News Brief

A Canadian professor lashed out at critics of his attendance in December at a Tehran conference questioning the Holocaust. Shiraz Dossa, a tenured professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, accused his bosses of being hypocritical, illiterate Islamophobes in an article published Monday by the Literary Review of Canada, the Chronicle Herald reported. Dossa, who was criticized by the school administration for attending the conference in Iran, said he attended out of academic interest and charged the university with sanctioning “a crusade against a Muslim Holocaust scholar.” Dossa also called portrayals of the conference as a conclave of Holocaust deniers a “fallacy that had been concocted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish Defense League.” “It was the Zionists and the neo-Nazis who, for very different, self-serving reasons, depicted it as a Holocaust-denial conference and sold [that view] to willing, anti-Iranian Islamophobes,” Dossa wrote. University President Sean Riley defended the criticism, asserting that while Dossa was entitled to his opinion, it was “terrible” that the university s name was “tainted” by the participation in the conference of “those denying one of the great tragedies of human rights in the modern era.”