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A portion of a fascinating interview with Prof. Denis Rancourt by Kourosh Ziabari – Fars News Agency.
Please visit http://www.radicalpress.com/?s=UNIVERSITY+OF+OTTAWA for the entire interview discussing the attack on freedom of speech, Palestine, collusion of Israel and Canada for Zionist concerns and more. .
Q: What’s your viewpoint regarding the influence of the Israeli lobby on the universities and academic unions in the West, especially in the North America? The case of your dismissal from your position as a professor at the University of Ottawa was simply one of numerous instances showing that the Israeli lobby can easily manipulate the university officials in the West into making illegal decisions and expelling the disobedient academicians, just like the Prof. Steven Salaita who has been recently fired from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for his comments criticizing the Israeli massacre in the Gaza Strip. How has Israel gained such an influence over the academic institutions in the West?
A: The Israel Lobby has the role of chief-whip for the US military-economic-finance empire; Empire, for short. That is, the Lobby ensures doctrinal discipline among Western, that is, US-aligned politicians, intellectuals, and the media, regarding the Empire’s Middle East policy. I mean “intellectual” in the broad sense of any professional who has influence, and “media” in the broad sense of anyone who communicates to others.
The Empire’s main geopolitical focus presently is the Middle East, where the Empire is dedicated to actively and continuously prevent liberation and coalescence of Arab nations, so as to keep control of the territory and the energy resources. To achieve this, the Empire’s main policy in the Middle East is Israel, which is charged with continual war and sabotage against all Middle Eastern entities that would vie for independence from the Empire.
Thus, the Empire, via Israel, is embarked on a vicious and murderous project without an end in the Middle East, and this unsavory project must be sold to the Empire’s home populations, including both managers and ordinary citizens. That is the role of the Israel Lobby; to sell Israel and the continuous and deliberate carnage as acceptable and unavoidable.
That is why the Israel Lobby is actively engaged is creating Islamophobia, in exaggerating anti-Semitism, in constructing Nazi-holocaust remembrance, in suppressing academic freedom, in suppressing freedom of the press, in “finding” and pursuing alleged “terrorists”, in developing anti-speech [or] “anti-hate” laws, in promoting cultural ties with Israel, in attacking Muslim associations, and so on.
As such, the work of the Israel Lobby includes hundreds of ongoing campaigns to intimidate, discipline, fire, and vilify academics who dare to be critical of Israel or of US Middle East policy. The list of shut-out and targeted academics is a long one and includes the well-known cases of Joel Kovel, Ward Churchill, Norman Finkelstein, James Petras, Terri Ginsberg, William Robinson, David F. Noble, Steven Salaita, Iymen Chehade, and many others. The more an academic is threatening to the Lobby, the more aggressively that academic is attacked.
My own case is also an example. I was a tenured Full Professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada’s capital city. I am an internationally recognized researcher and I taught in both the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Arts. I was publicly critical of the university president’s paid trip to Israel. I invited Palestinian speakers into my classrooms to talk about Gaza, and geopolitical analysts who were critical of Israel. These moves led to condemnation of me in the Zionist mainstream media, and to discipline, which was overturned. In 2008, a new university president – Allan Rock – who is a staunch and unconditional supporter of Israel and who had been Canada’s Zionist ambassador to the UN, became immediately motivated to fire me, tenure or not, and irrespective of my popular courses and my large science research funding.
With the help of an entire team using specially-hired union-busting lawyers, after contriving for years including intensive covert surveillance of me using a hired-student spy to monitor my every spoken and written word and my every activity on campus and at other university campuses, the university finally settled on the false pretext for dismissal of alleging that I had improperly assigned high grades to all 23 students in an advanced physics course. They needed a “clean” pretext that they hoped would be supported by public opinion and that would not bring out all of their dirt. When public opinion and some mainstream media sided with me instead, a high-profile Zionist columnist at the New York Times suddenly wrote not-one but two articles to discredit me, and was invited to Canada to falsely defame me, regarding my teaching, on a trend-setting Canadian TV talk show whose producers are Zionists.
Even after I was fired, as I continued to be publicly critical of the institution, the university funded a large defamation lawsuit against me which, after almost four years, has entirely washed-out my personal savings, and over which I was ordered to pay a total of legal costs and damages in excess of one million dollars, that I can never pay. I am presently struggling to generate the funds to pay the costs of court-transcripts for the appeal that has been filed. My funding campaign is endorsed by the Ontario Civil Liberties Association, which also has a campaign that condemns the university’s unlimited funding of the lawsuit against me using public money.
Although the university had many and mixed unstated and illegitimate reasons for wanting to fire me – such as my defiance and outspokenness in several areas, my popular courses and public events, and my support of student and community activism, I have no doubt that I was fired because the new Zionist university president Allan Rock – former Ambassador to the UN, and former Canadian federal government minister – wanted me out and silenced at any cost, and knew that he could count on support from the Zionist establishment. Under cross-examination, the dean testified that the pre-dismissal lockout of my graduate students and I from our laboratory was directed from above by Allan Rock. This president knew my firing would be seen as a good deed by the powerful Zionist establishment that he is part of. Years before I was ultimately fired, it had already been pronounced in the media that my firing was necessary and was desirable because of the “anti-Semitic” nature of my courses, to the great dismay and protests of many of my students.
After I was escorted off campus in handcuffs by police and charged with “trespassing” while I was still a tenured professor, and since my firing in 2009, Allan Rock has been systematically transforming the University of Ottawa into an institutional instrument at the service of Canada’s accelerating “globalist” agenda, and at the service of legitimizing Israel’s role in that agenda — rather than actually prioritizing the learning environment for students in Ottawa, an environment that is in dire need of an overhaul.
Allan Rock needed me out of the way. The Empire needs critics of the Empire out of the way. And the Israel Lobby needs anyone who threatens the acceptance of Israel’s crimes out of the way.