Brock University launches review after prof compares Israel, Nazis

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Brock University has launched a review after a professor praised Hamas’s October 7 atrocities against Israeli civilians, compared the Jewish state to Nazi Germany, and cited antisemitic conspiracy theories in a series of blog posts.

Tamari Kitossa, a decolonization and anti-racism scholar at Brock University, where he heads the critical sociology department, wrote a four-part series written following the Hamas atrocities, which Kitossa describes as “miraculous.” He argues that Zionism and Nazism are one and the same.

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“Zionism is a colonial project that intended from the start on lebensraum, a project of ethnic cleansing that preceded the coalition of German industrialists, US bankers and Hitler’s gang of thugs that formed the Third Reich,” writes Kitossa in a blog post on his personal website.

The posts were originally supposed to be published in the Journal of State Crime but were rejected “by the managing editor for reasons entirely unpersuasive,” Kitossa explains in the endnotes to a blog post. The Journal of State Crime declined to comment.

When reached for comment and asked whether his writings were based on robust scholarship or if they could be viewed as antisemitism, Kitossa replied: “I have no response.”

“You have already staked out your position,” Kitossa wrote.

In an email, Maryanne St. Denis, manager of content and communications at Brock University, said the school was unaware of Kitossa’s blog posts until National Post brought them to the school’s attention. “We are currently reviewing this matter,” the school said.

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St. Denis added that Brock has a “range of policies in place to ensure a safe and welcoming campus environment. There is absolutely no place on our campus for hate of any kind.”

The series repeatedly references “Rothschild Zionists” and “banker-cabalists” supposedly responsible for sparking the First World War, and cites Holocaust denier and conspiracy theorist David Icke.

Kitossa’s most recent post is directed at the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a non-governmental organization that developed a non legally binding “working definition of antisemitism” that has been adopted by dozens of countries, including Canada, Israel and the United States. The definition says that “rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism” can be “directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

In the post, Kitossa argues that the IHRA has been “successful in criminalizing” anti-Zionist thought via “gaslighting which treats as equally repugnant criticism of the Zionist State of Israel with hatred of Jews because they are Jews.” The “canard” which lies “at the heart of (a) hateful regime of Zionism,” Kitossa writes, is that “if the Jew does not exist as an object of hate, the Zionist must create her or him to rationalize the raison d’être of Zionism.”

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Kitossa’s writings cover a wide scope of subject matter, including Israel’s research during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kitossa describes this as selling “Jews out to be the lab rats for Pfizer,” he writes in his first essay, and calls it “a project so diabolical that not even Hitler, Eichmann, Mengele or even Henry Ford could have dreamt it.”

His writings often blur the line between strident criticism of Israel and dabbling in antisemitic rhetoric.

“I see that rank-and-file Jewish Zionists, in making a ‘Holy Calf’ of the State of Israel, are not only slaves of the only Jewish State, but they have abdicated their humanity in the process in cheering on holocaust of Gaza,” he argues in his latest article on his personal website.

In another, Kitossa concedes there are still areas in which the Jewish State has an edge over its prospective enemies. In doing so, he cites, for example, Israel’s cyber-warfare ability, but also apparently references the unsubstantiated idea that Israel was involved with what he terms “the espionage honeypot sexcapades of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.”

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(Maxwell is a British former socialite convicted of sex trafficking offences; Epstein, a former financier, committed suicide in a New York jail cell after being arrested on alleged sex-crime offences. Conspiracy theories have proliferated online claiming that Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset.)

The subsequent chapter in Kitossa’s blog posts seeks to highlight supposed similarities between Zionism and Nazism, and is dedicated to the criticism of two distinguished Jewish Holocaust scholars — Raphael Lemkin and Raul Hilberg — because they had varying degrees of Zionist sympathies. Lemkin coined the term “genocide.”

The third post strives to “delink” the Zionist “tools of history, sociology, and socio-legal studies which serves the myth of Jewish exceptionalism at the expense of the Palestinians.”

“The destruction of Palestinians, their very erasure to create a ‘greater Israel’ is encoded in the DNA of Zionism, whatever its variants,” writes Kitossa in that post.

In another, he argues that Jews “have a duty to blow Zionism to the winds.” “This alone will make them worthy of their dead, who were used and betrayed by Zionists, and, for the rest of humanity of whom their dead were a part,” it concludes.

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In his writings, Kitossa specifically highlights the work of Max Blumenthal, a left-wing journalist who has been accused of dabbling in conspiracy theories and downplaying Hamas atrocities on October 7, and Jonas E. Alexis, who contributes to the antisemitic website Veterans Today.

Zionism, Kitossa argues in the series conclusion, “thrives on — and encourages — the idea that the jew is an eternal victim of the ‘goyim,’ Zionists are happiest most when non-Zionist Jews encounter racio-religious discrimination.”

“Zionism is deeply contemptuous and hateful of Jews,” he elaborates in his most recent article. “This meant that before State formation, Zionists actively cheered on both discrimination against Jews in Germany and Austria and the death camps and squads in the occupied lands.”

The blog posts also cite several other controversial scholars. Kitossa cites approvingly from the PhD thesis of “Lebanese scholar Mahmoud Abbas,” not noting Abbas is the Palestinian president and not Lebanese. (Abbas’s thesis contends that Jews shared a portion of the blame for the Holocaust.)

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Kitossa also cites Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian whose work has been criticized by other historians for intellectual dishonesty, and Arthur Koestler, some of whose work has been discredited but still used by neo-Nazis and some in the Arab world to claim that Jews are not indigenous to the region.

Gil Troy, a McGill University history professor, reviewed Kitossa’s writings and underscores that while he would “bend over backward to defend free speech and academic freedom,” the series of articles “are unhinged, wildly inaccurate, sloppy, and offensive,” he told National Post by email.

“Some of the statements, especially the broad launching of gross, and quite familiar, anti-Semitic stereotypes, cross a line that would not be tolerated in speech characterizing any other group,” Troy wrote. 

Troy was especially struck by Kitossa’s depiction of Jewish heritage trips — basically trips where Jews in foreign nations receive free trips to Israel to explore their roots. Kitossa called them “an act of positive eugenics,” and described them as “sex junkets for foreign Jews to Israel” funded by the government “and rich Jews.” 

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“This sentence is the most problematic because it — like all the Rothschild references — traffics in traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes of rich, manipulative Jews who are sexually deviant,” Troy explained. “You have to follow the footnote, and dig deep into the article cited, to see that these nefarious supposed ‘sex junkets for foreign Jews to Israel,’ are educational programs to build Jewish and Zionist identity, such as Birthright Israel.”

Troy said that Kitossa’s writings make “a mockery of the word ‘academic’” and questioned whether similar rhetoric against other minority groups would be tolerated by college administrators.

“This kind of ranting and bile is not a jailable offence in a democracy. But it certainly should trigger some serious conversations among administrators and leaders of Brock University,” he concluded. 

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