A Brock sociology professor who led a BDS initiative in BUFA in protest of scholasticide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Israeli state is now facing a harassment campaign from a notable right-wing media personality and pro-Zionist networks on and off campus.
Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz, the professor in question, was interviewed by the Press wherein he gave his thoughts on the various forms of harassment he’s faced and expressed his steadfast commitment to bringing awareness to Palestinian erasure, which he says hasn’t wavered despite the concerted smear campaign against his character and credibility as a scholar. He also shared his thoughts on the disinformation campaigns directed against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) motion in the Brock University Faculty Association (BUFA), which ultimately failed to be passed in a vote.
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In a December BUFA meeting last year, Tanyildiz and his colleagues had an agenda item titled “Motion on Scholasticide in Palestine” approved for the official agenda. The motion was a call for the union’s total disinvestment and institutional cutting of ties with organizations — from companies to universities — that were complicit through direct and indirect support of the Israeli regime. The latest uptick of BDS motions like this one, comes in light of the ongoing flair up of violent ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territories since the October 7 attacks in 2023, where roughly 50,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli offence.
Tanyildiz was already active in pro-Palestinian organizations before the motion, being involved with the Brock chapter of Faculty for Palestine, a network of academics who actively work to support the Palestinian plight in the face of the ongoing apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the Occupied Territories.
In the intervening time since October 7, Israel notably destroyed the last university in Gaza. In the motion, Tanyildiz and his colleagues placed special emphasis on this act of scholasticide — the systemic mass destruction of education in a specific place — as a pertinent reason among others for why a union of university faculty should cut all institutional ties to Israel.
The private December BUFA meeting in the union, however, had their discussions recorded and leaked to the right-wing and pro-Zionist journalist and op-ed writer Jonathan Kay, formerly editor-in-chief of The Walrus and current editor at Quillette.
Kay went on to publish a smear piece against Tanyildiz alongside his motion-supporting colleagues in the union in Quillette in the early weeks of 2025. The piece, titled “Keeping BDS Out of Academia: A Canadian Case Study,” attempts a lazy character assassination of Tanyildiz by misconstruing the leaked recorded audio from the meetings as well as superficially deconstructing the professor’s scholarly interests.
In terms of the actual substance of Tanyildiz’s reasons for the BDS motion, Kay is smugly satisfied with not dealing with that at all in his write-up: “Most of Tanyildiz’s motion consists of the usual BDS boilerplate — either copied or adapted from other BDS-inspired documents — and so isn’t really worth close scrutiny, [my emphasis]” Kay writes.
Instead, Kay spends the bulk of his word-count obsessively detailing disparate aspects of the professor’s personality and physical characteristics such as his “sweeping, hectoring tone” and “his Brock faculty profile page — which reads much like a conservative parody of progressive intellectual fads.”
Strategic deflections away from having to deal with the substance of the motion in the form of schoolyard insults aside, when Kay does try to appear erudite in citing historical events and figures in the piece, he doesn’t realize the shocking hypocrisy vis-a-vis his stance on October 7 in the anachronistically McCarthyite argument he haphazardly concocts.
Kay writes specifically that Tanyildiz “appears in front of a 1970s-era Chinese propaganda poster celebrating the Paris Commune, whose brief takeover of Paris in early 1871 ended with a mass hostage slaughter.”
However, Kay doesn’t cite the number involved in the hostage slaughter of the Commune — 110 priests and gendarmes, most of whom were supportive of the monarchist-imperialist Third Republic and a brutally exploitative bourgeoisie that had saddled up to the imperial aristocratic order — because it’s too low to make the next point he attempts to make apropos of Israel and Palestine.
To run cover for this, simply because the poster is Chinese and from the late 20th century, he heavily implies that Tanyildiz is somehow tacitly supportive of the most disastrous policies from Maoist China, and thus a hypocrite in citing Israel’s killing of innocent civilians as examples of genocide when tens of millions were killed in The Great Leap Forward and so on:
“For their part, China’s communists caused the extermination of somewhere between 20-million and 40-million innocents during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution — three decimal orders of magnitude above even the most inflated Palestinian casualty statistics circulated by Hamas since Israel invaded Gaza following the 7 October 2023 terrorist attacks.”
The omission of the Paris Commune massacre’s number and the political-economic context of the Commune alongside the leap of logic with falsely ascribing sympathies to the worst of Maoist policies to Tanyildiz is a prime example of how intellectually lazy and historically illiterate the far-right is.
In fact, Kay, reminiscent of his lazy dismissal of getting into the substance of the BDS motion, treats the claim that Israel is committing genocide as a priori unfounded in his piece without feeling bothered to argue why, causing the whole piece to be an ideal candidate for a prime example of the begging the question fallacy.
Here are all the moments in the piece where Kay references the idea that Israel’s actions are genocidal:
“And for all his strange talk about BUFA’s ‘responsibilities’ to the International Court of Justice, no one in the Middle East, let alone The Hague, cares what professors at an Ontario university think about how Israel’s (non-existent) genocide figures into their academic ‘praxis’ […]
“Consistent with other campaigns inspired by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, Tanyildiz accuses the Jewish state of not only ‘scholasticide,’ but also apartheid, genocide and war crimes. He calls for Brock’s administration (and its pension planners) to execute a ‘complete divestment’ from any organization that’s even indirectly ‘complicit’ in this regard — including multinational corporations and Israeli universities — and demands that Brock enact a long laundry list of pro-Palestinian policies […]
“Somewhat detracting from the moral grandeur of this pronouncement, Tanyildiz then paused to assure fellow BUFA members that heroically standing up to genocide wouldn’t negatively affect their future pension payments […]
“From there, it was a short rhetorical jump to the proposition that anyone at BUFA who opposed his motion was effectively a maidservant to genocide — not unlike, say, a citizen of Nazi Germany ignoring the daily clatter of trains bringing Jews to concentration camps.”
Not a single one of these references, besides the bracketed modifying aside to genocide with “(non-existent),” actually attempts to argue the case with the same (attempted) flair of logic and numbers he brings to the Commune-Maoist point against the accusation of genocidal intent and practice.
Ironically, then, pointing out the hostage massacre at the end of the Paris Commune makes Kay’s excusing Israel’s massacre of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians since October 7 an absolute logical and moral contradiction considering the Commune took the hostages as bargaining chips to stop France’s prevailing Third Republic government, which was a ruthless imperialist army that — beyond awfully exploiting the working class at home (the impetus for the communards’ revolution in Paris) — was instrumental in the beginning of the New Imperialism of the 19th century with all the horror involved in the Scramble for Africa, among other examples.
Kay proves he will run cover for colonialist projects, from Israel to the New Imperialist powers of 19th century colonial Europe, through cynically omitting and selecting numbers and historical facts, because he’s a neo-colonialist supporter at heart.
This is not to say that the mass hostage executions in the Commune were justified. Rather, it’s quite revealing to ponder the stunning dissonance inherent in Kay, on the one hand, condemning the Communards’ retaliatory hostage killings against the imperialist French Army when they were fighting to maintain their (quite successful) attempt at a secular non-hierarchical system of democratic civil society, while having nothing to say against the strongest power in the Middle East which illegally presides over a people that have been displaced, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians which don’t even belong to the terrorist group that conducted October 7. In fact, in his own words, Kay defends the Israeli response as a justified retaliation, calling it a “largely successful military response.”
But it wasn’t only Kay whose sycophantic Zionist support drove him to flimsy arguments in support of genocide erasure with respect to the BUFA BDS motion.
A pro-Israel contingent of BUFA also distributed a plea statement to vote no against the BDS motion before it was brought to a vote.
In the plea the group stated that the motion is “racist,” “antisemitic” and “performative” among other things. Under the accusation of racism point, they even attempt to turn the rhetorical tables on the pro-Palestinian movement by stating the BDS motion is “colonialist” through an act of mental gymnastics which belies the most obvious example of projection:
“The motion is colonialist, claiming to know better what Palestinians need, denying them their own voice. Supporting Hamas’ claims is actually perpetuating the dictatorship of this terrorist organization over Gaza and its inhabitants.”
The supposed claims of Hamas that the motion is ostensibly supporting are not cited or quoted anywhere in the plea, proving once again that the Zionist far-right exists in a permanent state of bad faith as their whole ideology is intellectually and ethically bankrupt.
Despite this, the vote which took place on January 29 saw the defeat of the motion with 287 votes against, 149 for and 25 abstention votes with 76.8 per cent of the voting member body of the union participating.
However, even after the vote, Tanyildiz has received harassment online and on campus with his office door being vandalized and talks at other institutions targeted for cancellation.
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Our full interview with Tanyildiz:
NAWAZ I think a productive launching point is for you to provide a brief statement in response to the Quillette piece.
TANYILDIZ I do not have much to say about the Quillette piece itself because it was a poorly written ideological text devoid of any proper content to speak of. It made no arguments. For its reception, the text simply relied on the extremist right-wing doxa of its imagined reader. It was symptomatic of an anxiety about losing campus hegemony. All in all, the clumsy attempt to construct ideal-types to classify campus politics and contemporary academia betrayed an ignorance as to what a university is and how knowledge is produced.
NAWAZ Can you explain the impetus, in your mind, behind triggering the BDS motion at the union meeting? Additionally, what concerns — if any — do you see in the leaking of the meeting contents?
TANYILDIZ The knowledge community that academics in universities belong to is, by definition, international. In other words, as academics, our scholarship is embedded in the contemporary international context. We give papers at the annual meetings of our international professional associations, publish within venues that have global reach, and engage within our fields of study with debates produced not only in national borders but also beyond them. This very fact suggests that when a constituent of this global community is harmed, we have an epistemic responsibility to exercise.
It was in this context, when all of the universities in Gaza were reduced to rubble and when Palestinian professors and students were murdered in unsparing genocidal rage, that my colleagues and I thought that we had to take up our responsibility and do what is required of us — that is to ask our representative body, BUFA, and colleagues to join us, as well as other academics and academic institutions worldwide, to contribute to the upholding of international law.
I continue to believe that genocide and genocide denialism, in whatever context and form, undermine our scholarship, our work conditions and our students’ learning conditions. I am disappointed that a majority of BUFA members do not share this opinion. I am afraid such indifference, to say the least, is an example of the consent that is being manufactured for the legitimacy of the contemporary ascendance of fascism that we are witnessing all around the globe. However, I am not entirely pessimistic with the sound knowledge that neither I nor a considerable number of BUFA colleagues who voted in favour of the motion assent to this dangerous trend.
NAWAZ Do you have any opinion on the way the Brock administration has treated this issue/Gaza and the BDS movement overall?
TANYILDIZ As a professor who does not hold an administrative role, my interaction with the academic and non-academic members of the university administration is limited. Therefore, I do not know what kinds of local and extra-local relationalities, entanglements and concerns determine the decisions that university administration makes about this and other issues of governance. However, as a professor who takes teaching very seriously and who supervises students in three different graduate programs, I am rather sad to observe that Brock has not fulfilled its concept as a university in which, first and foremost, students develop a critical understanding of self, other and world relations that make us individuals, citizens and human beings as such.
Instead, during this process, Brock has revealed itself as a place of profound contradictions. I will only highlight two examples: 1) For all the talk of pedagogical innovations as a hallmark of our university, the administration, as far as I am aware, did not provide any serious support for instructors and students struggling with the weight of genocide. I raised this problem with members of the Administration in two separate occasions to no avail. 2) For all its supposed awareness of the importance of decolonization within a settler-colonial society which still has not reckoned with the aftermath of the genocides against Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, the Administration was not able to recognize the current situation properly and address it as another example of settler-colonialism and decolonization. Instead, as far as I am concerned, there seems to be an attempt at managing this process through culturalization, ethnicization and religiocization [sic] of students, staff and faculty. This approach, as I explained in an occasion to administrators, divides the constituents of our university community into groups with unreconcilable antagonistic differences.
However, I can confidently say that such division does not exist in our community. Many of us, who are concerned with our epistemic responsibility to our knowledge community and students, work within multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-racial contexts on our campus in concord and harmony. I think, therefore, we need to invite the University Administration to recognize the strong unity, will and belief we have for justice, as well as for the University’s undeniable responsibility and role to achieve it.
NAWAZ Do you have any comments you’d like to make about right-wing/Zionist organizations on our campus?
TANYILDIZ To this day, I am still rather amazed that a mere use of our democratic right as rank-and-file members of our union to bring forward a motion that asked our colleagues to consider a peaceful and historically well-regarded and efficient response to an ongoing scholasticide and genocide at a university should open the floodgates of hate, harassment and abuse against myself and my colleagues.
It is now clear to me that I was mistaken in expecting a collegial, charitable, civil and curious engagement. From the outset, far-right and Zionist (given the misinformation about the term, it is crucial to note that I use the term to indicate a right-wing political ideology of ethnonationalist racist supremacy) members of BUFA flagrantly displayed their intention of not engaging with this motion in good faith by recording the union meeting meant for its members and sharing this recording with a media platform seemingly to make an example of those of us who dared to speak up for justice.
There cannot be any legitimate argument and rationale for scholasticide, for genocide, for the murdering and maiming of civilians: innocent people of all ages, genders, ethnicities and religions. As a result, the leaked meeting and the following one were the most toxic and racist spaces I had the misfortune of experiencing at Brock.
At these meetings, so many harmful misconstructions of the motion we put forward were generated. I was dismayed that not a single Palestinian emerged in these portrayals as human beings at all. Listening to some of those ill-conceived arguments terrorized me, especially when I thought that our students must be subjected to these sorts of arguments coming through the same set of mouths. The callousness and inhumanity of these arguments made in my own workplace still haunt me.
Not surprisingly, these meetings, the recording, racism and toxicity chilled and silenced faculty who dared to have a better vision for humanity and our shared future. On my part, I received anonymous hate mails, was subjected to racist abuse, called names, slandered and thoroughly harassed. My office door was vandalized, and my academic talks at other universities were singled out as collective targets of cancellation. However, I am still here, I am still right in holding that universities are spaces not for hate, harassment and abuse, but for producing knowledge for social transformation to contribute to the making of liveable lives and justice.
NAWAZ When we chatted about this situation, you mentioned hearing a common refrain regarding university spaces not being appropriate places for political speech and practice (the Quillette piece suggests this as well); how do you feel about the university and political speech, debate and action, in this instance and/or in general?
TANYILDIZ The University is a space of politics, a political space and a space for politics. This much is clear to anyone who is familiar with the emergence and history of universities. Empirically, too, any methodological study of the documents governing universities makes it clear. Even a cursory look at university websites and newspapers makes this abundantly clear. Then, why, in increasing frequencies, do we keep hearing that the university and politics should not under any circumstance occupy the same sentence?
It is because politics are an agonistic process with differing groups arguing for differing opinions for different structural and institutional outcomes. And those who are content with the existing outcome, normalized as the status quo and the common sense, do not realize that it is actually a result of negotiations with contending groups and can be changed in the future. Thus, they represent their position as the natural and neutral outcome — the nonpolitical one!
The University is not an exception to what I describe above. Thus, people who are happy with the prevailing social arrangement, those who do not experience a bifurcation, a fissure, when it comes to measuring their expectations of society with their experiences of it, do not want those of us, who ask for a more equitable and just society in which a genocide is a genocide and must therefore be stopped to uphold the international law, to do the work necessary in our workplaces in relation to our vocational responsibilities and ethics.
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