Ontario doctor removed from journal after calling out antisemitism

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An obstetrics professor at McMaster University was removed from the editorial board of an academic journal after publicly criticizing his professional association for failing to condemn the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7.

“As everybody was traumatized, we waited, in shock, for people to condemn,” Jon Barrett told National Post. “And I was waiting for the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (SOGC), as soon as the stories of rape and sexual violence came out. I was waiting for the women’s organizations, and it became very clear the duplicity of women’s organizations across the world.”

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Barrett wrote emails to the SOGC leadership asking why the association hadn’t spoken publicly. In March, after the organization continued to avoid issuing a public statement on sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas, he wrote an op-ed in National Post condemning the SOGC’s position.

“This silence has shaken me to the core because it reveals something much more sinister than just the age-old fear of a Jew experiencing antisemitism,” Barrett wrote in the Post.

This silence has shaken me to the core because it reveals something much more sinister than just the age-old fear of a Jew experiencing antisemitism

His op-ed explained his lifelong devotion to the SOGC, the leading body for Canadian OBGYNs with over 4,000 members, and his struggle to reconcile the organization’s devotion to women’s health with its silence on the weaponization of sexual assault by Hamas.

“Weeks after Oct. 7 passed, I wrote to the leadership asking why they had been silent and was met with excuses. Eventually, in December, the SOGC released a statement, but this made no mention of Hamas or even the date of Oct. 7,” he wrote in the Post. “It simply stated, ‘In the light of recent and ongoing global events’ and mentioned the Red Line Initiative. What recent events? Committed by who against whom? I asked, but received no response.”

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Barrett saw political bias in SOGC President Amanda Black’s December 2023 public letter applauding the reporting of sexual assault perpetrated by Russian soldiers in Ukraine — and highlighting the organization’s work advocating for women — alongside the association’s silence on Hamas’s atrocities against Israeli women.

“The penny dropped, my denial evaporated and it all changed. It was then that I resigned. I fear that, once again, just like in my grandmother’s generation, the Jew is being dehumanized to the point where the most heinous of acts are accepted by society. If you cannot name the perpetrators and victims, you are complicit,” Barrett wrote.

After the op-ed was published, Barrett says he received a call from Togas Tulandi, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada (JOGC), the academic publication associated with SOGC. According to Barrett, Tulandi told him that his op-ed had angered the association’s leaders, and, following his public resignation from the SOGC, they were demanding his removal as an associate editor of the journal. Barrett says he challenged Tulandi over the basis of his removal and the then editor-in-chief apologized for raising the matter.

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Shortly after, Tulandi sent a message to JOGC’s editorial board, informing the group, “I regret my error,” and that Barrett would no longer be dismissed. Tulandi’s communication clarified that the underlying tension centred on whether Barrett could continue in his role despite no longer being an SOGC member.

Emails reviewed by the Post reveal that the announcement sent ripples across JOGC, with Tulandi announcing his resignation from the journal’s leadership alongside at least two other members of the editorial board. According to Barrett, several others expressed sympathy and contemplated leaving JOGC but feared doing so would undermine their ability to challenge the direction of the journal.

Barrett, himself, regretted resigning from SOGC, in retrospect.

“I don’t think it was the right thing to do, but it was that frustration that I didn’t feel I had a voice anyway,” he told the Post. “Perhaps I could have used the voice of reason, internally, to change.”

Arthur Leader, a professor emeritus of obstetrics at the University of Ottawa, empathized with Barrett’s predicament. “It was not surprising that he reacted against the SOGC’s double standard in its statements on the brutal attacks on women in the Ukraine and Israel. When he failed to modify the Society’s position, he resigned his membership — an ethical response,” Leader told the Post in an email.

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Leader, who resigned following the incident, said that “SOGC and Elsevier publications removed (Barrett) from the Journal‘s editorial board on the pretext that only SOGC members could be board members. Yet there was no similar directive to me and other editorial board members who are not SOGC members. This disrespect for academic freedom has led to the departure of the editor, Dr. Barrett, myself and others. Much has been lost. The victim will be women’s health care in Canada.”

In an email this month to National Post, SOGC’s president pointed to a statement issued in December 2023 “specifically condemning the use of women as weapons of war — a tragic and enduring reality for women globally. This was a general statement applicable to all countries where such atrocities were, and continue, to be committed,” Black wrote. “This is also a position that the SOGC has always had and will continue to maintain.”

Barrett was unswayed by Black’s argument and pointed to statements issued by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on Oct. 13 condemning violence against women in the Middle East, noting “it is horrifyingly clear that they are being specifically targeted for sexual violence, abuse, and kidnapping.” The Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine sent an even more direct email to “our Israeli colleagues and your patients” in November.

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Black cited Barrett’s decision to let his membership lapse as the reason his editorial term was not renewed.

Barrett argued that while his three-year renewable term was set to expire, the vast majority of editors serve subsequent stints and he could not remember another JOGC editor who received a similar dismissal note. “No other editor whose term is coming up in October has been informed that their term is up,” Barrett said in an email to the Post. “It was just a backtrack when they realized the ‘reason’ they gave was false.”

His subsequent attempts to resolve the dispute with the SOGC were rejected.

Elsevier, the academic publishing house that oversees the publication of JOGC, referred the Post to the SOGC’s statement.

Barrett speaks highly of Tulandi, a world-class researcher at McGill University who helped JOGC obtain an “impact factor,” an academic metric that a journal is influential in its field of study. “This was also not your ‘error,’ Togus,” he wrote in an email to the JOGC editorial board following Tulandi’s resignation.

“I think all of us, including some (of) you on this email who are on the board, see this for what it is – a transparent and petulant attempt by some of the leadership of the SOGC to place pressure on Togus, an editor of an international journal, to do something he did not want to do and then scramble trying to find a reason,” he wrote.

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