A Canadian university has suspended a professor who has denied the historical accuracy of the Holocaust and accused Israel of planning the 9/11 terror attacks.
Anthony Hall, a professor of liberal education and globalization at University of Lethbridge in Alberta, was suspended without pay while the university investigates whether his statements constitute violations of the Alberta Human Rights Act. The university issued a statement saying that it “has taken immediate and active steps to ensure that the suspension of Dr. Hall will not impact or disrupt the studies of the affected students of the University of Lethbridge.”
The Holocaust and 9/11 are “historical tragedies — some of the greatest tragedies of modern times,” said Amanda Hohmann, the national director of B’nai Brith Canada’s League of Human Rights. “And trying to rewrite those to try to set a particular political agenda is just horribly offensive.”
Shimon Koffler Fogel, the CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, also lauded the suspension. “The administration has taken the right approach and worked within the parameters of its labour guidelines to remove Dr. Hall from the privileged position he abused for too long,” he said in a statement.
B’nai Brith Canada posted a video of Hall’s comments calling for “open debate” about the Holocaust and declaring that 9/11 attacks were “of course a Zionist job.”
In a profile of Hall in June, The Lethbridge Herald, a local newspaper, compiled a number of his conspiracy theories: “The 2014 Parliament Hill shooting in Ottawa was a scheme to keep [Prime Minister] Stephen Harper in power; the Sandy Hook massacre was staged to promote gun control; and Jewish Zionists are waging a secret war to demonize Muslims around the world through control of western media.”
Hall is the co-host of a YouTube series called “False Flag Weekly News,” which the Herald described as promoting “the idea of a global Zionist conspiracy to create hatred against Muslims by promoting an alternative narrative of Muslim extremism through global ‘false flag’ terror events.” Hall’s two co-hosts, Kevin Barrett and James Fetzer, were also described as “established Holocaust deniers.”
Barrett is often interviewed on Iran’s PressTV and is associated with the website Veterans Today, which the Southern Poverty Law Center described as being “squarely in neo-Nazi territory.”
Barrett has also defended many other professors accused of anti-Semitism, including Joy Karega, an Oberlin College professor whose anti-Semitic online postings were first reported by The Tower in February and who was put on leave by Oberlin prior to the beginning of the academic year, as well as Nikolaos Balaskas, who was fired from Canada’s York University in September for writing Facebook posts that, according to the university’s investigation, “target identifiable groups based on such factors as race, religion, and ethnic origin” and “denigrate particular religious faiths include those of the Jewish faith.”
[Photo: ULethbridge / YouTube ]