In the brief essay below, Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie has helped demonstrate that the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada constitutes a classic example of a very subversive tendency undermining the quality of much so-called higher education throughout many jurisdictions. The author is V-P of Research of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a Canadian conservative think tank that counts the veteran businessman and newspaper publisher, Conrad Black, among its most active members.
Unfortunately, the U of L is providing a text book example of how the leadership of a public institution of higher learning has been creating the very conditions it later deploys to restrict and censor free speech. The U of L repeated a much-manipulated tactic of making an academic opponent appear like a threat to public safety in order to justify the imposition of undeserved censorship.
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The U of L declared itself the “winner” of an academic debate it purposely avoided without addressing the critical perspective it refused to address fairly and honestly. The academic leadership of the U of L fell back on an attack on the messenger to escape an honest and reasonable reckoning with an unwanted message.
Dr. Navarro-Génie argues that the resort to pushing indoctrination over independence of thought and expression in the conduct of pedagogy is well illustrated by the University’s appalling maltreatment of Dr. Frances Widdowson.
As a Professor Emeritus of the University of Lethbridge, I am in agreement with many of Dr. Navarro-Génie’s condemnations concerning the persistent efforts to silence Dr. Frances Widdowson, especially when it comes to the obsession aimed at preventing her from articulating her views on the history of Indian residential schools in an orderly and dignified setting.
To Dr. Widdowson and to many who back her on her interpretation of the schools, the evaluation of what went on in these controversial institutions bears heavily on the determination of whether or not Canada is a genocidal nation.
Here is the essay with a attachment to the Substack version of the text
https://irsrg.ca/articles/stop-pretending-campus-mobs-are-an-accident/
Marco Navarro-Génie
Stop pretending campus mobs are an accident
May 20, 2026, 11:59 am
https://irsrg.ca/articles/stop-pretending-campus-mobs-are-an-accident/
This article by Marco Navarro-Génie was originally published on the Frontier Centre for Public Policy website on May 7, 2026. It has been re-posted with the author’s permission.
The University of Lethbridge has spent two years using administrative power as a weapon against a woman it refuses to debate. Edmonton is out of excuses to look away.
The University of Lethbridge creates the conditions it later cites to restrict free speech
On the afternoon of April 25, Frances Widdowson, a former Mount Royal University professor, walked into a near-empty cafeteria at the University of Lethbridge (UofL) and sat down with a student for coffee.
She was not holding a rally. She was not disrupting a class. Just a woman of grandmotherly age having a conversation, which is, one might have thought, the foundational act of university life. Lethbridge police arrested her for trespassing.
The trespass order exists because university bureaucrats declared Widdowson a health and safety risk. It is worth pausing on that phrase before accepting it. She threatens no one physically and has no record of violence. The safety risk she is said to pose rests entirely on the institution’s response to her presence.
On each prior occasion Widdowson appeared at the university, administrators sent a mass alert to the student body announcing that a controversial figure was on campus. The protest assembled. The crowd grew loud.
The university then pointed at the crowd it had summoned as evidence that her presence was dangerous and ungovernable. The university was not responding to the disorder. It was creating disorder and then certifying that disorder as grounds for removal. It gave administrators the outcome they wanted while allowing them to present themselves as reluctant custodians of campus safety.
Widdowson’s April 25 visit was different in one respect. It was a Saturday. There was no physical crowd with drums to drown her out. But the machinery ran anyway.
The Faculty Association had already circulated a warning to members, urging caution in their communications due to potential Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy (FOIP) requests. Read that carefully. The association was not calling for a defence of open inquiry. It was not asking members to reflect on the potential spectacle of a woman being escorted from a cafeteria by police for the crime of conversation. It was coaching members on “document hygiene” so that their internal communications would be harder to obtain and scrutinize. That is an institution protecting itself while an arrest happens in its name.
An old dean at the last university I worked taught me that bureaucratic cowardice rarely announces itself directly. It typically arrives dressed as procedural caution.
None of this has anything to do with truth or reconciliation, whatever the university’s invocations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)’s Calls to Action might suggest. The university cancelled Widdowson’s 2023 lecture on exactly those grounds, framing her arguments as harmful to Indigenous students and incompatible with its reconciliation commitments.
But the Calls to Action ask for honest engagement with difficult history. Using them to suppress examination of historical claims is institutional self-protection dressed in borrowed moral authority, not reconciliation. The university has never demonstrated that Widdowson’s claims and arguments are fallacious. It has demonstrated only that they are an inconvenience to the orthodox narrative, and an institution of higher learning willing to arrest a woman rather than argue with her has effectively conceded the debate.
Universities govern themselves. Academic freedom, they remind us, requires insulation from outside interference. That argument has merit when the people making it are committed to free inquiry.
What U of L has demonstrated instead is that academic self-governance can become a protection racket for ideological conformity, complete with trespass orders, police escorts and FOIP warnings to sanitize the paper trail. These are not the instruments of a scholarly community.
The Alberta government has watched this unfold for over two years. Reporting requirements without consequences are suggestions. The Chicago Principles, free expression guidelines first developed at the University of Chicago, without enforcement, are decoration.
Those principles, which Alberta required all 26 publicly funded post-secondary institutions to adopt in 2019, are explicit on the central point: debate may not be suppressed because ideas are thought by some to be offensive, unwise or wrong-headed. Shielding members of a university community from views they find disagreeable is not a legitimate institutional purpose. U of L signed on to exactly that standard. Its conduct since has been a systematic repudiation of it.
Widdowson has been harassed and arrested at universities across the country. She was removed from the University of Victoria under B.C.’s Trespass Act in December 2025 for the offence of attempting to speak to students. The pattern is national.
But Alberta has something the other provinces have so far declined to build: a government with an explicit mandate to act, a province-wide free speech framework already in place and a documented case history that removes any pretence of ambiguity. The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) has already drafted legislation that would empower the minister to levy fines, mandate viewpoint-neutral enforcement of campus policies and allow funding to be withheld from institutions that use administrative power to silence.
The Widdowson case has produced a cancelled lecture, a manufactured protest, a trespass order, a pre-emptive ban titled like a police alert, a Charter challenge before Alberta’s Court of King’s Bench and an arrest in a cafeteria on a quiet Saturday. It is a complete and documented record of precisely the conduct that legislation should address.
The legislature should write it down, give it a number and pass it without delay.
Written by
Marco Navarro-Génie
Marco Navarro-Génie, BA (Concordia University), MA, PhD (University of Calgary), is Frontier’s Vice President of Research and Policy. His academic work focuses on radical revolutionary movements and cultural and political identity. He regularly comments on government, politics, and public policy issues in local, national, and international media. He is the author of hundreds of articles, several policy reports, and three books. His latest book, co-written with Barry Cooper, is Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).
https://frontiercentre.org/2026/05/07/stop-pretending-campus-mobs-are-an-accident/
Defending Indoctrination Disguised as Education By Transforming Those Who Can and Do Debate Openly, as “Trespassers”
by Tony Hall
In his essay Dr. Marco N-G makes specific reference to the adoption of the Chicago Principles by the government of Alberta in 2019. As the author indicates above, the Chicago Principles were formulated at the University of Chicago in 2014. According to the formulators and proponents of the Principles,
“The Chicago Principles articulate the importance of free expression as an essential feature of the university. They commit the university to allowing the widest possible range of ideas to be spoken and heard, even those that are considered wrong, upsetting or offensive by many. The Chicago Principles stress that the members and guests of the university must not be prevented from expressing their views.”
https://www.goacta.org/the-chicago-principles/
The Chicago Principles are an in Alberta an addition to the explicit protections afforded academic freedom in collective agreements between Faculty associations and University Boards throughout Canada and much of the United States. Moreover, free speech is supposed to be a Charter right in my country, although that claim became dubious after the government and the judiciary more or less abandoned Charter Rights to favour of unnecessay and even harmful Covidian restrictions.
Alberta’s former Minister of Advanced Education, Demetrios Nicholaides, introduced the Chicago Principles in December of 2019 shortly after the United Conservative Party (UCP) of Jason Kenney took power. In explaining this move Minister Nicholaides spoke of the importance for universities of “philosophical debate, critical thinking, and academic discovery,” processes which, he asserted, “can’t happen without strong protections for free speech.”
In spite of the positive language employed by some members of the Alberta government in supposedly embracing the Chicago Principles, the spirit of the policy has never been genuinely upheld in Alberta universities during Premier Danielle Smith’s time in office.
Citing the U of L’s treatment of Dr. Widdowson in a variety of separate episodes at the University of Lethbridge, Dr. Navarro-Génie dismissed the Chicago Principles as little more than a neglected provincial “ornament” meant to make the government look good without spurring genuine remedial action.
In December of 2019 Danielle Smith was still a relatively popular radio host with her own public affairs show. She was at the tail end of her period of public shaming among conservative folks in Alberta. Danielle had being doing penance for her antics as Leader of the Wild Rose Party when her crossing the floor of the provincial Legislature split the conservative vote to enable Alberta’s left-wing NDP Party to form government after the 2015 election.
Ms. Smith would become the Premier of Alberta in 2021 as part of her political rehabilitation in which I had participated.
I happened to be listening to her show on the day in 2019 when she interviewed Demetrios Nicholaides about the embrace of the Chicago Principles by the United Conservative Party which, under Jason Kenney, had recently beat the NDP in the 2019 election.
Radio show host Danielle Smith asked the Advanced Education Minister about why he felt the province needed to create a new means of protecting the free speech and diversity of perspectives at Alberta’s schools of higher education. What evidence was there that the system was broken enough to require a new remedy?
Minister Nicholaides responded by pointing to a controversy at the University of Lethbridge sparked by the effort to discredit, stifle and deplatform in 2016-17 the academic voice of a senior and tenured full professor. The scenario followed a script that was already well established even back then. The professor had emphasized in social media presentations the sometimes ruthless Israeli treatment of Native Palestinians. For this he was condemned as a Jew Hater who might act on his sinister preoccupations.
That professor was me, Anthony James Hall. In the period between 2015 and 2017 I had been targeted by a collaboration of many agencies revolving around the unsavoury partnership between B’nai Brith Canada and the Board of Directors of the University of Lethbridge.
I later learned from freedom of information inquiries that University of Lethbridge had been meeting with lawyers representing several Israel-First “philanthropies” with the object of attacking my academic reputation in order to justify dismissing me without any reckoning with a host of key issues. The contextual issues prominently included the wrongful attack on the institutions of tenure, an important device for the protection of academic freedom, and the Trustees’ failure to partake in due process as outlined in the collective agreement between the U of L’s Faculty Association and the Board of Governors (the Trustees).
No secret was made of the deep integration of the Israel-First Lobby into the guiding structure of the University of Lethbridge. On September 30, 2016, the subordination of the U of L to the Israel-First Lobby was basically made public by the news branch of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. CBC itself is well known for its notorious compliance to the dictates of the Israel-First Lobby.
Four days after the CBC publication of this story, cited below, I was indeed suspended without pay in a process outside the framework of due process at the University of Lethbridge.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/bnai-brith-anthony-hall-antisemitic-petition-1.3784968
In the radio exchange in 2019 between Danielle Smith and Demetrios Nicholaides, the opening question by the host asked the then-Minister of Advanced Education to explain the need for the Chicago Principles. What were the problems in the present system that needed to be remedied? The Minister responded by pointing to the nasty controversy at the censorious University of Lethbridge.
The Minister, however, left it at that. He did not identify anything about the specifics of the case and explain who was most immediately involved, namely me. Danielle Smith played along. She raced away from the subject onto the next topic without taking a moment to go beyond vague abstractions about something not being right at the University of Lethbridge. That news is only now beginning to coalesce in Alberta public opinion fuelled for the most part by social media, not Legacy media.
Demetrios Nicholaides and Daniel Smith
I recall feeling frustration from Nicholaides and Smith going along with shrouding the U of L case behind a veil of minimalist commentary whose effect was to maintain the disinformation and biases planted throughout many extensive media networks by my Zionist detractors. After all, the Israel Lobby had pressed the pedal to the metal in terms of its campaign to smear me with its own concocted narrative republished in many dozens of media venues, all of them pro-Zionist, including prominently by Facebook Inc and by the Crown’s Canadian Broadcast Corporation, CBC.
The B’nai Brith made sure to threaten NDP Premier Rachel Notley with bad media coverage in her upcoming re-election bid unless she went along with her instructions from the Isreal-First Lobby to smear me. The result was that the top elected official in the province put aside her impartiality on a sensitive juridical matter involving core issues in the conduct of post-secondary education in Alberta.
Premier Notley helped to entrench the wretched narrative of the Israel-First Lobby by repeating the accusations that could be summed up as what Owen Holmes has identified satirically as the Zombie Complaint— that career-destroying nuke-like accusation that one is an anti-Semitic, Holocaust Denying, Conspiracy Theorist. Dr. Owen Holmes is one of the most widely respected academic founders of the University of Lethbridge. He is now well along into his 90s.
Rachel Notley had never been in my classroom. Nevertheless Rachel appointed herself an expert on my teaching by parroting for her own political advantage the smear and disinformation as related to her by Israel-First spin doctors with all their strategic media connections
https://academicfreedomanthonyhall.ca/professor-halls-letter-to-the-premier-february-17-2018/
https://thecjn.ca/news/holocaust-denying-prof-reinstated-university-lethbridge/
Dr. Holmes has written much about the abusive implications of the uncritical adoption of the “Zombie Complaint” by the Board of Governors of the University of Lethbridge. The Zombie Complaint would come to constitute an automatic complaint against university faculty that find fault with Israel’s treatment of native Palestinians.
Owen Holmes to James Compton, President, Canadian Association of University Teachers, 20 August, 2018
Own Holmes to Jackie Flanagan, Alberta Views, 4 September 2018
Both items referenced in
Back to Main Text
As Prof. Holmes became increasingly aware of the scale of the campaign to smear my work on a subject that flowed naturally from my professional involvement in Native American Studies, Prof Holmes intervened with a variety of institutions whose wide range surprised me.
For instance I became aware of letters he wrote detailing a rule-breaking exchange between MLAs trying to outdo each other in exposing my alleged wickedness in speaking against Israel on the Palestinian question. That is how I was discusses in a debate in the Alberta Legislature. Not one MLA rose to defend me. But I guess that’s an expression of democracy in Alberta
Making reference to the comments of a former Speaker of the House, Dr. Holmes drew attention to violated “rules about not defaming or deriding someone who is not in the house as an elected member and has no ability to defend himself or herself.”
(Owen Holmes to Robert Wanner, Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, Province of Alberta, 6 February, 2018)
The larger failure of proper reporting was mirrored by Demetrios Nicholaides and Premier Danielle Smith when the U of L case was cited by Advanced Education Minister as his primary example of why the Chicago Principles were required. Both Smith and Nicholaides ducked the contentious issues involved censoring out any reference to some of the most substantial episodes concerning what had actually happened.
Given the scale and the intensity of the media smear and disinformation campaign, I could not have had any delusions in 2019 about Smith and Nicholadaies making it their priority to protect my right to privacy. What more concerned me than privacy issues, were issues concerning accuracy, lies, and the hiding of basic information necessary for proper assessments of the collaboration that took place in the between B’nai Brith Canada and the University of Lethbridge. Their officers collaborate in the project of removing this tenured senior full professor from my academic post as faculty member in Alberta.
To this day I still find it almost impossible to ever get a proper hearings in the ZIONIST-dominated big media venues to tell my side of the story. Quite clearly there is much that the U of L Administration together with its partners in the many-faceted Israel-First Lobby still want to hide from the public.
Dr. Holmes has attempted to explain a genuine version of what actually happened to me in a succinct and generalized way. He writes as follows as follows:
“In June of 2016 Hall completed his 26th year in the Faculty of Arts and Science as one of the best historians ever to grace the U of L campus. His career scholarship has explored the effects of global imperialism upon conquered indigenous peoples around the world, from the invasion and colonization of the Americas beginning with Columbus in 1492…. The violent atrocities extended to the conquest, occupation, and colonization of the indigenous Palestinian people by the state of Israel, a process currently being played out on the international scene. Along with academic colleagues around the world, Hall has researched and publicized his findings on Israel’s flagrant and chronic violations of international codes of military and humanitarian law as well as the Jewish state’s widespread involvement in regional terrorism.
The Zionist Lobby (aka Israel Lobby) is a wealthy powerful network determined to suppress all criticism of Israel by whatever means necessary. An important part of that mission is to stifle such criticisms in the universities of this country. The well honed tactic is character assassination and the career destruction of academics researching the past and and current actions of the state of Israel. That’s accomplished by attacking the researchers with a set of weaponized words that stir up public indignation and antagonism. The Zionist owned/ dominated/influenced mainstream media, including the CBC, The Canadian Press, PostMedia, SunMedia etc are enthusiastic collaborators, no evidence needed. The enormously successful weaponized phrases are “anti-semitism,” “holocaust denying,” “conspiracy theories.”
During the summer of 2016 the Zionists decided the time had come to silence once and for all Tony Hall whose criticisms of Israel’s colonization and terrorism were getting too serious to ignore. The Lobby launched a national coast to coast media attack aimed at disgracing the supposed anti-semitic holocaust denying conspiracy theorist monster, said to be running amok at the University of Lethbridge. Simultaneously the colorful imaginary charge was sent to the UL Board Chair and President and to the Alberta Premier, Solicitor General and Advanced Education Minister. Terrified, threatened, bribed and bullied into panic, the Board of Governors entered into a secret tripartite pact with the lobby to exterminate Hall professionally as quickly as possible.”
The evidence-based nature of Dr. Holmes’ characterization is reflected in the fact that I am intervening as a U of L Faculty member in this discussion starting with the essay cited above by Marco Navarro-Génie. I have participated in many of the discussed events as an Emeritus Professor. Indeed, I am writing this commentary from within the academic community of the University of Lethbridge, an institution to which I have contributed some of the best years of my career as a professor.
Although my detractors tried hard, they never did succeed in convicting me of anything. One result was that when I retired in 2018 as a full professor in good standing, I was extended the title of Emeritus Professor. I am currently attempting to live up to the responsibilities of this title; to help the University of Lethbridge overcome some of the worst aspects of its present sorry state.
I am attempting in this and other interventions to help the U of L recover some of its former dignity before its significant fall around 2020. Part of the decline involved a fall into very censorious approaches to indoctrinating students rather than helping them become independent-minded critical thinkers.
The focus of Dr. Navarro-Génie’s essay on the the notorious maltreatment by the U of L of Dr, Widdowson describes a process that I have witnessed and experienced in my own way back in era of my suspension in 2016-18. Most recently, Frances and I teamed up in early February taking part in an event that produced what I witnessed as a multicultural Native Rights Mob. Their radical excesses run directly against the civility of thoughtful and careful scholarship which I see as necessary element of enlightened academic activism.
The radical extremes of what might be described as the UNDRIP school of Aboriginal rights and title springs directly from part of the professoriate of the Native American Studies Department in the 1990s. I worked as a prof for about 12 years as a NAS prof. Russel Barsh was the NAS Prof who took a leading role in drafting UNDRIP and getting it through the UN process.
The application of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is currently creating havoc in the economics, politics, and law of British Columbia. This same havoc seems to have infused the excesses of the Native Rights Mob as it coalesced on Feb. 4.
As I see it, the fact that I continue to be a senior member of the U of L faculty in good standing at the U of L constitutes evidence of a lot things. In spite of all the unbacked accusations I faced from my detractors, I transcended their attacks based largely on the strength of my academic work of teaching, publishing and community service. One aspect of my reinstatement into the faculty of the University of Lethbridge came by way of a court order from the Court of Queen’s Bench in Alberta in 2017. See
University of Lethbridge v University of Lethbridge Faculty Association, 2017 ABQB 556 (CanLII)
https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abqb/doc/2017/2017abqb556/2017abqb556.html
Another element of this U of L case in 2016 was the harsh condemnation of the Board of Governor’s actions resulting in the threat to censure the University Administration. Here are some of the key phrases from the CAUT letter below,
“That CAUT condemn the actions of the University 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… If the matter is not satisfactorily resolved 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.”
One subject that is treated as a no-go zone by every one who has been involved in pushing the smear campaign against me, involves a horrific digital item planted on Facebook for about two hours on August 26 while I was in Kansas. I did not produce the item nor was I aware of during a period when I was visiting Jeremy Rothe-Kushel in Kansas. The post was attributed to Glen Davidson, a Lethbridge resident who I know.
In a major slight of hand the appalling Facebook item, which I immediately condemned when I found out about it, was quickly attributed to me in a crafty manipulation between Facebook Inc and B’nai Brith Canada. Back in 2016 Facebook was not yet subject to open censorship although the company was pointed in that direction. The planted Facebook post scam was deployed by the repetition of the following meme taken from the disgraceful digital item.
https://www.winterwatch.net/2016/10/hes-back-jewish-terrorist-joshua-goldberg/
In 2016 I spoke by Skype with the cartoonist Ben Garrison who easily identified the planted Facebook post, both text and image, as the work of Joshua Goldberg. Goldberg is supposedly in a federal penitentiary now for impersonating an Islamic terrorist at a “Jihad Watch Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in Garland Texas in 2015.”
As demonstrated below, the image of Garrison’s head was photoshopped into the planted Facebook image. As illustrated below, the original picture was of an Israeli security guard arresting a rabbinical protester trying to stop the building of a highway in Israel across a cemetery.
I have outlined the Facebook Post scam in some detail in the following
Back to Text
No Criticism Of Israel is Allowed
As noted, a very public collaboration between the University of Lethbridge and B’nai Brith Canada was devoted to smearing and deplatforming me from my tenured academic platform. A main episode in the smear just happened to occur on the eve of the beginning of the new term in the transition from summer to autumn in 2016.
I have noticed that many of the attacks of Israel-First hit squads that target academics critical of Israeli government commence, just as the new university terms begin in early September.
The procedures deployed in destroying academic careers by enforcing the Zombie Complaint have been standardized, mechanized and rendered pervasive. Once one gets target by the Zionist Lobby one is forced into processes going forward in what is made to seem like an assembly line. I have had much company on the receiving end of Zionist zealotry to control the curriculum and staffing of many universities. The objective of the censorship and doctored history is… No Criticism of Israel Allowed
One of the primary blacklisting sites is Carnary Mission. One of its discriminatory specialities is to wreck and obstruct the move of promising Arab students into academic streams of university employment.
The collaboration that culminated in the call by the B’nai Brith staff to fire me, began with the frauds piled upon frauds brought together in a small put tremendously potent post on my Facebook Wall while I was preoccupied with an assignment in the United States. The post scam featured a shocking image described as a violent “white man”strangling a rabbi.
The photoshopped art work was accompanied by an unbelievably obnoxious text that looked to me as if it had been authored by lawyers with the object of creating language so hateful that it could be used to justify criminal charges. In fact the planted Facebook put put on the Internet without my knowledge, let alone approval, were submitted to the police supposedly by an employee of B’nai Brith Canada. In my case the police were asked to determine whether or not I had incentivized genocide.
Once I had been targeted in the Zionist media with these kinds of B’nai Brith-planted associations highlighted in dozens of Zionist hit-squad publications, I was in a way thrown to the dogs, many of whom were part wild wolf. The first concocted accusations opened the door to onslaughts of other accusations to come. Most were based on lies or half truths or outright evil insinuations. Of course I am totally perfect and totally correct in everything. I have never said or written anything that is wrong. Jokes!
Once I had been associated with the “Kill All Jews” label repeated again and again, it became basically impossible to restore some modicum of reason and order on my side. My side, involved a few friends locally and dozens of strangers who wrote to me to urge me to stand may ground. On the other side was the frenzied, purposely chaotic smear and disinformation campaign— hasbara— that the Israel-First Lobby expertly orchestrated. Obviously the hasbara experts had lots of practice. When your trying to live through it, being the brunt of the standard Zionist Zombie Complaint can be quite invasive.
As I shall explain below, I have arrived at the conclusion ten years after the fact that the planted Facebook psy op was quite probably developed for a price with the awareness and complicity of the University of Lethbridge Administration.
In preparation for the court case that took place in 2017— a court case that the University of Lethbridge Board of Governors would lose very dramatically— CAUT conducted a freedom of information searches that turned up evidence that the B’nai Brith staff was communicating with University Provost Andy Hakin at least a full month before the planted Facebook post scam.
Amidst the Freedom of Information finds was some of the communication of B’nai Brith’s Amanda Hohmann. In her writing to officials at the University of Lethbridge and in the Alberta government she to opened up dialogues. Among her correspondents were U of L President Mike Mahon, Provost Andy Hakin, and “Minister Schmidt” with a cc or two to the then-Dean of Arts and Science, Craig Cooper. Identifying herself as the “National Director of the B’nai Brith League of Human Rights,” Hohmann made a made a number of accusations presented without any evidence.
So far I have no way of knowing whether the “Human Rights” expert received any direct written response from the officials she secretly contacted with the clear intent of secretly turning my employers against me. She did so well outside the decorum of proper procedures of academic interaction. She was no scholar. That is for sure.
I seemed to me that Hohmann was basically asking whether the recipients of he smear letter would have any objections to calling me a “Holocaust Denier” in the media smear campaign that was then being designed to go along with the publicity attending the diabolical content of the planted Facebook post.
Whatever transpired behind-the-scenes, B’nai Brith Canada decided to take me down with them into the Holocaust rabbit hole. What lay in this hole were a bunch of issues I hadn’t addressed at that point in 2016. Hohmann was very emboldened to defame me aggressively in her secret communications. She asserted, for instance, that I was the equivalent of a flat earther because she reckoned I did not go along with the sacrosanct six million figure.
I had never shown the slightest interest in any discussion of the number of genocide victims, so Hohmann just made up a story to fit, however carelessly, her theories about what I believed or what she thought I taught in my classes. What a fraud was this self-styled director of a supposed human rights league.
I don’t believe she ever had read anything I’d ever written and reported on in my successful tenure and promotion applications done over more than two dozen years. As with my University president, Amanda Hohmann’s literary metier seemed limited to things like You Tube.
From my perspective Hohmann’s thinking basically resembled the operation of a xerox machine devoted to reproducing recycled stereotypes.
Hohmann included in her diatribe the thesis that, “Jewish students may quite reasonably feel unsafe or unwelcome in a lecture taught by Dr. Hall, or fear that they will not receive equal or fair treatment from him.” At that point in 2016 I had 26 years of teaching behind me at the U of L. Throughout this time I received consistently decent and good teaching evaluations from my students.
These evaluations were required as I moved up the ladder of tenure and promotion. Never in those 26 years did I become aware of any complaint from a Jewish student on any matter whatsoever. For the most part I would not be aware of who among my students was or was not a Jew. Basically it would be none of my business unless a student chose to refer to his or her religious or ethnic identity in the free flow of regular discussion and dialogue
Ten years ago most of my references to the subjects Hohmann emphasized in her intensely defamatory ranting and raving, came in the context of my discussion on an Internet show entitled False Flag Weekly News. That show persists to this day. At the time University officials were encouraging Canadian professor to go outside the classroom in order to reach average people with interesting and topical information.
I found it stimulating to speak to audiences of several thousand people at time rather than a few dozen or sometimes less in the classroom. But I always reserved my best teaching efforts for my registered students.
(Amanda Hohmann to Mahon, Hakin and Schmid, cc Dean of Arts and Science Craig Cooper, 28 July, 2016)
As I look back on the genesis of the surprise attack that came my way back in late August of 2016, I am made to reflect on what Frances Widdowson is going through now at the University of Lethbridge. She is being harassed and smeared based on concerted aggressions emanating from within both the Faculty Association and the Administration of the U of L.
Key individuals from both groups have manufactured an image, now being enforced by police, of Dr. Widdowson as a “trespasser” whose behaviour is so ornery she has been forbidden to step foot on the grounds of the Lethbridge Public University. This verdict somehow appeared without any due process much as in my case in 2016 when I too was declared by President Mike Mahon to be a trespasser. Being declared a trespasser can be seen as an adjunct to the attempt to “neutralize” Dr. Widdowson in a religious ceremony conducted by Leroy Little Bear and a group of selected elders.
As Dr. Marco Navarro has argued, the University of Lethbridge “has been creating disorder and then certifying that disorder as grounds for removal.” For me the disorder was the planted Facebook psy op that was published under unusual circumstances in 2016. This episode was used to kick off the failed campaign conducted by the University Administration in partnership with B’nai Brith Canada. I’m still here.
How Did It Come to Be That Tony Hall Was Investigated in Lethbridge and Calgary for Inciting Genocide by Cautioning Against the Slide Towards Israeli Genocide Pointed Against Native Palestinians?
The CBC has produced multiple reports highlighting the role of the post planted on my Facebook Wall. The abhorrent content of this post was put forward as evidence of why I was supposed to be a menace to my profession and to my employer. Recall that the Sept 30 CBC report was headlined with the assertion that B’nai Brith wanted me “fired.” The CBC reporter, Ayesha Clough, went to B’nai Brith employee, Ryan Bellerose, as a primary news source.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/bnai-brith-anthony-hall-antisemitic-petition-1.3784968
Clough reports on behalf of the CBC that the Facebook planted post
shows a photograph of an Orthodox Jew being assaulted, and is accompanied by a violent rant calling for the extermination of Jews. The post was removed from the Facebook account a short time later and the account of the person who posted it was deleted, police said.
Hall says he had no knowledge of the post, and has further come out to “strongly condemn the message conveyed in both the image and the text” in an article he wrote for the American Herald Tribune, a website of which he is editor-in-chief.
He could not be reached for comment by the CBC.
Bellerose was also put front and centre in another CBC item broadcasted on September 29, 2016
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/audio/1.3786000
In his CBC radio interview with the Calgary Eyeopener’s host, David Gray, Ryan claimed he had discovered the concocted Facebook post by accident and then deputized himself to immediately put the digital item before the police forces of both Lethbridge and Calgary.
In the September 29 CBC Radio interview, Bellerose announced he invited the Calgary police over to his residence in the middle of the night. The police officers accepted the unusual invitation. As Bellerose explains in the broadcast, he presented the police with an elaborate presentation apparently going into materials other than the planted post. Apparently this Metis man just happened to have ready with a prepared package of material to show the police when they came to Ryan’s residence. Good timing.
In the course of the radio interview, Gray and Bellerose acknowledge I did not make the post. David Gray also played a clip where I made a point of condemning all aspects of the planted post in no uncertain terms. I had no part in locating or editing this clip which was recorded before Gray’s interview with Bellerose. I condemned the post as I do now and as I will always do in very explicit terms.
The post is genuinely vicious and hateful and menacing towards Jews. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that it wasn’t created by Jews. I would like it very much of the police did a proper investigation to see where the subversive post really comes from and who is really responsible.
Nevertheless, although it was established I did not make the post and I did not approve of its contents, Gray encouraged Bellerose to spout on about his theories. The show was allowed to go on in spite of CBC finding on its own a tape and then running it. The tape reveals I independently condemned the contents of the hateful planted post as soon as I saw it. Bellerose was given the green light to explain I didn’t believe what I said I believed. I was not there to make the point that I know better the Bellerose what I do or don’t believe.
Gray gave the B’nai Brith Lobbyist a platform to say the objectionable item might as well be considered mine presumably on the basis that Bellerose was privy to some kind of expert knowledge about me. What was the source of his expert knowledge? What kind of shoddy journalism was being cultivated by David Gray and the CBC?
As I recall it, the clip of my voice was lifted I believe from the prior broadcast of False Flag Weekly News in the period I was co-host along with Kevin Barrett. The CBC attributed the clip wrongly to American Herald Tribune. I was indeed the Editor In Chief of American Herald Tribune, a web site with a gifted global group of writers and an attentive worldwide audience that I am very proud to have been involved with.
From several experiences I have found that CBC generally acts as a stenographer publicizing anything that B’nai Brith wants and with the perspectives that B’nai Brith seeks to emphasize. B’nai Brith is Netanyahu and CBC is Trump the subordinate. As I have come to see him, David Gray is adept at making himself a compliant servant in the cause of getting out to the public whatever message B’nai Brith Canada wants to highlight.
Sometime prior to the suspension controversy, I think I recall exchanging a few hasty words with Bellerose at some kind of conference. However I have never talked to him in earnest. Frankly, from the little I recall hearing from him, I found Ryan to be pretentious, ill-informed and irritating. As an aside, Ryan made no allowances for the variability of Facebook’s settings in Facebook’s working in his pseudo-lawyer-like effort to try and convict me on-air.
I know that some serious people in Israel have condemned B’nai Brith Canada for hiring this frivolous Metis huckster who some say made a fool of himself during the time he was in Occupied Palestine. The records of his mishaps run wide and deep.
https://thejudeanhammer.blogspot.com/2017/06/ryan-bellerose-hasbara-bottom-feeder.html
As his Israeli critics have pointed out, Ryan was for a time busily engaged in trying to raise money in Israel ($20,000) for his never ending, never completed research project aimed at proving Jews are the Indigenous peoples of Palestine.
I think Bellerose was specifically hired by the B’nai Brith Canada as a Native man who was more than willing to deliver media smear on me to disseminate and embed the Zombie Complaint that Owen Holmes has identified. Indeed, it came to seem to me that Ryan has been preparing for that assignment before he was hired essentially by Amanda Hohmann.
As the official story is told, Ryan Bellerose decided on behalf of B’nai Brith Canada to take the planted Facebook post to two police units Southern Alberta. The planted Facebook posts were attributed to Glen Davidson.
I would later learn from B’nai Brith Canada’s explanation, that the planted post was on display at the B’nai Brith site for only two hours before it was taken down. Hence as B’nai Brith tells it, all this fuss was generated by a post featured for only 120 minutes. What am I to make of all this?
From my perspective I have no cause to take seriously the tainted word of this sketchy organization when it comes to all of the dubious operations of this “charitable philanthropy” that in Canada can give tax write offs.
As reported by the CBC on 30 September
“The post, while extremely offensive and inappropriate, does not meet the threshold for intent set out in the Criminal Code of Canada for advocating genocide or public incitement of hatred,” the police said in a statement on Wednesday.”
This finding I found reflected negligence and bias on the part of police. So the post, which even B’nai Brith Canada first acknowledged was not made by me, was “extremely offensive and inappropriate.” So…. why blame me? Surely that is a matter that should have been raised vis a vis the creator of the post, not me.
Why did not the police discuss in their findings who created the post and why? Where does the post come from? How often and in what contexts has this noxious Facebook post been used in the Lobby’s quest to target and destroy critics of Israel?
The digital item is said in the CBC news report of 30 September to have been created by a “third party,” namely Glen Davidson, then a Lethbridge restaurant owner that I know. When I got a chance I asked Glen directly about his side of the story. He told me he did not post the item. He also indicated that B’nai Brith Canada or its agents have harassed him involving harsh interventions I do not remember.
What is there to situate me near what the police described as a “threshold for intent set out in the Criminal Code of Canada for advocating genocide or public incitement of hatred.” Who came up with this wording? Did Ryan Bellerose propose this question? Did someone tell him to prpose this wording to the police?
Did the question come from within from the legal branches of B’nai Brith Canada who sometimes seem like it is a part of the police? Was B’nai Brith investigated to see if some of its members planted the post on my Facebook Wall? If not, why not? Did Ryan Bellerose just happen to run across the post as soon as it came out or did he have prior knowledge causing him to make the existence of the post a police matter right away? If he has prior knowledge, where did it come from?
I have never come anywhere close to such a thing as advocating genocide. There is no evidence to put me near some “threshold” of some sort of infraction like that described in the police verdict which condemns me without charging me. My tendency is to switch around the assumptions by viewing with suspicion the decision to draw the police into a vile misrepresentation of my views with the objective of causing me harm in the prelude to what I can now only now see in retrospect as part of the set up for my forthcoming suspension.
I had worked very hard for that position, one I very much deserved and was good at. Compare how NAS operated when I was a faculty member there and how it operates now trying to “neutralize Dr. Widdowson” for her invented pseudo crime of being “a residential school denier.” Dr. Widdowson’s attackers have essentially created a cult giving rise to the dangerous operations of Native Rights Mobs enforcing UNDRIP-like pseudo-laws
What effort did the police make or not to look into my own interpretation involving finding knowledgable witnesses who pointed me at the role of Joshua Goldberg? I am under the impression that B’nai Brith Canada has made repeated use of the Joshua Goldberg text and illustration. Was B’nai Brith ever asked by police if its staff knew the true origins of the offensive digital item which I suspect is part of their large arsenal for destroying the careers of those they target for deplatforming because they have criticized Israel.
The Montana cartoonist, Ben Garrison, was photoshopped into the planted Facebook post used against me. The shockingly disgusting text is said to be signed by Ben “Tel Aviv Terror” Garrison. Garrison explained to me that Joshua Goldberg often transformed pictures of him by putting him in, for instance, Nazi uniforms.
My research into the matters was based on my analysis of the actual content of the offensive image and text that came and left a Facebook page over a two hour interval. Why did not the police look at the available evidence rather than wrap me in language involving incitement of genocide and hate? Why did the people at B’nai Brith Canada not show any interest in conducting their own research into an episode that, in my books, still makes them look like the prime suspects?
Why did the not some agent of the University Administration including the Board of Governors not look into the fishy stuff swirling around the planted digital item with a view to protecting the integrity of a post-secondary institution whose tarnished reputation is becoming increasingly clear to a growing portion of the tax paying public.
The B’nai Brith decision to have Ryan Belrose turn me into the police for a criminal investigation formed a primary part of the preparation for the culmination of the professional violence done in the effort to destroy my reputation and academic career. The B’nai Brith smear campaign quicly obliterated any and all references to the “third party” sources of the controversial digital item.
The secret emails to hundreds of top officials in Alberta included cabinet members and Premier Notley. In all these emails the text of the digital item were presented as if the words were conceived by and written by me and me alone…. according to Bert Raphael it was made to seem as if the words came right out of my lips. (See below) Such a sequence of extremely serious defamation and fraud embodies a crime spree by the crime perpetrators on an enormous scale.
What evidence is there to say that B’nai Brith Canada DIDN’T conduct all elements of the scam in the effort to criminalize me.
Of course it was difficult to deal with my professional responsibilities as a professor with news items floating about connecting me to police investigation for something to do with inciting genocide and encouraging hate. Obviously my colleagues suddenly had questions rooted in the content of the planted Facebook post I had to address as carefully and honestly as I could.
The smear of course gathered momentum on my way to being suspended and afterwards. In the prelude to the trial that took place in 2017 I bgan to see portions of CAUT’s FOIP searches. Many of these documents showed that B’nai Brith Canada and its related Israel Lobby agencies (including the University of Lethbridge?) attributed the atrocious text to me directly as if I authored the disgusting text.
As an example I shall post excerpts from a letter dated September 1. The letter is from Bert Raphael, Q.C., LSM, President of the Canadian Jewish Civil Rights Association. The letter is to U of L President, Dr. Michael J (Mike) Mahon. Mr Raphael writes,
“Dr. Dr. Mahon;
It has been brought to my attention that Anthony J. Hall, a Professor at Your University. posted a on Facebook on August 29 9sic) the following message:
There never was 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 parasitic kike is rounded up and slaughtered like the vermin they are…..Like all parasites, the Jew will continue to reproduce until every single 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
I trust you agree with me that such a statement has no place in Canada and most recently from the lips of a university Professor. I would respectfully suggest that such an odious pronouncement would warrant Professor Hall’s dismissal from your University. I would be interested in your response which I undertake to share with the members of my organization whose names appear on the reverse side of this stationary.”
In the span of days the original item said to be posted by Glen Davidson was transformed by the network of people in and around B’nai Brith Canada into a statement that caused Bert Raphael to say the horrific words came “from my lips.” The evidence is available to elaborate a wide array of similar stories all based on the presumption that I was the author and creator of the horrendous text
How is one supposed to recover from seeing oneself defamed with such a high degree visceral eloquence and disgust as that articulated by Bert Raphael?
It is strange to the look back from the perspective of 2026 at an episode in 2016 that poses such serious questions about the integrity of B’nai Brith Canada and the Israel-First Lobby more generally. B’nai Brith Canada is one small part of a large propaganda operation that been promoting public acceptance of a vile and many-faceted genocide campaign pointed at the elimination of Palestinian people and others in the region of expansionary Israel
The lies and crimes of the Israel-First Lobby are attached to military and political agencies in many countries, but especially in Israel, the USA, and in the so-called “Western” countries including Canada. The Israel-First Lobby is up to its eyeballs in the worldwide expression of outrage by legions of mostly decent people disgusted by what they are seeing in the livestreamed genocide.
This unfolding genocide that the world has witnessed and continues to witness violates all conceptions of civilized decency in a society supposedly governed by universal principles including the requirements of uniformly-applied rules of law.
So far no one has acknowledged that maybe we would have been better off now if people had heeded rather than attacked the warnings of numerous academics like me who explained years ago that the Israeli relationship with native Palestinians was unjust and pointed towards becoming even more horrific. Civilized behaviour is heading off the rails with the increasingly ruthless Israeli treatment of Palestinian pointing the way to further extensions of the inhumanity of some humans to other humans.
David Gray, B’nai Brith and Facebook
The planted Facebook post infused an initial burst of energy into the smear and disinformation campaign targeted at me. Once the initial damage was done, however, the agenda was made to move along away from the repetition in dozens of news reports detailing hair-raising bigoted phrases put in close proximity to my name and my position at the University of Lethbridge. Frankly I look at this ruthless tactic of the form of defamation I have faced as constituting a Goy variant of blood libel.
Very soon the planted Facebook farce was pushed aside as the story kept being driven into a purposely bewildering array of varied and unsupported accusations. The planted Facebook post saga ceased to be discussed at all unless I raised it.
On October 3 I was invited by David Gray to face him on the CBC where he delivered a classic pressure interrogation. As best I can figure, before interviewing me Gray was presented with a series of questions drafted by the people in or around B’nai Brith Canada.
The intent of the array of diverse questions, it seemed to me, was to produce answers from me that would, it was hoped, verify that I was indeed a wacko Anti-Semitic, Holocaust Denying Conspiracy Theorist… I was indeed a worthy target of the Zionists’ Zombie Complaint.
My friend Jeremy Rothe-Kushel ran a camera while I was on the other side of the glass with the B’nai Brith operative doubling as a CBC host. I had invited Jeremy to visit me in my time of trouble. On Oct 3 I had just picked just picked up at Jeremy at the Calgary Airport airport before being interviewed by Gray. On August 26 I had been visiting Jeremey and his family in Kansas during the two hours when the contentious post is said by my attackers to have come and gone from Facebook leaving behind a screen shot as the basis of a macabre media frenzy.
According to my attackers, who I obviously distrust, the first round of publicity was a criticism by B'nai Brith Canada supposedly ctiticizing Facebook Corp for publishing the “KILL ALL JEWS.” This phrase, it was said, was deemed to be “consistent with Facebook’s community standards.” The nub of the story is that censorship of Facebook was on its way. In 2016 Facebook Inc was preparing its users for full-fledged censorship.
Dr. Mahon Is a Corrupt Flake, Not Worthy of the Task of Being a Conscientious University President
The role of the University of Lethbridge’s President, Dr. Mike Mahon, was deeply integrated into the plot of B’nai Brith’s Facebook caper. This caper was was done to me, not by me. What instructions were given to the police who received delivery of the planted Facebook post before I was even aware that such a post existed?
Was Ryan Bellerose telling the real story in his CBC interview? Probably not. Did he really act independently to call police when his main objective was to have the police charge me with a crime? Were Ryan’s supervisors involved (which I imagine they must have been)?
Why did David Gray NOT do journalistic due diligence when he failed to challenge any aspect of Ryan’s story? I think I know why. Its pretty obvious.
As he told it to me, I think something was done to Glen Davidson, not by him. Was Mr. Davidson duped in some way when he was named as the source of the original post that Ben Garrison attributes to the work of Joshua Goldberg?
I have my own doubts about the veracity of the Joshua Goldberg story first related to me by Ben Garrison. I see as involvement Goldberg, or even his existence, as problematic. (See link to Kevin Barrett’s VT article below)
But any way you cut it, the first steps of a genuine investigation, which the Calgary and Lethbridge Police obviously did not do, point to Garrison’s account of Goldberg’s role. The image of Garrison is integral to both the text and the image that make up the digital item, a very small item with a very big meaning for me
https://medium.com/s/no-new-messages/trolled-into-clarity-b533f49544fa
https://veteranstoday.com/2017/04/25/goldberg-a-cover/
https://academicfreedomanthonyhall.ca/halls-article-hate-speech-deceptions/
The staff of B’nai Brith Canada were all over the planted Facebook post episode in many capacities, including in the initiatives of Amanda Hohmann before the scam and by Ryan Bellerose who helped kick off the scam… Ryan Bellerose who drew in the police before I had any idea what was going on while I was with Jeremy and his family in Kansas.
The Facebook post scam formed the basis of the manufactured crisis that set in motion the train of events that led to my my suspension in early October. My suspension was part of a transition that transformed me into a trespasser if I set foot on the University of Lethbridge campus. I thereby pioneered the anti-academic status of a U of L trespasser, a status applied, also without any due process that I can see, to Frances Widdowson. The University of Lethbridge should be nicknamed Trespass U…. off bounds to critical thinkers.
Frances had the anti-academic campus trespasser status imposed on her by police, apparently because some on campus disagree with her well-chronicled ideas combined with her insistence on talking about her theories in public spaces because she is repeatedly denied access to classrooms at the University of Lethbridge by order of its successive Presidents. It is Mike Mahon who signed on the dotted line to deplatform me. Dr. Mahon was the decider who declared on Feb 3, 2023 that Frances was a trespasser on campus who should be drummed into silence and ultimately removed.
As came to see Dr. Mahon, he is flakey individual not educated or committed enough enough to live up to his responsibilities as a University President. A person in such a position could not be considered a success without putting a high priority on the protection of academic freedom. No institution of higher learning can be worthy of the name without welcoming and hosting open and vibrant debate an a wide diversity of issues, contemporary and historical.
Open debate cannot thrive on campus if the top officials value conformity, solidarity and indoctrination over the encouragement and protection of critical thought and expression. Dr. Mahon was no friend of open debate, but especially open debate governed by civility, attentiveness and respect for empirically-demonstrated proof no matter how awkward to the interests of power.
The University of Lethbridge’s Enforcer of the Zionists’ Zombie Complaint
During the period of 2016 to 2018 Dr. Mahon travelled around speaking about the Zionsts’ Zombie Complaint to the media and to different audiences publicly and privately. He regularly presented interpretations that reinforcing B’nai Brith’s condemnation of me while pretending that he had sort of grasp of what I was all about.
Dr. Mahon had pretty much nothing to say about the academic implications of what was going on in our school. That was the main topic it was his job to address with insight, verve, and an awareness of his fiduciary responsibilities to protect the University of Lethbridge from malevolent violations of academic freedom.
Any such analysis it seemed to me, was probably way beyond Dr.Mahon’s limited academic capacities. He began his university career as a glorified phys ed teacher. At one point he was calling his own academic specialty, Leisure Studies. I’m not making this up!
As far as I could see Dr. Mahon avoided altogether any reference to the academic elements of the controversies swirling around me and around our school. He did not rise to the importance of the pivotal issues entailed in the controversy. In fact I’m having difficulty remembering any instance where Dr. Mahon ever uttered anything significant about any academic issues.
Not once did Dr. Mahon and I talk face to face over the entire course of the many years we worked in close proximity in within the same university. When I asked in writing or directly with his secretary to sit down with him for a chat, he simply ignored the requests.
I still am very unsettled by the fact that Dr. Mahon neglected to have a chat with me even during the peak period when news about the grotesque Facebook derangement became prominent with menacing implications for me and for many people asking legitimate questions given what they were seeing and hearing in the Zionist-directed media.
What if I really had become unhinged and violent? How would Dr. Mahon know whether or not this was true given we had never even talked together? He owed it to the safety of what he calls “the University Community” to have investigated the situation himself by simply talking to me face to face. It could have been easily arranged.
Did Dr. Mahon understand that the menacing text highlighting the supposed desire of the supposed author for mass murder was a fiction, a made-up story? If he knew but would not say, then Dr. Mahon is implicated in a crime which makes him even more guilty than he already is by failing to due due diligence by assessing my mental health in an extremely fraught set of circumstances?
Why did Dr. Mahon know and when did he know it? That is a very serious question that he still has not answered for the University community that he basically endangered by not finding out for himself what was really going on. Or if he did know what was really going how sad for him. How pathetic!
What if all the horrific text really did point to a genuine shift towards some sort of extreme imbalance in my consciousness? What if I really was going off the deep end? What if something tragedy had unfolded at the University of Lethbridge without him taking the time and devoting the energy to investigate what was really going on?
My suspicion, my serious suspicion, is that Dr. Mahon was well aware that the onslaught of publicity afforded the planted Facebook post was part of a theatrical spectacle in which he had agreed to play a major part. His job was to be an actor and seems to have known it.
By not talking to me directly he leaves the question open that he knew I posed no danger of the kind spectacularized by the Zionist media network radiating around B’nai Brith Canada and related agencies like the Centre for Jewish and Israeli Affairs, CIJA. Dr. Mahon had been cast as a performer in a drama aimed at helping to protect the government and the backers of Israel from criticism for its treatment of native Palestinians.
In the final analysis Dr. Mahon did himself justify what appear to be his criminal misrepresentations by pointing to the planted Facebook post story as the #1 reason for getting as close as he could to firing me from the academic staff of the the University of Lethbridge outside the terms of the collective agreement. B’nai Brith Canada had publicly requested this outcome in a report published in a CBC headline and story of 30 September, 2016.
On October 3 when Dr Mahon began the process of suspending me and transforming me into a trespasser if I was found on the property of our public university, he began his justification for enforcing the Board’s decision with the accusation
“Your Facebook page being used for virulent and antisemitic comments”
So once again the job of a university professor is made to come be assessed on the pronouncements in Facebook. Facebook activity no matter from whom is made to constitute the leading accusation to justify my suspension.
In a U of Lethbridge Internet post made ten years ago on Oct. 13, 2016 President Mike Mahon addressed the “University Community” on the “Dr. Anthony Hall Suspension.” The Message reads that the reasons for disappearing me from the faculty and the campus were
“NOT focused on Dr. Hall’s published scholarship, driven by complaints of students, or the demands of external advocacy groups. It is focused on his YouTube based videos and comments in social media that have been characterized as being anti-Semitic, supportive of holocaust denial and engagement in conspiracy theories.”
Those are pretty big NOTS. The reasons for disappearing me from the faculty and even from the campus did not involve my published scholarship and complaints from students. In the official explanation of why the decision was made to terminate in mid-term, in an atmosphere of dishonour, the very platform of a tenured and full professor, the reasons outlined are ill-defined to say the least. How is it Dr. Mahon considered himself qualified to disintegrate my academic platform simply by waving some sort of magic wand over my decades of meritorious service.
Dr. Mahon’s claim that my suspension was not brought about by the demands of external advocacy groups is transparently dishonest. After all, only four days before my suspension, the CBC ran a headline announcing “B’nai Brith wants [me] fired.” The B’nai Brith/ U of L conniving together is a matter of record amply recorded throughout this essay.
What were the reasons that the U’s resident expert on Leisure Studies give FOR my being suspended? The answer pointed towards “YouTube based videos and comments in social media that have been characterized as being anti-Semitic, supportive of holocaust denial and engagement in conspiracy theories.” What videos? What comments? Dr. Mahon fails to cite his sources. It like giving as an academic reference say to the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.
The accusation mirrors the Zionists’ Zombie complaint to a tee. Dr Mahon is saluting and enforcing the Israel-First creed.
Dr. Mahon fails to give even a single example of reprehensible You Tube or social media comment. That’s a pretty slippery entrance on a trip towards a consequential outcome.
Dr. Mahon indicate this unspecified items attributed to me have “been characterized as being anti-Semitic, supportive of holocaust denial and engagement in conspiracy theory.” Who is making these characterizations? Who are the experts he is depending on to give backing to his finding? What is his own opinion on something specific I have said or have published. What a cop out to not even name the individuals doing the dirty work of giving the career-destroying characterization. Dr. Mahon seems to want to hide under a pillow as he is doing the dirty work of selling out the University as a reputable institution.
I’m trying to hold back. ButI must say, What a coward! What a fuzzy-minded University President To call his commentary “Mickey Mouse” does a disservice to Walt Disney. Dr. Mahon’s commentary here touches on some of the most momentous issues of our time. He shows no awareness of the gravity of the decisions he is espousing with evidence or articulate explanation of his precedent-setting actions
In my opinion Dr. Mahon’s failure to do justice to some of the main responsibilities of his job,have had a very injurious cumulative impact on the University of Lethbridge. The damage done to the school continues to gather momentum. The decline is evident in the heavy-handed handling by administrators and by faculty of the challenge posed by Dr. Widdowson’s refusal to be swept to the sidelines of a major national debate she is helping to simulate.
One key focus of that larger debate concerns how we should understand the relationship between genocide and Indian residential schools in Canada.
Are the officials of the U of L and of Advanced Education in the UCP government aware of the many thousands of outraged public comments in many You Tubes illuminating the current abuses underway prioritizing indoctrination over the sublime freedom of open, yet disciplined, debate.?Are our governors aware of the outpouring of public sentiment that is basically supportive of Dr. Widdowson when she stands up to the kind of systematic bullying she has faced especially at the University of Lethbridge?
In his statement on October 13, 2016 for the “University Community,” where Dr. Mahon explains my suspension without pay, without due process, and without my mobility rights to even walk through the U of L campus without being arrested, Dr. Mahon adds the following. He accuses me of having created
an environment that is discriminatory for students and [my] faculty colleagues whose personal backgrounds, research topics or beliefs are at odds with Dr. Hall’s stated views.
Once again…. what stated views? How are my views any more or less at odds than my colleagues and all other members of the “University Community.” Its as if Dr. Mahon believes that I should be weeded from the academy because I do not conform with some fictional consensus he invents to soothe his immature, simplistic yet confused mind.
If Dr. Mahon had even talked to me once he might have had some conception of my actual stated views rather that those outlined for him by those on the frontlines of the Israel-First Lobby in Canada among whom he figured prominently in 2015-2018. Does the consensus he imagines distinguishing the acceptable members of the “University Community” in 2016 now extend to those who embrace the genocide that the Israel-First Zionists have perpetrated? Who is now out of line with acceptable interpretation?
To me Dr. Mahon’s justification for weeding me out of the big happy family he envisages at the University of Lethbridge runs particularly contrary to the vision of the University as a place that affords significant space for masters of independent inquiry and critical thought. His infatuation with disappearing and “neutralizing” those outside his conception of permitted opinion helps explain the exclusionary treatment that has been heaped on Frances Widdowson at the University of Lethbridge in a series of events since 2023..
Dr. Mahon’s adoption of B’nai Brith’s emphasis on media like Facebook and You Tube obviously comes at the expense of his paying much attention to the larger bastions of scholarship like the massive and well reviewed university press books I have produced. Is Dr. Mahon aware that in 2004 my book, The American Empire and the Fourth World, won the main Alberta prize for the best non-fiction book of 2004. The Prize banquet took place at the Paliser Hotel in Calgary.
I belong at the University of Lethbridge where I am now Emeritus Professor in spite of Dr. Mahon’s despicable conniving with the prominent members of the genocidal Israel-First Lobby that tried to eliminate me from the faculty.
I would think more highly of Dr. Mahon if he had spent even an hour or two looking at the intellectual roots of my work in the course of his unprofessional and unethical hit job on my career. If he had done even a small bit of his own independent research on my academic work, Dr. Mahon might not have looked so ridiculous when he presented himself as some sort of expert on my You Tubes.
Why didn’t Dr. Mahon consult with Dr. Owen Holmes, one of the more celebrated academic founders and builders of the University of Lethbridge, who has written quite extensively on the University of Lethbridge case, a case in which our former president played a sad and sordid role.
What Now?
On Feb 3 and 4 I took part in events at the University of Lethbridge that included Dr. Frances Widdowson and her husband Albert Howard. One of the outcomes of our time occurred on April 25. On that day a poor excuse for a paper trail beginning on Feb 4 was produced leading to the police arrest of Dr. Widdowson as a trespasser on the Lethbridge Campus.
Back to Text
Little by little the message seems to be getting through that Alberta’s Advanced Education system is not in a health state and the University of Lethbridge is being identified as a ground zero of the problem. Accordingly the University of Lethbridge might become ground zero where something like an academic remedy might be attempted. The goal would be to push back against a malady that materialized for me in the dangerous antics of an Antifa-style Native Rights Mob.
________
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