Where would we be without academics? – Pt. 74 of a seemingly endless series:
One of Australia's most prestigious universities has become the centre of a movement that believes Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has been framed by the West for last week's chemical weapons attack.
The University of Sydney is standing by a controversial senior lecturer, Tim Anderson, who has dismissed the sarin gas attack in the Idlib Province as a "hoax" and called Syria's six-year civil war a "fiction" perpetrated by the US "to destroy an independent nation".
Fairfax Media can reveal Dr Anderson is just one among a number of Australian academics who have formed a pro-Assad outfit called the Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies, based in Sydney, to counter "censorship" by their universities.
The centre was formed "after concern that many Western academic bodies constrain, censor and marginalise counter-hegemonic or anti-imperial research and discussion, due to their close ties with government and corporate sponsors"….
Next week the Centre will hold a two-day conference at the University of Sydney, including a discussion of the Syrian conflict "from Hezbollah's perspective". The event is endorsed by the University of Sydney Union-funded Political Economy Society.
An enthusiastic supporter of the Syrian state and lifetime radical, Dr Anderson was convicted in 1990 over the 1978 Hilton Hotel bombing in Sydney, but acquitted the following year. He has travelled to Syria several times to meet with Assad.
Mick Hartley 
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