Kushel in the Kansas City area.
In the few hours this post is said to have been on my Facebook wall, B’nai Brith officials jumped on the item, calling in police to the come to the Calgary home of one of the organization’s most controversial spokesmen. This agent explained on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio airwaves that he showed the local police some sort of prepared exhibit on Aug. 26 with the object of persuading law enforcement officers to investigate me for hate speech crimes and incitement to genocide. Other B’nai Brith officials sprung immediately into action to initiate a vicious media smear campaign that led to a B’nai Brith petition calling for my investigation and removal from the University of Lethbridge faculty.
On and around Aug. 26, the day of the possible digital false flag episode, I was preoccupied in the Kansas City area with a variety of matters. These included, for instance, doing FFWN with Kevin and Ole Dammegard, meeting with criminalized Kansas City librarian Steve Woolfolk, doing talks with Kevin and Jeremy at the Lawrence Kansas Public Library, and commenting on refugee issues in Australia via Iran’s Press TV. In mid-September, during the opening phase of a new academic term, I learned about what had transpired back in late August. Indeed, in mid-September I was quickly subsumed in the onslaught of an elaborate media campaign choreographed by B’nai Brith Canada along with its sister organization, the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs. The CEO of the CIJA, Simon Koffler Fogel, seems to have been in contact with the administration of the University of Lethbridge even before the Aug. 26 episode.
To make a long story short, I have traced back to Joshua Goldberg the original design of the reprehensible Facebook post that I condemned publicly on FFWN as soon as I became aware of its disgusting contents. According to B’nai Brith Canada, the digital item was put on my Facebook wall by a Lethbridge-based Facebook friend named Glen Davidson. When I visited Glen’s home to ask him about the incident, he told me he hadn’t posted the digital item in question. If he didn’t post it then who, if anyone, actually did?
As I see it, B’nai Brith Canada either did know or ought to have known that the post’s origins go back to a now-notorious Internet imposter. The source of the reprehensible Facebook item, Joshua Goldberg, has been depicted as a troubled youth doing random “trolling” while left alone to make mischief in the basement of his parent’s Florida home. The official story is that Goldberg was arrested in 2015 by the FBI for supplying bomb-making information to jihadists planning to plant and ignite an explosive device during the 14^th anniversary of 9/11 in… of all places… Kansas City. Currently Joshua Goldberg is said to be in the psychiatric section of a federal hospital of a federal prison complex in North Carolina. He was apparently assessed in the federal prison in Miami as being too unstable mentally to withstand a trial.
Goldberg’s arrest was reportedly an FBI response to the Internet postings of the troubled youth’s invented Internet personae named “Australi Witness.” As I looked more deeply into his record, Goldberg, or whomever it is that blogs in his name, became in my eyes something of a diabolical virtuoso in the digital generation of contemporary hate speech in the idiom of the day. Goldberg’s wide array of hate speech diatribes is disseminated on the Internet from a variety of perspectives that are often antagonistic to one another. One of his invented characters, for example, was “Michael Slay,” a Nazi White Supremacist who published frequently in 2015 on Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer web site.
Goldberg was also adept at disguising himself to provide voices of real people. He wrote, for instance, in the The Times of Israel as if he was an actual Australian lawyer named Joshua Bornstein. Pretending to be Bornstein, Goldberg wrote,

“Isn’t it time for a mass sacrifice of ignoble ‘Palestinian’ scum? Isn’t it time to cleanse the land of Israel—which rightfully belongs to the jews—of all inferior subhuman vermin? What we need to do is round up all “Palestinian” cockroaches and slaughter them like cattle. We need to take immense pleasure in raping, torturing, and murdering ‘Palestinians.’”

The use of language in this obscene text is very similar to the hateful commentary that is said to have briefly appeared on my Facebook wall. The image on this post was photoshopped to remove the face of an Israeli security guard quelling a protest of Israel rabbis. Inserted into the altered version was the head of Montana cartoonist Ben Garrison. It was Garrison who identified Goldberg as the real source of the offending post. Over Garrison’s name the miniature text of the offending post reads as follows:

“There was never a Holocaust, but there should have been and, rest assured, there WILL be, as you serpentine kikes richly deserve one. I will not rest until every single filthy parasitic kike is rounded up and slaughtered like the vermin they are. The White man has had more than enough of International Jewry and we are fully prepared to smite the parasite for the millionth time. The greedy, hook nosed kikes know that there days are numbered and, unlike in the past, they now have nowhere to run. This time, there will be no kikes left alive to spread around the planet like cockroaches. We will get them ALL into the oven and their putrid memory will finally be erased from the planet once and for all. Like all parasites the Jew will continue to reproduce until every last one has been wiped out. This is why it is crucial that all kikes are ruthlessly and mercilessly butchered for the good of us all. KILL ALL JEWS NOW! EVERY LAST ONE!” Ben “Tel Aviv Terror” Garrison

I have much more to report about the hate speech deception of Joshua Goldberg. Kevin and Jeremy and I have discussed my research at some length in a False Flag Weekly News special entitled, “Joshua Goldberg:” A Cover for an Elaborate Psychological Operation?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoNSVtOq4fY
I have embedded this You Tube within the text of a publication in American Herald Tribune entitled, “Hate Speech Deceptions: Joshua Goldberg’s Prolific Production of Discordant Fake Voices.” http://ahtribune.com/in-depth/1652-joshua-goldberg.html
My Statement of Claim recently registered in Lethbridge with the Court of Queen’s Bench points to my employer’s failure to address the misrepresentation and manipulation flowing from the planting of the maliciously engineered Facebook post. The record is clear that this post was used to initiate a smear campaign that seemingly moved seamlessly from the staff of B’nai Brith Canada to the U of L president’s office and then to the U of L’s board of governors as represented by its lawyer, Bob Thompson. As the Statement of Claim indicates, “the Defendants knew that the allegation relied upon was neither spoken by nor authored by the Plaintiff and that he had publicly condemned the act of a third party.”

Poster boy for the end of tenure?

I came to the subject of the 9/11 in 2008 and even later to the subject of the interaction between the Palestinian people and the Israeli government and lobby. As discussed, for instance, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, this elaborate network of political influence exerts considerable power in the United States and throughout the U.S.A.’s NATO satellites, including Canada.
I came to the subject of the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians largely through my work with Joshua Blakeney, a very energetic and smart graduate student originally from the United Kingdom. I was struck by the power of some of his insights after he began to apply in some unexpected ways ideas from my published scholarship. This academic work highlights the colonization of indigenous peoples, especially in the Western Hemisphere. Joshua Blakeney was instrumental in encouraging me to extend the basic perspectives and methodology to Israel/Palestine.
My first response to Joshua’s interest in Israel/Palestine was to warn him to go gently into this controversial topic. I recall suggesting to him that, for my generation of academics, our tendency was to leave criticism of Israel to Jewish professors. Some of them, it seemed, did not shy away from being quite critical of the actions of the Jewish state. As he sometimes did, Joshua brushed aside my advice. He indicated that a long time had transpired since World War II and his generation, no matter of what ethnic background, should not be constrained from speaking truth to power in whatever context invited commentary, including Israel/Palestine.
I resolved to go with the flow and widen my perspective to include into topics introduced to me by Joshua Blakeney. Joshua helped point me at new subjects that proved to offer fertile ground for the extension of my work on indigenous peoples into historical and contemporary themes involving the Middle East and Eurasia. He also introduced me to the editors of Veterans Today and Press TV in Iran.
At Veterans Today I entered a realm where many of the bloggers and very active commenters were veteran members of the special forces units involved in the American superpower’s elaborate national security apparatus. I was introduced into a new kind of discourse and a new kind of discernment from readers. I was also in a milieu where I could interact with Dr. Barrett, a senior editor at Veterans Today, who, for an extended period of time has introduced a new article, often based on original research, practically every day.
My work on new themes in new venues of publication and commentary led in the autumn of 2014 to my attendance at the 2^nd International New Horizon Conference of Independent Thinkers and Film Makers. At this assembly I met many investigative journalists whose work I had read and admired but never actually met. Together we addressed many topics, including 9/11, as well as the negotiations linking Iran’s nuclear power facilities with economic sanctions. In this milieu the intensity of the antagonism between the Israeli government and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran became very obvious. The gravity of what is transpiring at this high level of global geopolitics engaged me in a way that spurred me to write many things and to try my hand as a regular commentator on Press TV.
Part of this antagonism was dramatically illustrated as we left the conference and just as Western news media characterized our conference as an “Iranian Hate Fest Promoting Anti-Semitism, Drawing Holcaust Deniers and U.S. Anti-Israel activists.” The main source of the blanket condemnation of our assemblies and discussions was Abraham Foxman, then the U.S. National Director of Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Foxman announced,

“A disturbing new element in this anti-Jewish gathering is the appearance on the guest list of a few high visibility U.S. antiwar and anti-Israel activists who claim their positions are not motivated by anti-Semitism. It will be harder for them to make that claim now, given their open collusion with this event and its Iranian government sponsors.”

https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/iranian-hatefest-promotes-anti-semitism-draws-holocaust-deniers-and-us-anti
I was unsettled to see this kind of generalizing hate speech directed at friends and colleagues who I knew from our discussions harbored diverse opinions on a wide array of topics. Seeing the commentaries of Mr. Foxman and others who followed his lead caused me to reflect in an introspective way on the malicious deployment of the weaponized terms anti-Semite, conspiracy theorist, holocaust denier and, sometimes, 9/11 Truther.
Apparently, to be targeted by any one of these verbal assault weapons is to be placed in the target zone of all them of them. It is to be offered up prey to feed the voracious appetites of imperial aggrandizement. The lethal phrases are often shot off like deadly verbal projectiles with the full intention of inflicting professional carnage. No definitions are generally offered. No proof is required.
The phrases are simply invoked as was done against me by Dr. Mahon. The malicious intent is to down those with the gumption to question the operatives who occupy some of the most powerful centres of power in our times. These power centres include the academy, whose expert practitioners have a crucial role to play in distinguishing truth from falsehood. The evidence is overwhelming that universities are failing quite conspicuously to perform honestly or responsibly or competently their core civilization mission.
After suffering the collective smears pointed at those of us who participated in New Horizon conference, we travelled to our home countries, often to be targeted with our own tailor-made local smears. Mine came from a web site called Blazing Cat Fur. Its unnamed authors highlighted me in 2014 as “the poster boy for the end of academic tenure.” How prophetic. Now, in 2017, will this prediction come true or will other forces prevail like those pointed towards the transformation of the Left Out Forum into the Real Left Forum?