Title: Upside Down: Anti-Palestinian Racism, Judicial Bias, and Inverted Racial Power

Date: Monday, March 16, 2026

Description: This paper wrestles with the contradiction of legal objectivity/subjectivity using the case study of the bias complaint against Justice Spiro for his interference in the hiring of a scholar at the University of Toronto who applied international law to Israel. We trace the meaning of judicial bias from the Court’s leading decision (RDS) to its citation by B’nai Brith of Canada League for Human Rights (B’nai Brith) in its successful intervention before the Federal Court in Justice Spiro’s case. Whereas RDS conceived of bias as permitting (rare) judicial anti-racism, B’nai Brith, the Canadian Judicial Council, and the Federal Court all conceived bias as, in effect, permitting judicial racism—what we term an “upside down” analysis premised on Zionist subjectivity. 

Speakers:

• Joshua Sealy-Harrington - Associate Professor & Chair in Palestinian Human Rights in Canada

Podcast:

Transcript:

00:00:00
Hi everyone, we're going to get started.
00:00:02
So thank you all for attending today's talk by Professor Joshua Seeley Harrington.
00:00:09
It is my great pleasure.
00:00:11
to introduce Professor Seeley Harrington.
00:00:14
And I know this is an especially busy time of the semester for everyone, so I really appreciate and commend you for taking the time to listen and to engage with the work that Professor Seeley Harrington will share with us today in a paper entitled Upside-Down Anti-Palestinian Racism, Judicial Bias, and Inverted Racial Power.
00:00:38
We convene today on the lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples, and I think it's especially fitting and important to reflect on the relationship between peoples and the land and the brutal contests, conflicts, and conquests that have arisen over this land because it is land and a people's relationship to that land that lies at the center of the so-called question of Palestine.
00:01:08
Only in recent years have we come in official political and legal discourse in this territory known as Canada to publicly acknowledge the material fact of genocide perpetrated by settler Europeans against indigenous peoples across Turtle Island.
00:01:26
The history of residential school cemeteries
00:01:30
that my colleague and former special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites, Kim Murray, associated with Indian residential schools, has formed part of the record of this genocide.
00:01:47
And for the better part of 2 1/2 years, we have seen a genocide in Palestine unfolding in real time, a position held by the Israeli human rights organizations B'Tselem and Israeli Physicians for Human Rights, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Palestinian Human Rights Organization Al-Haq, among many others.
00:02:14
The hiring scandal at the University of Toronto that Professor Seeley Harrington will discuss unfolded in 2021, several years before the October 7th attacks and the current genocide.
00:02:29
And we sometimes hear in public discourse a suggestion that what happens, quote, over there in the Middle East or West Asia should not be, quote, brought here, as though the world and its peoples and the flow of arms and weaponry are not inevitably and always as much a story about here as there.
00:02:51
But more fundamentally, I think what Professor Seeley Harrington's work presses us to consider is how the material footprint of
00:02:59
power struggles over Palestine are felt acutely right here in Canadian workplaces, universities, law firms, and courtrooms.
00:03:09
As M.
00:03:10
Gessen wrote in a New Yorker article on EU of T hiring scandal at the time, quote, Palestine is where international human rights consensus collides with the North American political consensus.
00:03:25
So it's these consensus points that Professor Seeley-Harrington, I think, is going to push us to think through in a really carefully crafted piece that I've had the privilege to read in draft form.
00:03:38
And I'm going to introduce him now to speak about that work.
00:03:41
Professor Seeley-Harrington is an associate professor and the chair in Palestinian Human Rights in Canada at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law.
00:03:52
Before joining Windsor Law, he was a law clerk at the Federal Court and the Supreme Court of Canada, as well as an assistant professor at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law, where he was awarded Professor of the Year by the student body and Person of the Year by the Faculty Association for his steadfast defense of academic freedom and Palestinian freedom.
00:04:16
Joshua's teaching, research, and advocacy apply critical legal theory to questions of socio-legal identity and justice, with a particular focus on Black and Palestinian solidarity and resistance.
00:04:30
So without further ado, it's my great privilege and honor to invite Josh to the podium.
00:04:50
I want to begin by thanking Queen's Law for inviting me to present today about some of my latest research on anti-Palestinian racism.
00:04:58
And I want to stress at the outset that it is particularly important to intentionally make space for discussing Palestine and anti-Palestinian racism.
00:05:08
One of its core manifestations is censorship.
00:05:12
And a crucial antidote, therefore, is persisting and having those forbidden conversations that many feckless administrators routinely seek to suppress and intimidate.
00:05:23
I'll provide a high-level overview of the article, which I co-authored with a brilliant TMU law student, Sabadara.
00:05:29
The title, as Lisa said, is Upside Down, Anti-Palestinian Racism, Judicial Bias, and Inverted Racial Power.
00:05:36
And the structure of the article is that it is a discussion of two legal decisions.
00:05:42
First, a bias complaint against a black woman judge in a case of ostensible police brutality.
00:05:48
That is the Supreme Court of Canada's leading decision on racial bias from 1997, commonly referred to as RDS.
00:05:55
Second, a bias complaint against a white male judge who was personally implicated in the anti-Palestinian hiring scandal at the University of Toronto Law School.
00:06:04
that is a recent racial bias decision from the federal court in 2022, which relates to a series of events commonly referred to as EU of T scandal.
00:06:14
Specifically, in our article, we compare the anti-black racism in RDS with the anti-Palestinian racism at U of T to explore what we call the weaponization of bias in Canadian courts.
00:06:28
The core thesis of our article
00:06:31
is that the law institutionalizes inverted racial hierarchies.
00:06:36
That is, the law does not flatten racial hierarchy through a performance of colorblindness, but rather is color conscious in a way that obscures and maintains white supremacy.
00:06:48
In RDS, anti-black police brutality inverted to purportedly anti-white judicial bias.
00:06:56
And in EU of T scandal, anti-Palestinian judicial interference
00:07:00
inverted to a purportedly anti-Semitic complaint against the judge.
00:07:06
Lastly, our article considers 2 key continuities.
00:07:10
One continuity is from RDS to EU of T scandal, where alleged bias works, we argue, to preserve white innocence.
00:07:18
A second continuity is from EU of T scandal to the Gaza genocide, where alleged anti-Semitism works to preserve Israeli impunity.
00:07:27
Now let's proceed through the article.
00:07:30
The article opens with three quotes from the last half century that set the stage for a critical race theory analysis of anti-black racism and anti-Palestinian racism.
00:07:40
Quote number one relates to the test for judicial bias in common law, which was most famously articulated by an overt white supremacist, Lord Denning.
00:07:49
Specifically, in 1982, the New York Times wrote the following about a new publication by Lord Denning.
00:07:56
Quote,
00:07:56
Lord Denning, who is master of the roles, holds one of the most powerful and influential judicial offices in Britain and is the senior judge of the appellate system, argued that all British citizens were no longer qualified to serve on juries.
00:08:10
End quote.
00:08:11
The Times cited directly from Lord Denning's own words, including the following quotes.
00:08:17
The English are no longer a homogenous race.
00:08:20
They are white and black, colored and brown.
00:08:23
Some of them come from countries where bribery and graft are accepted, and where stealing is a virtue so long as you are not found out.
00:08:31
They no longer share the same code of morals or religious beliefs.
00:08:36
Remarkable racial candor from a supposed beacon of the common law.
00:08:42
Quote #2 in the article, in the introduction of the article, is from RDS, where the Supreme Court of Canada cites Lord Denning, ironically, on the test for racial or other bias.
00:08:54
Quote, the test for finding a reasonable apprehension of bias has challenged courts in the past.
00:08:59
Lord Denning, master of the roles, captured the essence of the inquiry in his judgment in Metropolitan Properties Co.
00:09:06
And then the court cites Denning's words.
00:09:09
In considering whether there is a real likelihood of bias, the court does not look at the mind of the justice himself.
00:09:15
It does not look to see if there was a real likelihood that he would, or did, in fact favor one side at the expense of the other.
00:09:21
The court looks at the impression which would be given to other people.
00:09:25
End quote.
00:09:26
One can only imagine why Lord Denning, who lamented the morals of black and brown people, did not want to test for bias that examined the mind of the justice himself.
00:09:35
Finally, quote number three is from Justice Kane, who presided over the judicial review of the complaint against Justice Spiro for his interference in EU of T scandal.
00:09:44
Justice Kaine, understandably, sought to reassure the public at the hearing about her impartiality when adjudicating A complaint against one of her judicial colleagues.
00:09:54
And so at the hearing, she said, quote, I hope none of my questions have suggested that I see things in the way of a judge.
00:10:03
End quote.
00:10:04
But of course, Justice Kaine literally was a judge.
00:10:09
And so we ask in this article the following question.
00:10:13
Do we understand our judiciary better through wishful thinking, or through what can at times feel like uncomfortable but necessary critical inquiry into judicial subjectivity?
00:10:25
There is a consistent tension across the three quotes that open this article.
00:10:29
On the one hand, we have the law performing what is meant to be objectivity.
00:10:34
On the other hand, we have the law, in reality, institutionalizing the subjective preferences of judges.
00:10:41
In RDS,
00:10:42
We call that a white subjectivity.
00:10:45
And with respect to EU of T scandal, we call that a Zionist subjectivity.
00:10:50
This article seeks to excavate these subjectivities to accurately characterize how bias is adjudicated by courts to preserve, we argue, not impartial or objective reasoning, but white innocence.
00:11:05
Let's first consider the RDS case.
00:11:07
And let's begin with the facts surrounding the RDS case.
00:11:11
There are, I would argue, actually two RDS cases.
00:11:15
There's the RDS by reputation, a vindication of social context judging and racial justice more broadly.
00:11:22
And there's the RDS from what I would call a critical race theory perspective, which is an astounding instance of inverted racial hierarchy.
00:11:31
Factually, it was a case of ostensible police brutality by a white officer.
00:11:36
Jurisprudentially,
00:11:38
It is a case of claimed anti-white or anti-police bias by a black judge.
00:11:44
Given this duality, we lay out the factual context in RDS beyond how it is described in the judgment itself to illustrate how white subjectivity obfuscates what was quite plainly a case of anti-black, not anti-white racism.
00:12:01
In the underlying dispute, we have a black boy, Rodney Small.
00:12:06
The Supreme Court's judgment suggests significant ambiguity at first instance.
00:12:11
To the contrary, the record and ruling illustrate a fairly straightforward case of police brutality.
00:12:18
We write in the article, quote, RDS arose out of remarks made by Judge Corinne Sparks, the first black judge in Nova Scotia and the first black female judge in Canada.
00:12:28
Her remarks happened following the trial of a 15-year-old black boy named Rodney Small, who witnessed his young cousin in handcuffs and who, while straddling his bicycle, persisted in offering to contact his cousin's mother after a police officer instructed Rodney to shut up or you'll be under arrest too.
00:12:47
Rodney was charged with three offenses, including assaulting a police officer, despite Police Constable Donald Steinberg violently arresting Rodney with a chokehold.
00:12:56
As Constance Backhouse notes, some observers believed that the situation should have resulted in a criminal charge and policing complaint against the officer.
00:13:06
The underlying dispute aside, we also have the aftermath of the case regarding a black judge, Connie Sparks.
00:13:14
The Supreme Court judgment holds that a black woman judge exhibited bias, though a majority found her bias at least immaterial to her concrete findings.
00:13:24
Through a critical race theory lens, however, Justice Sparks exhibited no meaningful bias.
00:13:29
First, while acquitting Rodney Small, Justice Sparks made a fleeting comment about systemic anti-black racism in Nova Scotia of all places.
00:13:38
Second, she harbored doubt in a police officer's inferior testimony.
00:13:43
RDS is sometimes narrated as a black judge simply acquitting a black accused because of systemic racism.
00:13:50
But this is wildly misleading.
00:13:53
We write, with significant credit to Constance Backhaus's excellent legal history on the case, quote, At trial, Judge Sparks reviewed contradictory testimony from the only two witnesses, Rodney, a black boy who looked about 12 years old, and Constable Steinberg, a white cop over 6 feet tall with a heavyset athletic physique and who chose policing for its physical aspects.
00:14:17
There was a stark disparity between the towering, burly 29-year-old officer and the 5-foot-8-inch, 15-year-old Rodney Small, weighing all of 104 pounds.
00:14:28
Backhouse helpfully summarizes how the two witnesses agreed on some points, but not on others.
00:14:33
Judge Sparks was regarded within her community as a conservative, someone who has never really been vocal on race issues.
00:14:41
She did not accept either witness's narrative wholesale.
00:14:44
She held that the Crown failed to meet its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt after explaining that she found Rodney's testimony both candid and detailed.
00:14:52
As Backhouse explains, it was the handcuffs that gave Judge Sparks pause.
00:14:58
Rodney testified his cousin was already handcuffed when he arrived.
00:15:02
Steinberg, in contrast, omitted the cousin being handcuffed and described struggling to control the two children.
00:15:10
Judge Sparks expressed confusion over how a handcuffed child created such a large ordeal or somehow posed a threat to the officer.
00:15:19
She concluded tentatively, I believe that probably the situation in this particular case is the case of a young police officer who overreacted.
00:15:29
And while delivering oral reasons, Judge Sparks made her now notorious remarks.
00:15:34
I'm not saying the officer overreacted, but certainly police officers do overreact.
00:15:40
particularly when they're dealing with non-white groups.
00:15:43
Of note, Judge Sparks made these remarks in Nova Scotia, whose past and present of state-sanctioned racial discrimination was well-documented.
00:15:52
In Backhouse's words, quote, Nova Scotia's distinctive black history embodies centuries of racial violence and discrimination, perpetrated against a substantial, firmly embedded, interconnected community of settled people from the African diaspora.
00:16:08
In all aspects of life, immigration, education, employment, housing, and economic, social, cultural, and political life, generations of resistors struggle to survive in a deeply racist society.
00:16:23
Their collective experience provides a striking background to the RDS case.
00:16:28
End quote.
00:16:30
Despite all of this context, RDS becomes famous not for white police misconduct,
00:16:37
but rather black judicial misconduct.
00:16:40
This is the inverted racial hierarchy we theorize in Upside Down.
00:16:45
The white cop is transformed into the victim of racism when he was the perpetrator.
00:16:50
The black judge is transformed into the perpetrator of racism when she was its second victim alongside the black boy.
00:16:59
And all of this is accomplished by a superficial invocation of bias.
00:17:04
That does not simply flatten racial hierarchy between whites and blacks, but inverts that hierarchy, such that the central issue is supposed anti-white bias on the judiciary.
00:17:15
I cannot overemphasize how absurd the inverted recontextualization of RDS is.
00:17:23
The Marshall Inquiry, completed five years before the RDS trial,
00:17:27
found not only blatant and overt racism in Nova Scotia, but specifically that a large portion of both blacks and whites believe the police are the most likely officials in the criminal justice system to practice discrimination.
00:17:42
And yet, even when Steinberg's testimony was less candid and detailed than Rodney's, the Crown submitted that there was absolutely no reason to attack the credibility of the officer.
00:17:55
Judge Sparks' inostensible reply alluded to racial bias in policing, and then with unseemly vigor, the Crown challenged Judge Sparks for her racial bias, thus shifting the focus from white racism to the impartiality of Canada's first black female judge.
00:18:13
The Nova Scotia Supreme Court and Court of Appeal both accepted the Crown's challenge,
00:18:18
But a divided Supreme Court of Canada in four separate opinions ultimately vindicated Judge Sparks on the issue, but the narrow issue of whether her bias had materially impacted her verdict.
00:18:30
The irony of it taking 122 years for a race bias case to surface at the Supreme Court of Canada, and for that case to concern, in effect, anti-white racism by a black female judge is pronounced.
00:18:45
As Elle Jones observes, RDS is a racial profiling case, but it's also about what happens to a black woman judge who steps out of line.
00:18:54
Similarly, Shireen Razak describes the enduring legacy of RDS as the consequences of disputing the official story.
00:19:03
We know now, if we didn't before, what happens when we dare to say that race matters.
00:19:08
We have been warned.
00:19:10
Backhouse notes that the Dalhousie law team that helped prepare the RDS appeal could locate no Canadian precedence of judges found guilty of race bias.
00:19:20
This was a shocking absence, given the fact that as Constance Backhouse summarizes, there are numerous examples of overtly racist expression and affiliation by white adjudicators in Canada.
00:19:32
including, one, Magistrate George T.
00:19:35
Dennison, who described Jews as neurotic and depicted blacks as childlike savages.
00:19:41
Two, Ontario Court of Appeal Justice William Renwick Riddell, who characterized blacks as incompetent and uncivilized and indigenous people as having savage appetites in contrast to whites.
00:19:53
And 3, Manitoba Court of Appeal Justice Alfred Monin, who in 1982, when asked to rule on the exclusion of indigenous witness testimony, said, quote, if I had to strike from the record the evidence of drunken Indians that I have heard over the past 25 years, there wouldn't be much left.
00:20:12
Even during the RDS hearing itself,
00:20:15
Chief Justice Lemaire audaciously asked whether Judge Sparks' accounting for anti-black racism should permit other judges accounting for, quote, Chinese propensity for gambling.
00:20:27
None of the three enumerated white male judges above, all overtly racist, faced challenges for bias.
00:20:34
In overwhelming contrast, Judge Sparks, for anti-racist expression, was challenged both formally by appeal and informally by venomous and mostly anonymous hate mail threatening her and her family.
00:20:49
Moreover, Judge Sparks later faced what Elle Jones saw as retribution for acknowledging racism.
00:20:55
In 1999, all the judges from the standalone family court were elevated to the newly created unified family court.
00:21:02
All but one.
00:21:04
Judge Sparks.
00:21:05
And this was despite her being the most senior judge on the court.
00:21:09
Judge Sparks' fleeting allusion to anti-black racism somehow threw the entire legal system into an existential crisis.
00:21:17
Again, Razak is apposite.
00:21:20
Quote, Is this the unease that comes from knowing that once race is taken into account and the stereotypes come tumbling down, what is left is the awesome fact of white supremacy?
00:21:31
James Baldwin reminds white people, if I am not who you think I am, then you are not who you think you are either.
00:21:38
And that is the crisis.
00:21:40
Without gambling Chinese and emotional black women partial to their own people and biased against white police officers, there would be no reasonable and impartial white men.
00:21:49
End quote.
00:21:50
Notably, a white male Nova Scotia judge, two years before RDS, also affirmed systemic racism in a judgment.
00:21:58
With reference to the Marshall Inquiry, he wrote that a person would have to be stupid, complacent, or ignorant not to acknowledge its presence, not only individually, but systemically and institutionally.
00:22:11
This was dramatically less diplomatic language than what was used by Judge Sparks, but triggered no bias allegation, indicative of how the RDS case implicated not only what Judge Sparks said, but who Judge Sparks was.
00:22:26
Now, with the RDS facts addressed, let's turn to the law in RDS.
00:22:31
There are three distinct conceptualizations of impartial adjudication in the RDS judgment of the Supreme Court.
00:22:37
The first substantive opinion by Justice Major, with Chief Justice Lemaire and Justice Sapinka concurring, conceptualized bias acontextually.
00:22:47
By acontextually,
00:22:49
We mean that these judges held that pre-existing social hierarchy should never be considered by judges.
00:22:56
In the American constitutional vernacular on race, this is called colorblindness.
00:23:02
The second substantive opinion was jointly authored by Justices Laura Dubay and McLaughlin.
00:23:08
And as Constance Backhouse explains, both women judges had experienced gender discrimination themselves.
00:23:14
including from Chief Justice Lemaire of the first opinion, who threatened to resign if Lura Dube was appointed to the court.
00:23:23
Lura Dube and McLaughlin conceptualized bias contextually.
00:23:27
By contextually, we mean that these judges acknowledged pre-existing racial hierarchy and, in our view, represented that hierarchy faithfully.
00:23:36
That is, in line with the social, economic, and political condition of African Nova Scotians.
00:23:43
The third substantive opinion by Justice Corey, with Justice Iacobucci concurring, conceptualized bias we say re-contextually.
00:23:52
By re-contextually, we mean that they acknowledged pre-existing racial hierarchy, but represented it unfaithfully.
00:24:00
That is, in contradiction with the social, economic, and political condition of African Nova Scotians.
00:24:06
So whereas the first opinion denies the relevance of race,
00:24:11
the third opinion misrepresents how race is relevant.
00:24:16
Most critically, the first and third substantive opinions can function identically.
00:24:21
They are simply different methods of obscuring properly contextualized racial hierarchy.
00:24:27
Specifically, acontextual reasoning rejects all context, because it claims that judges should never account for racial hierarchy.
00:24:36
And recontextual reasoning rejected this context,
00:24:40
because while judges may account for racial hierarchy, Judge Sparks apparently did so inappropriately.
00:24:47
Given this, at times, identical functioning, Razak notes that the line blurs between the first and third opinion.
00:24:56
No matter their course of reasoning, they ultimately affirm the same thing, namely white innocence.
00:25:03
RDS is often celebrated in Canada, like Brown v.
00:25:06
Board is celebrated in the US, as a judicial affirmation of racial justice.
00:25:11
But its actual legacy is rather racist.
00:25:14
Sujif Xavier notes 2 patterns in his academic survey of the post-RDS jurisprudence.
00:25:20
Pattern #1, that anti-racist judging is closely scrutinized for bias.
00:25:26
And pattern #2, that racist judging is largely insulated from substantive scrutiny.
00:25:32
Alana Lenton's recent book, The New Racial Regime.
00:25:35
examines how racial ideologies shift over time to map onto new political moments and preserve white and state power.
00:25:43
And recent recalibrations of white supremacy can be mapped onto RDS's jurisprudential legacy, and specifically onto these first and third opinions that I summarized.
00:25:54
The first substantive opinion affirmed, as I said, colorblindness.
00:25:58
We can see this racial ideology, for example, when President Trump invokes Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech, but toward racist ends.
00:26:07
Martin Luther King Jr.
00:26:08
dreamed that his four little children would one day live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
00:26:17
Trump cites this as a supposed affirmation of colorblindness.
00:26:21
despite the fact that anyone with a modicum of familiarity with Dr.
00:26:24
King's politics would know that he was the very opposite of colorblind.
00:26:28
Oh, whoops.
00:26:31
Sorry, one sec.
00:26:33
I scrolled on my screen.
00:26:35
The very opposite of colorblind.
00:26:38
See, for example, his letter from a Birmingham jail, where Dr.
00:26:42
King lamented being gravely disappointed with the white moderate.
00:26:46
Armed with this perversion of Dr.
00:26:47
King's political thought, President Trump in his first term sought to purge public institutions of what he called critical race theory, but which in reality was essentially any reference to systemic racism or sexism.
00:27:01
All of this political nuance is erased, however, by the first substantive opinion's acontextual approach.
00:27:09
Dr.
00:27:09
King is simply a person with ideas.
00:27:12
America is simply a place with people.
00:27:16
No race, no history.
00:27:18
The third substantive opinion, in contrast, can be seen as a precursor to how the establishment has innovated its racial discourse in the current political moment.
00:27:30
That third opinion calls not for colorblindness, but inverted racial consciousness.
00:27:35
Again, President Trump's racial ideology is instructive.
00:27:39
President Trump blacklists Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian academics for their supposed anti-Semitism.
00:27:45
and senior advisors to President Trump post online about how the president, a Christian, has the ability to, quote, revoke someone's Jew card, end quote.
00:27:56
All this, the president does, he claims, to combat anti-Semitism.
00:28:01
Crucially, this is not colorblindness.
00:28:04
This is awareness of race, but simultaneously perpetuation of racism.
00:28:10
Understood in this way, the distinct opinions in RDS contain various strands of racial ideology, the colorblindness of old and the inverted racial consciousness of today.
00:28:22
With a summary of RDS complete, let's next examine how its legacy of recontextual judging informed the judicial review following EU of T scandal.
00:28:32
First, let's discuss the scandal that preceded that judicial review.
00:28:37
In this background, I'll briefly outline, first, Justice Bureau's interference at the University of Toronto, second, Justice Cromwell's report exonerating U of T, and 3rd, the social context of anti-Palestinian racism.
00:28:50
So first, Justice Bureau's interference at U of T.
00:28:54
U of T was on the verge of hiring Dr.
00:28:56
Valentina Azarova, a preeminent scholar of international human rights, to direct its international human rights program.
00:29:03
Specifically, Dr.
00:29:05
Azarova was the enthusiastic and unanimous choice of the academic hiring committee tasked with appointing a new director.
00:29:13
However, that impending hire was leaked by an unnamed faculty member outside of the university to an anti-Palestinian organization based in Israel.
00:29:22
For context, that Israeli organization is described by Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Savard as, quote, a militia of the Israeli government,
00:29:31
that works symbiotically with it to promote the same agenda, perpetuating the occupation by slandering and thwarting the funding of organizations that are working to end it.
00:29:41
End quote.
00:29:42
Crucially, a Tax Court of Canada judge, Justice Spiro, then acted as the essential and coercive messenger of a racist objection to the appointment of Dr.
00:29:52
Azarova.
00:29:53
First, the anti-Palestinian Israeli organization contacted an anti-Palestinian organization based in Canada.
00:30:00
For context, the Canadian organization is described by Jewish academic Dan Freeman Malloy as conducting advocacy focused on, quote, weakening solidarity with the Palestinian people and solidifying official Canadian rejection of basic Palestinian rights.
00:30:17
End point.
00:30:18
Second, the anti-Palestinian Canadian organization contacted Justice Spiro.
00:30:24
For context, Justice Spiro was a significant donor and fundraising collaborator with the University of Toronto.
00:30:31
And before his appointment to the Tax Court, Justice Bureau was a director for the Canadian organization and had characterized academic discourse about a single democratic state in historic Palestine as, quote, anti-Israel propaganda, end quote.
00:30:46
Lastly, Justice Bureau shared objections about Dr.
00:30:50
Azarova with contacts at U of T, including by sharing a memo from the Israeli organization.
00:30:56
Highlights from that memo include, one, claiming that Dr.
00:31:00
Azarova's scholarly focus, which academics usually label expertise, reflected a quote, discriminatory focus on Israel, end quote.
00:31:09
Two, critiquing Dr.
00:31:11
Azarova's support for the non-violent boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement as evidence of her anti-Semitism.
00:31:18
Three, critiquing her work with Amnesty International as evidence of her anti-Semitism.
00:31:24
and four, critiquing her work for quote, repeating the claims of anti-Semites, end quote.
00:31:31
One such anti-Semite, actually listed in the memo, was Jewish Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Richard Falk.
00:31:40
Despite the facial absurdity of these racist objections to Dr.
00:31:44
Azarova's audacious affirmation of Palestinian human rights,
00:31:48
Within 2 days of Justice Spiro's contact with U of T, Dr.
00:31:51
Azarova's appointment was unilaterally cancelled by the dean.
00:31:56
Second, I'll briefly outline Justice Cromwell's report exonerating U of T.
00:32:01
The administration juggled various often incoherent pretexts for cancelling the appointment.
00:32:06
Indeed, one such pretext was that Dr.
00:32:10
Azarova's arrival from Europe may be delayed by a few months.
00:32:14
Responding to that brief delay by canceling the appointment process and starting a new, likely year-long process is absolutely absurd.
00:32:22
When challenged on these ridiculous pretexts, U of T hired former Supreme Court Justice Cromwell, who authored a report exonerating the administration based on a superficial methodology that all but guaranteed that very exoneration.
00:32:36
The report was evidently commissioned as a political bludgeon against burgeoning criticism of the administration and failed in stopping a formal censure of U of T by the Canadian Association of University Teachers for its obvious violation of academic freedom.
00:32:50
Finally, third, I'll briefly outline anti-Palestinian racism.
00:32:55
Criticism of U of T and of Justice Bureau's interference was caricatured as an anti-Semitic witch hunt.
00:33:02
This functions similarly to the challenge in RDS.
00:33:06
Justice Spiro and U of T were criticized for their anti-Palestinian racism.
00:33:11
The response, however, was a racial inversion.
00:33:14
That, in fact, the criticism was itself anti-Jewish.
00:33:18
As various scholarly reports explain, including the framework outlined by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, false allegations of anti-Semitism are a routine form of anti-Palestinian racism.
00:33:29
And the racial logic underlying this inversion is Zionism.
00:33:33
which legitimates Israel's colonization of Palestine and in turn transforms critique of that colonization into supposed anti-Semitism.
00:33:43
This is the recontextualization we described in the third substantive opinion of RDS.
00:33:49
Not denying racial hierarchy altogether, but rather acknowledging racial hierarchy and claiming that it is not Jews who oppress Palestinians, but rather Palestinians who oppress Jews.
00:34:01
Importantly, this inversion arises in the context of overwhelming academic, human rights, and international legal consensus about, one, Israel illegally occupying Palestine for decades, two, Israel practicing apartheid in Palestine for decades, and three, Israel committing a genocide in Gaza.
00:34:21
I cannot stress enough the extent to which Zionism's recontextualization of Israeli colonialism
00:34:28
inverts A principled analysis of racial power in historic Palestine.
00:34:33
Western discourse is obsessed with the specter of Palestinians living under occupation, somehow oppressing Israelis.
00:34:42
This is tantamount to Haitians oppressing the French when resisting French colonialism, or slaves oppressing slave owners when revolting against slavery.
00:34:52
Racism, most fundamentally, is not about hate, but power.
00:34:57
I'm sure many black slaves did not think too highly of their white slave owners, but to characterize that hate as racist or oppressive is to recontextualize the relevant racial hierarchy beyond recognition.
00:35:11
With all of that background covered, we can now efficiently discuss the judicial review examined in the article.
00:35:18
Various civil society and racial justice groups formally complained to the Canadian Judicial Council because of Justice Bureau's biased interference at U of T.
00:35:27
The Canadian Judicial Council exonerated Justice Spiro by recontextualizing his anti-Palestinian interference as simply voicing concerns of the Jewish community.
00:35:38
And then, in the judicial review before the federal court, the legacy of RDS and weaponized bias allegations was clear.
00:35:47
The civil society applicants properly contextualized Justice Spiro's interference as anti-Palestinian racism and as an attack on academic freedom.
00:35:57
B'nai Brith, described by Rabbi David Mivaser as an anti-Palestinian hate organization, intervened in the case, recontextualized these critiques of anti-Palestinian racism, and intimated that those critiques were themselves anti-Semitic.
00:36:12
The federal court recontextualized Justice Bureau's anti-Palestinian interference, again, as simply voicing Jewish community concerns.
00:36:21
In effect,
00:36:22
B'nai B'rith analogized Judge Sparks in RDS with Justice Spiro in U of T.
00:36:29
Yet, as we explain in the article, they could not be more distinguishable.
00:36:34
Quote, Judge Sparks recognized the well-documented fact of racial bias in Nova Scotian policing.
00:36:41
Justice Spiro perpetuated the well-documented fact of Palestinian suppression in the legal academy.
00:36:47
Judge Sparks, in an exercise of transparency,
00:36:51
referred to the racial context of her trial while delivering oral reasons in open court.
00:36:56
Justice Bureau, in an exercise of opacity, inverted racial context in a confidential hiring process to suppress Palestinian narratives.
00:37:05
For acknowledging anti-black racism, Judge Sparks was harshly criticized by the Crown, 2 courts on appeal, and the Chief Justice of Canada.
00:37:13
For perpetuating anti-Palestinian racism, Justice Spiro was exonerated by Justice Cromwell, exonerated by the Canadian Judicial Council, and exonerated by the Federal Court.
00:37:24
Indeed, the real analogy, we argue, is not between Judge Sparks and Justice Spiro, but rather between Judge Sparks and Dr.
00:37:31
Azarova.
00:37:33
Quote, Judge Sparks and Dr.
00:37:34
Azarova converge for affirming widely documented patterns of injustice, anti-black racism by police,
00:37:42
and anti-Palestinian racism by Israel, both were defamed as themselves racist.
00:37:49
In this respect, we cite Darrell Lee, who explains why Zionism is such a potent weapon for racist recontextualization.
00:37:56
Quote, the power of contextualization and decontextualization is so deeply woven into racism.
00:38:04
Universalism is not just about claiming certain things to be universal.
00:38:08
but it also entails the power to decide when something is universal and when something is particular.
00:38:14
To illustrate with a concrete example, in American public life, white Jews can access their whiteness to discipline people of color, but they can also speak as a victimized minority when going after other white people.
00:38:26
All the stuff that conservatives decry about identity politics, cancel culture, standpoint theory, victimhood narratives,
00:38:33
Zionism has long been at the forefront of liberalism's language of minoritized grievance.
00:38:38
End quote.
00:38:40
With the judicial review out of the way, I'll now summarize how we conclude the article, as well as its afterword, which connects the article's themes to the Gaza genocide.
00:38:49
In conclusion, we note that Palestinian academic Nadia Abu Alhaj delivered the inaugural keynote commemorating the academic boycott of U of T that was triggered by Justice Spiro's anti-Palestinian interference.
00:39:02
And when writing about that lecture, Fatima Amir wrote the following about the weaponization of bias against Palestinian and black people, which draws out the first continuity I flagged in my introduction, namely between RDS and EU of T scandal.
00:39:17
Quote, when it comes to the issue of Palestinian human rights, El-Haj noted that the accusation does not always have to be one of anti-Semitism, but could be that Palestinians are too biased to speak on the conflict.
00:39:29
Such an accusation imposes demands on Palestinians for evidence, similar to the demands on black communities for footage of black death as evidence of police brutality.
00:39:39
RDS.
00:39:40
El-Haj explained that Israeli historians possess a certain kind of epistemological authority to speak on Israel-Palestine, which Israeli scholar Ariella Aisha Azulay considers a product of their imperial citizenship.
00:39:53
This can be seen in how Israeli historians are far more widely cited than Palestinians, who are not considered reliable witnesses to their own histories, let alone histories of the other.
00:40:04
Ironically, El-Haj, like Azarova at U of T, faced significant Zionist resistance when joining the faculty at Barnard College, and El-Haj's remarks illustrate significant parallels between black and Palestinian struggle.
00:40:18
That it is black and Palestinian people who are too biased.
00:40:22
that it is black and Palestinian people who lack evidence, and that black and Palestinian people are not reliable witnesses, even of the blatant oppression they directly suffer.
00:40:33
These shared fates are even reflected in the history of RDS itself, again detailed carefully by Constance Backhouse.
00:40:41
Rodney's pro bono lawyer, Rocky Jones, was one of the most visible faces of anti-racist activism in Canada.
00:40:47
including by forging connections in the United States with pro-Palestinian activists, like Stokely Carmichael, and pro-Palestinian organizations, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers.
00:40:59
Indeed, Jones accused Halifax police of behaving like an occupying force in the black community, and believed that blacks were facing a cultural genocide in Nova Scotia, two references that resonate powerfully with the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
00:41:16
Which brings me, lastly, to the articles afterward, which draws out the second continuity I flagged in my introduction, namely between EU of T scandal and the Gaza genocide.
00:41:27
A brief timeline is relevant here.
00:41:29
We first presented this article at a conference at Windsor Law in the summer of 2022.
00:41:34
We submitted the article for peer review in 2023.
00:41:38
The article successfully passed peer review in 2024.
00:41:42
2023 and 24 were, of course, a horrific period of time for anti-Palestinian racism, so we briefly updated the article by connecting its thesis to inverted racial hierarchy and the genocide in Gaza.
00:41:55
The article was then set out for a supplemental peer review in 2025, and we received confirmation that the article successfully passed that second peer review in 2026.
00:42:07
Due to this unusually prolonged timeline and the catastrophic intervening events of the genocide in Gaza, we included what is essentially an afterword linking the core argument to the genocide.
00:42:18
The afterword opens with two passages from Palestinian poets, each describing the racial discourse on Palestine as upside down, hence the title of the article.
00:42:27
In 2003, Muri Bhaguti wrote in I Saw Ramallah, quote, It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick.
00:42:37
Start your story from secondly.
00:42:39
Yes, this is what Rabin did.
00:42:41
He simply neglected to speak of what happened first.
00:42:45
Start your story with secondly, and the world will be turned upside down.
00:42:49
Start your story with secondly, and the arrows of the red Indians are the original criminals, and the guns of the white man are entirely the victim.
00:42:58
It is enough to start with secondly for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous.
00:43:04
Then, in 2025, Muhammad Al-Kurd said, quote, it's an upside-down world.
00:43:10
You feel like you're trapped in someone else's hallucination.
00:43:13
This is why, be you a student or an academic, and you get falsely accused of anti-Semitism, while the so-called self-proclaimed Jewish state literally burns people alive in their refugee tents, I don't think it's wise to engage in any of these kinds of discursive traps, because they are fundamentally red herrings.
00:43:31
they are meant to take away from the focal point, which is genocide.
00:43:35
Honoring Al-Kurd's astute point, we connect the racial inversion discussed in the article to the West's mischaracterization of the Gaza genocide.
00:43:43
Specifically, we discuss racial epiphanies by liberal Zionists concerning the genocide.
00:43:50
Various liberal Zionists belatedly appreciated the Gaza genocide when it was apparent not simply on October 7th, but we argue well before.
00:43:59
And we argue that this illustrates how Zionist bias is anti-Palestinian precisely because it inverts the applicable racial hierarchy between Palestinians and Jews.
00:44:09
We write that before October 7th, 2023, Israel had already brutally occupied Gaza for decades, exercising effective control over its borders.
00:44:19
And after October 7th, during an initial carpet bombing campaign that killed 8,000 Palestinians,
00:44:26
the highest echelons of the Israeli political establishment announced their genocidal intent without any credible ambiguity within the first month of Israel's now multi-year siege.
00:44:38
Israeli Minister of Social Equality and the Advancement of the Status of Women may go on on October 7, 2023, quote,
00:44:46
All of Gaza's infrastructures must be destroyed to its foundation and their electricity cut off immediately.
00:44:53
The war is not against Hamas, but against the state of Gaza.
00:44:56
End quote.
00:44:58
Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Parliament, Nassim Vatouri, on October 9th, 2023, quote, To wipe out Gaza, nothing else will satisfy us.
00:45:07
Don't leave a single child there.
00:45:10
Expel all the remaining ones in the end so they have no chance of recovery.
00:45:14
End quote.
00:45:16
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant on October 10th, 2023.
00:45:20
Quote, Gaza won't return to what it was before.
00:45:23
We will eliminate everything.
00:45:25
End quote.
00:45:27
Israeli President Isaac Herzog on October 13th, 2023.
00:45:31
Quote, it's an entire nation out there that is responsible.
00:45:35
It's not true, this rhetoric about civilians.
00:45:38
Not aware, not involved.
00:45:39
It's absolutely not true.
00:45:41
End quote.
00:45:43
And finally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on October 28, 2023.
00:45:48
Quote, remember what Amalek did to you.
00:45:51
For context, the Bible includes the following passage about Amalek.
00:45:55
Quote, now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ***.
00:46:09
End quote.
00:46:10
The above context, excluding Netanyahu's subsequent invocation of Amalek on October 28th, led Israeli professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Raz Siegel, to conclude that Israel was carrying out a textbook case of genocide in Gaza on October 13th, 2023.
00:46:27
That is, he identified the genocide within one week of October 7th.
00:46:33
However, Omer Bartov, another Israeli professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, initially denied the genocide on November 10th, 2023, even with the added context of Netanyahu's genocidal invocation of Amalek.
00:46:48
Bartov acknowledged that it was crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place.
00:46:57
But nevertheless, he reasoned that a genocide was not actually occurring because Israeli military commanders insist that they are trying to limit civilian casualties.
00:47:06
This was a bizarre statement, given that Bartov himself quoted one such commander, who addressed the population of Gaza in overtly genocidal terms.
00:47:14
Quote, human animals must be treated as such.
00:47:18
There will be no electricity and no water.
00:47:20
There will only be destruction.
00:47:22
You wanted hell, you will get hell.
00:47:24
End quote.
00:47:26
This internally contradictory reasoning is quite simply Bartov's anti-Palestinian bias.
00:47:31
Indeed, Bartov all but admitted this bias on July 15, 2025, nearly two years and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, when he belatedly condemned the Gaza genocide in what we consider to be a telling rhetorical register.
00:47:48
Quote, my inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.
00:47:56
Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier, an officer, and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes in the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could.
00:48:13
But I have been teaching classes on genocide for 1/4 of a century.
00:48:17
I can recognize one when I see one.
00:48:20
End quote.
00:48:21
The irony, of course, is that Bartov could not recognize the Gaza genocide when he saw it.
00:48:28
Long after the other genocide scholars and leading human rights organizations had concluded Israel was committing A genocide in Gaza, Bartov reached the same painful conclusion, one that he resisted as long as he could.
00:48:40
In the face of Israel's overtly genocidal statements, quoted a moment ago and acknowledged by Bartov nearly two years earlier, this pain
00:48:48
And this resistance must be re-articulated as euphemisms for Bartov's anti-Palestinian bias, which is clear from how Bartov himself connects this pain and resistance to, in his words, growing up in a Zionist home, formerly living in Israel, and formerly serving in the IDF.
00:49:06
Palestinian scholar Asma El-Alabi critiques such Zionist epiphanies astutely.
00:49:11
Quote, purportedly aghast at what their Israel has become, some intellectuals, rather than honestly reckoning with the past, resort to desperate exercises in obfuscation.
00:49:22
And Palestinian poet Ahmad Ibses captures this Zionist bias evocatively.
00:49:28
Quote, it is not the eyes that are blind, but the hearts.
00:49:32
End quote.
00:49:33
The article concludes with a passage tying inverted racial hierarchy and the Gaza genocide back to the very beginning and the esteemed Lord Denning.
00:49:42
We write, in 1982, when Lord Denning lamented the colored and brown citizens no longer fit for jury selection in England, he foreshadowed the racist premise we now confront over 40 years later in the ongoing legacy of his jurisprudence.
00:49:57
A judicial construction of bias that preserves not objectivity,
00:50:01
but white and Zionist subjectivity.
00:50:04
Specifically, the Judge Sparks and Justice Bureau cases involve the reformulation of either the state, police, or a state, Israel, into entities needing protection from racial bias, with the fundamental contradiction being that they are rather essential to perpetuating racial domination.
00:50:23
For our courts to have any credibility on the question of bias,
00:50:26
Indeed, for our courts to have any credibility as courts, such inversions must be upended.
00:50:31
This is the upside-down discourse that denied police brutality known by Judge Sparks, and which denies Israel's brutality, known increasingly to the world, to anyone willing to look objectively at the genocide in Gaza.
00:50:45
I'm incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to share this research with Queen's Law, and I now look forward to discussing these ideas with all of you.
00:50:52
Thank you.