SouthernWorldwide.com – A non-Jewish Canadian professor claims he was terminated from his university position after defending Israel in an online post amidst a surge of antisemitism across Canada following the Hamas attacks on October 7th.
Professor Finlayson stated that in November 2023, he responded to a message on LinkedIn from an international educator whom he described as advocating for Israel’s destruction. Although the original poster later removed their content and related comments, the National Post quoted Finlayson’s response in an article published in December 2023.
“If you say ‘from the River to the Sea’, you’re a Nazi,” Finlayson wrote. “I’m not neutral. I stand with Israel. I stand against antisemites who want nothing but dead Jews: who take millions from their education and health care budgets and spend it on making war…You stand with Palestine means you stand with Hitler. You don’t want peace, you want dead Jews…They murdered 1,400 innocents and took 250 hostages and the people celebrated rapist monsters as heroes.”
Finlayson alleges that since making this post, he has been subjected to a concerted campaign that has negatively impacted his professional reputation and future employment opportunities.
He explained that students at his university discovered his LinkedIn reply before the original poster deleted the thread, which led to significant backlash. Finlayson recounted an incident on November 27th where, while meeting with a student in his office, an administrator waited outside and subsequently presented him with a letter of suspension.
The suspension letter, which Finlayson provided, cited “inappropriate online comments” and placed him “on leave pending the outcome of the investigation.” It also instructed Finlayson to refrain from contacting “any of your departmental staff or students or broader members of the [university].”
Finlayson asserted that he was highly regarded by his students, who had consistently rated him among the top faculty in the business department. He expressed that rumors surrounding the accusations against him had damaged his academic standing, which included his work in curriculum development and textbook authorship.
“My trial has been by defamation, and it continues by defamation,” Finlayson remarked, describing the ensuing situation as “Kafkaesque.”
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The university formally dismissed Finlayson in July 2025. He shared his termination letter, which indicated that following a “formal complaint of discrimination and harassment,” an investigator concluded that his “conduct violated the Ontario Human Rights Code and Humber’s Human Rights and Harassment Policy, and that [he] engaged in reprisal under both of those instruments.”
The Humber harassment policy stipulates that “anyone who attempts Reprisal or threatens Reprisal against a person who initiates a complaint or participates in proceedings under this Policy may be subject to disciplinary action.”
This policy also states that “Humber upholds and supports the right to equal treatment without Discrimination” based on protected grounds, which encompass antisemitism.
The Instagram page of “UofGforPalestine” at the University of Guelph, identifying itself as a collective of “students, staff, and faculty who stand in solidarity with Palestine,” has shared posts featuring the inverted red triangle, a symbol used by Hamas to designate targets. Hamas is classified as a terrorist group by both Canada and the United States.
In November 2024, the group posted images on its Instagram account depicting a guillotine that had appeared on a walking path in Guelph. The images showed the heads of Canadian, American, and Israeli leaders covered in red paint. Although presented as an “anonymous submission,” the post conveyed a message of “Death to empire, death to colonialism and imperialism, death to the war machine.”
Finlayson believes that a professor at the University of Guelph-Humber, who has made inflammatory statements on his own LinkedIn account—calling Israel a “terrorist state” and asserting that the world “cannot have both” peace and Israel—was instrumental in the case against him.
While Finlayson lost his academic position, other activists in Canada have faced different outcomes. In November 2023, eleven individuals, including three staff members from York University, were charged with “hate-motivated mischief” for covering a bookstore with photos accusing a Jewish CEO of genocide and splashing the store with red paint, as reported by the National Post.
Since the October 7th terrorist attacks, antisemitism has seen a significant rise across Canada. In April, B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights released a report indicating that 6,800 antisemitic incidents occurred in the country in 2025, marking a 9.4% increase from 2024. This averages to 18.6 incidents per day, representing the “highest volume” recorded by the organization since it began tracking such events.
