Mick Hartley

Izabella Tabarovsky is a writer with a special interest in Soviet antizionism and contemporary left antisemitism. I've featured her a few times here. Her latest, at Tablet, recounts her depressing recent experience in Finland, where she was cancelled by two universities. Academics everywhere, it seems, harbour the same mix of progressive anti-Zionism and cowardice.

The smear campaign against me began on Instagram on Wednesday, Jan. 22—one week before my scheduled appearance at a conference titled “Dialogue on Antisemitism: A Path Towards Understanding and Action.” Organized by the Antisemitism Undermining Democracy Project at the Polin Institute of Åbo Akademi University, the conference was meant to launch a conversation that, the organizers felt, had long been overdue in Finland. It was the first major international conference dedicated to contemporary antisemitism in the country. Leading the effort was Mercédesz Czimbalmos, a scholar with a an extensive body of research on antisemitism and Jewish life in Finland.

The campaign branded me a “genocide denier” who legitimizes a “settler-colonial apartheid state” and is an all-around dangerous extremist guilty of the ultimate transgression—equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. It also seized on a mistake by a conference team member, who had erroneously added “Ph.D.” next to my name on the conference site. The error was quickly fixed, but not before my detractors took notice and claimed I misrepresented my academic credentials. Angry calls and emails to university administrations followed. By Friday it was over.

The excuses from the institutions were classic evasions. From Peter Nynäs at Åbo Akademi:

“The decision was based on an overall assessment where no single argument in itself was decisive for this,” he wrote. “Rather, as Dean, I felt that there were several difficult questions and that there was obvious uncertainty and lack of clarity around these. Furthermore, these posed risks to both individuals and other stakeholders that could not be clearly assessed or adequately addressed prior to the event.” …

There were additional bad optics here. In this story, men in authority, who were not subject-matter experts, overruled their female subordinates—women who had organized the conference, were experts in their field and knew exactly who they were inviting and why. These men also thought it appropriate to censor a female speaker whose expertise had earned her an international reputation. The fact that three out of the four women affected were Jewish, and all were of Eastern European background, only worsened the optics.

The article's worth reading also for shedding light on the unique situation of Finland – of the West, yet so close to the USSR. Compromises were made, not least on the promotion of the Soviet position that equated Zionism with Nazism. As Tabarovsky notes, "One of my Finnish contacts may have been right when she told me that Finland has yet to fully come to terms with that past."