The Finlayson Affair: Canada’s Dreyfus Moment

History doesn’t just repeat itself with military precision; sometimes it replays itself in bureaucratic monotony. The uniforms change—epaulettes replaced by lanyards, sabres by syllabi—but the essence remains: a man is made into a warning for standing with the wrong truth.

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was convicted of treason and shipped to rot on Devil's Island. Not because he spied. But because he existed inconveniently: Jewish, competent, and upright. The Dreyfus Affair wasn’t just an indictment of a man but a mirror held to a rotting republic. Zola saw it and said: J’Accuse! It echoed across time.

Fast forward. Enter Paul Finlayson—not a Jew by blood or synagogue, but close enough in conviction to be cast as one by those who despise both. He supports Israel. He defends Jewish life. For that, he has been assigned the familiar role of the heretic. “If standing with Jews makes me a Jew,” he says, “then so be it. I take it as a compliment.

He was not, as with Dreyfus, accused of espionage.  But, you wouldn’t know it from the treatment. Rather, for saying the obvious: that Hamas, the murder cult responsible for October 7, is a genocidal death cult akin to the Nazis. An analogy that might earn you a byline in The Guardian or Haaretz—on any other day. But uttering it as a professor at the University of Guelph-Humber, that bureaucratic chimaera where the only real merger is between cowardice and careerism, suddenly becomes heresy.

There, such moral clarity is treated as radioactive. Finlayson was seized—not physically, but professionally. Hauled from his office, gagged, silenced, and slandered. The Vice Provost herself, Melanie Spence-Ariemma, filed the human rights complaint. The accuser wasn't a student or a peer, but the institution incarnate. She called him a danger to children. Let that sink in. Not just wrong. Dangerous. A violent threat. The kind of rhetoric one uses for paedophiles and predators. It was, to borrow from Orwell, not a complaint but a punishment in search of a justification.

And what followed was worse.

The professors who told students he was a criminal? No punishment. No investigation. The professor who essentially called him a paedophile in the Human Rights Complaint? Still employed, still smug. He bragged—yes, bragged—to students that he'd reached out to his contacts at Stop Zionist Hate. The result? A social media mob of over 300,000 was encouraged to demand Finlayson’s firing, with every email address at the university conveniently posted. Another 20,000 were told he was a racist. Finlayson was gagged and shunned.

Gagged and shunned. And when you're banned from campus, your ears catch only the few drops that splash from the river of slander. He wonders: how much of the defamatory flood is he aware of? 2%? 5%? Surely not the majority.

And what happens to those who did this? They aren’t reprimanded—they're coddled. Sometimes, they proclaim themselves the victims just to complete the Kafkaesque tableau. After objecting to his treatment by the university, Finlayson learned that his protest made the Vice Provost feel "unsafe." Yes, unsafe. Expressing outrage at being smeared, banned, silenced, and accused of being a danger to children now constitutes a security threat. She might need security. The last refuge of a scoundrel may not be patriotism, but victimhood.

No evidence. No threat. Just another slander, this one cloaked in therapeutic jargon.

"Maybe I’m not Dreyfus," Finlayson says. "It’s a bit pretentious. I am not off to Devil’s Island.  But I am a man put in medieval stocks—a public punishment ritual where everyone is free to lob rhetorical bombs and slurs, with the added cruelty that I must thank them for their restraint and, above all, that I must be silent.  When I cry out, I am accused of recrimination. I am not human and will not be responded to or heard.”

He can’t go on campus anyway—not by their edict, trespassed, and not now safely. And that’s no exaggeration. The institution, led by Vice Provost Melanie Spence-Ariemma and her colleague Wael Ramadan, has placed his life in danger. It only takes one person radicalised by a lie, and Ramadan and his student confederates have done their best to ensure that the lie spreads like wildfire. Ramadan’s posts glorify Hamas, vilify Jews, and cross into what any serious reading of Canadian law would recognise as hate propaganda.

And the universities know it. The University of Guelph, Humber College, the University of Guelph-Humber, and even Sheridan College, whose President has slavishly ignored Professor Ramadan’s violent anti-Jewish rhetoric, have had 18 months to back down, to recognise the danger, to defend a faculty member facing targeted harassment and threats. Instead, they’ve doubled down. They’ve protected the inciters and punished the whistleblower. They’ve left Finlayson exposed, endangered, and alone.

That wasn't an accident. It was deliberate—a choice made with full knowledge of the stakes.

Meanwhile, staff members went from student to student in the days following his suspension, spreading lies with impunity. Finlayson received alarmed call after alarmed call from students: staff were aggressive, spreading lies that he’d assaulted someone in class, he was under criminal investigation, and he was about to be fired.

The staff member told students she had insider knowledge, that she had witnesses, that Finlayson was a problem child with a poor record, and that he would be terminated no matter what. The truth—his excellent academic record and his popularity as a professor—was discarded in favour of whispered defamations. And any discipline for these staff members? None. They were part of the team.

When Finlayson complained, he was threatened by the Head of Public Safety—a woman who thought it appropriate to copy the Toronto Police on emails to him. One month before any charges were even concocted, it was made plain to him: procedural justice was just a Potemkin village. He would be fired. They just needed to finish the paperwork. And all the while, he had to endure their sanctimonious emails, smug HR platitudes, and infinite capacity to repeat a lie until it became an institutional truth. Finlayson says that living with the lie that there has ever been any attempt at procedural justice is torturous.

The university is still trying to fire him, with cause. Yes, with cause. Let’s pretend he deserves it. The unions, OPSEU 562 and CUPE 3913, have done everything but join the VP's morning huddles and legal jackal pack to brainstorm the next move in the "Destroy Finlayson" strategy.

The strange part? The Vice Provost and his accuser never met him. Never spoke to him. But the moment a student forwarded his post standing with Israel and comparing Hamas to Nazis, they responded as if he'd shown up in class wearing a KKK robe and dropping the N-word. That’s the moral equation now.

Defending Jews is hate speech. But don’t worry—they’re not antisemitic. They once went to a multifaith service and put up a Hanukkah poster.

The new blasphemy is not racism—it’s refusing to call genocide “resistance.”

Staff were instructed to shun him. Do not reply. Forward emails to HR, which, in an exquisite parody of Kafka, never responds. Even the new Business Department Head has been told not to communicate with him. Phone calls go unanswered. Emails vanish into the ether—nary a word in 18 months. A paid suspension, but without the pay unless he contacts the Labour Board, gets a lawyer, and is humiliated by HR treating him like a criminal. Benefits denied. Payroll records are inaccessible. A bureaucratic oubliette.

When he asked them to stop spreading lies about him, the institution, not the students, threatened him with criminal harassment.

Imagine that. They lie about you. Call you dangerous. Then, when you ask them to stop, they say you are the threat.

When he speaks, he is told he must be silent. When he is silent, they say his silence is suspicious.

The psychological toll is not academic. According to published research in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, shunning—or "social exclusion"—triggers the same brain regions as physical pain.

The pain of ostracism is not metaphorical but real, biological, and brutal. When combined with defamatory campaigns and institutional silence, it creates what psychiatrists call "complex trauma." Chronic stress, isolation, loss of identity—the stuff of psychiatric handbooks and, increasingly, Canadian HR practice.

He wonders why the few who speak to him are cold, abrupt, sometimes hostile. But what have they been told? That he’s a racist, a danger, a menace. An axe murderer, perhaps.

“I email them, desperately, crying out, ‘what have you heard about me, why do you treat me like this?’ They never respond,” he says.

Human Rights complaints in Canada—sacrosanct and secretive—allow the accuser to defame at will while the accused is gagged. And when the accuser is the Vice Provost, to whom does one appeal? The janitor?

He is not a professor now, not even a person. He is a liability, a line item, a ghost.

And the smear campaign has its twin in the cowardice of the Human Rights Office. They cleared his accuser’s co-complainant of three separate human rights claims —a professor who has posted over 4,000 anti-Israel messages since October 7, including paeans to Hamas, memes or individuals that he concurs with who, in their spare time, accuse Jews of organ theft, satanism, and being filth. Posts that would qualify as hate propaganda under the Canadian Criminal Code. Nothing. Silence. And when Jewish students complain? They are told to wait. Reflect. Consider nuance. A human rights department that does not support Jews.

Canada’s streets now echo with the chants of Hamas mobs, blocking ambulances, screaming genocidal slogans, while police arrest those who oppose them. Call it the Muslim Exception Clause to the Criminal Code. But heaven help you if you question it.

Paul Finlayson did. And now he lives in exile, in situ.

He calls it psychological abuse. He is right. It is defamation, shunning, and enforced silence dressed up in the garb of process. He isn’t allowed to respond to those who accuse him. But they can call the police on him for writing an email.

He has become a non-person. A Jew, not erased, but redacted.

He once knew three Jewish professors at his university. One was too scared to reveal they were Jewish. One has capitulated to the gospel of passivity: that if Jews stay quiet, invisible, meek, the mob will pass over them. And the third has simply vanished. Resigned. Moved. Escaped.

The university, for its part, continues its dance of denial. Perhaps they'll post a Hanukkah flyer next December—provided no one rips it down or smears a swastika. That, after all, is the Canadian threshold for concern. When students, as they have, scream, “F*** Zionists!” in the hallways, the executive will weakly condemn it.

It is not about procedure. It is about purging. Finlayson has not failed by one system. All of them have failed him: the university, the unions, the Human Rights Office, and a country so enraptured by its virtue-signalling that it forgot truth requires teeth.

He has lost his peace, his income, and his name. He has gained only clarity. And he asks, quite reasonably: Where the hell is everyone?

This is Canada’s Dreyfus Moment.

Not because we are rounding up Jews—not yet—but because we are shunning, silencing, and smearing them with bureaucratic cruelty. And when they cry out, we tell them they are the problem.

Finlayson doesn’t know if he wants his job back. What he wants is justice. Or, failing that, he wants the story told. And now it is.

He says only God can bring real justice; Finlayson has little hope of it on earth.

And so, after 18 months of exile in situ—cut off, slandered, surveilled—Paul Finlayson finds himself not vindicated, not restored, but clear-eyed. The system that chewed him up was not broken. It was functioning precisely as designed: to protect the institution, not the truth; to preserve the hierarchy, not justice.

He does not claim sainthood, nor martyrdom. He claims only what is his: the right to speak, to be heard, and not to be lied about in silence. What was done to him was not an error. It was deliberate, orchestrated, and repeated.

In reflecting on the scale of it all—the defamation, the shunning, the institutional cowardice dressed in moral jargon—he turns not to grievance but to a line that has haunted the conscience of free people for generations. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who endured far worse and understood far deeper, once wrote:

“Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

Finlayson knows that what he is up against is not just a lie, but the Lie: the pernicious falsehood that antisemitism ceases to be dangerous when it is polite, bureaucratically laundered, and hidden beneath the bland upholstery of university administration. It can be excused as long as it doesn’t shout or goose-step. It can wear a diversity lanyard and still target Jews, so long as it cites “impact” and “process” while doing so.

That lie, he says, will not pass through him. And neither will it pass through his daughter and family, as his daughter, Sophia, wrote “In Defence of my Father,” - on behalf of her family and her dad -  in a powerful piece in Finlayson’s  Substack, freedomtoffend.com,

Let the record show: he stood.

Let the record show: we were warned.

Will you stand?