Iran, Holocaust denial and the Canadian professor

We previously ran a photo accompanying this post which we believed depicted Prof. Shiraz Dossa. In fact it was another Shiraz Dossa, unconnected to St Francis Xavier University. We apologise to the latter Mr Dossa for this error.

Winter term is starting at St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, where that distinguished political scientist Professor Shiraz Dossa is teaching “an introduction to political analysis and judgment”. That’s right, judgment. Not a quality Dossa exhibits when it comes to accepting invitations to academic conferences attended by Holocaust deniers, including Fredrick Toben (see below).

You would have thought that a conference on the Holocaust organised by President Ahmadinejad of Iran would have set off some alarm bells. But no. Dossa, a ferocious critic of Israel who believes that “the real anti-Semitism” consists of anti-Arab sentiment, headed off to Tehran in 2006 to hang out with Neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers and the Ku Klux Klan. We do not know, alas, whether Dossa found time to admire the model of Treblinka extermination camp, complete with trains, that Toben brought along to demonstrate the non-existence of gas chambers.

The professor’s justification for attending this obscene event? Here it is, from an article in the Literary Review of Canada:

The second western fallacy is that the event was a Holocaust-denial conference because of the presence of a few notorious western Christian deniers/skeptics, a couple of a neo-Nazi stripe. It was nothing of the sort. It was a Global South conference convened to devise an intellectual/political response to western-Israeli intervention in Muslim affairs. Holocaust deniers/skeptics were a fringe, a marginal few at the conference. The majority of the papers focused on the use and abuse of the Holocaust in Arab, Muslim, Israeli and western politics, a serious and worthy subject for international academic discussion. Out of the 33 conference paper givers, 27 were not Holocaust deniers, but were university professors and social science researchers from Iran, Jordan, Algeria, India, Morocco, Bahrain, Tunisia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Syria.

Dossa’s assurances seem to have satisfied St Francis Xavier University – after all, he’s still teaching there. On the other hand, his chances of living this one down seem slim: just try Googling his name.

Incidentally, he seems to have a Facebook profile. Anyone fancy becoming his friend? Fredrick?