Sydney University moves to sack lecturer Tim Anderson over swastika

Sydney University will move to fire controversial lecturer Tim Anderson over images he used in teaching materials and on social media.

Sydney Uni lecturer Tim Anderson has been suspended, and will potentially be fired, at least partly for including a cropped swastika on teaching materials about Israel. Picture: Facebook/Tim Anderson

Sydney University will move to fire a controversial lecturer after he was accused of using images of a cropped swastika in his teaching materials and on social media.

Political economist and lecturer Dr Tim Anderson allegedly used the swastika image superimposed over Israel’s flag as part of an infographic on Israeli assaults on Gaza versus Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

Sydney University provost and acting vice-chancellor Stephen Garton wrote in a formal letter to Dr Anderson that “it is clear that the altered image of the Israeli flag … depicts a cropped Swastika”, adding that the image “references Nazi symbolism”.

In the letter, which Dr Anderson included in a Facebook post, Professor Garton wrote that Dr Anderson had used the swastika image in various Twitter and Facebook posts, as well as in his teaching materials.

Sydney university lecturer Tim Anderson.

He also made it clear in his letter to Dr Anderson that the allegations, if substantiated, would amount to “serious misconduct” and might “justify the termination of your employment”.

In his Facebook post, Dr Anderson wrote that he had had been suspended and banned from entering the university where he had worked for more than 20 years.

“This move is the culmination of a series of failed attempts by management to restrict my public comments. I have always rejected such censorship”, he wrote, adding “these complaints, over the last 18 months, have been petty and absurd. In my view they represent an unusually aggressive regime of political censorship, in which no decent university should be involved”.

“I have told Provost Garton that I don’t abuse or engage in gratuitous criticism, but I do criticise dishonest propaganda harshly, when justified. I have rejected his attempts at political censorship as unprincipled.”

Known to be a champion of Palestine and a critic of Israel, Dr Anderson has often used social media to condemn the actions of the “apartheid” state of Israel, while insisting the mainstream media had failed to accurately cover the news in Israel and Palestine. He has also travelled to North Korea “in solidarity”.

Professor Garton rejected Dr Anderson’s allegations of political censorship. “The university has, since its inception, supported and encouraged its staff to engage in public debate and it has always accepted that those views might be controversial,” he said. “Our academic staff can and often do disagree with one another publicly. In fact, the process of doing so is part of the academic process.

“The university has and will continue to defend academic staff to express unpopular views as part of their teaching and research, so long as they fulfil their obligations to engage in that debate in a civil manner”.

A provocative and unabashed anti-western activist, Dr Anderson recently defended a colleague for wearing a “Death to Israel” badge. He has cordially met with Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad, and lauded Venezuela’s one-time controversial president Hugo Chavez.

He has long railed against his own university’s United States Studies Centre, prompting vice-chancellor Michael Spence to describe Dr Anderson’s contention that the centre had been set up by business and media interests to counter anti-Americanism as “logically and factually ridiculous”.

In 1990, Anderson — then a member of the Ananda Marga sect — was convicted of three counts of murder in connection with the Hilton bombing in Sydney, but he was released the following year by the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal when an informant’s evidence was discounted.