Academic sacked over swastika image fails to get job back

The University of Sydney has won its bid to a sack far-left academic for displaying of a Nazi swastika on an Israeli flag.

Sydney University lecturer Tim Anderson, left, and former tutor Jay Tharappel during their trip to North Korea. Picture: Facebook

The University of Sydney has won its bid to sack far-left academic Tim Anderson over his display of a Nazi swastika superimposed on an Israeli flag, with a court finding his actions did not comply with the “highest ethical, professional and legal standards” required to be protected under the university’s intellectual freedoms.

The university had appealed a ruling by Federal Court Justice Thomas Thawley in 2022 that Anderson was exercising his academic freedom when he showed students the slide and was unlawfully dismissed in a breach of employment law.

Justice Thawley said he accepted Anderson’s argument that he created the swastika graphic for academic purposes, to stimulate critical analysis and comparisons between “fascist systems”.

“While I consider that the (slide) would be offensive to many people, in the context in which the Israeli flag superimposed with the swastika was used, I do not consider that its use involved ‘harassment, vilification or intimidation’,” Justice Thawley found.

On Friday the Federal Court by a majority of two to one overturned Justice Thawley’s ruling, finding that Anderson’s comments failed to comply with the “highest ethical, professional and legal standards” required to be protected under the intellectual freedoms enshrined in the university’s enterprise agreement.

Justice Nye Perram noted that in 2018 Anderson posted on his Facebook account a photograph taken at a lunch in Beijing showing five people sitting at a table in a restaurant, one of whom is wearing a shirt bearing Arabic script which translate into English as “Death to Israel”, “Curse the Jews” and “Victory to all Islam”.

Syrian President Bashar Assad, left, meets with Australian professor Tim Anderson in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Dec. 23, 2013. Picture: Twitter / @Presidency_Sy

Anderson refused to comply with the university’s repeated direction to remove the photograph

Justice Perram accepted that “it may in an appropriate case be consistent with the university’s standards to use a Nazi swastika in the work of a university academic” but “it was for Dr Anderson to engage in the forensic gymnastics of explaining how his at least incendiary conduct could be characterised as being consistent with the highest ethical, professional and legal standards … This he did not do.”

Justice Michael Lee said the posting of the swastika image, “which is self-evidently offensive (and obviously disturbing to a section of the University community)” could not amount to an exercise of intellectual freedom which was both “responsible” and in accordance with the “highest … standards”.

Anderson had “conceded the offensive image was not even important nor ‘central to the meaning of the graphic’ and was so peripheral to whatever point he was seeking to make that Dr Anderson ‘forgot’ about the image,” Justice Lee noted.

The ruling comes as pro-Palestinian protests continue on university grounds around the country, with the University of Sydney in particular struggling to balance the right to free speech with accusations of blatant antisemitism by protesters.

Anderson, who worked at the university for three decades before his dismissal in 2019, was issued multiple warnings before the university sought to terminate his employment after he presented the swastika graphic.

He claimed he was sacked from the university “for offending Israeli killers”.

His appeal was backed by the National Tertiary Education Union, which argued “cancel culture” led to his axing.

As an academic, Anderson made several statements that resulted in several formal warnings from the university’s leadership, including claims a News Corp journalist was a “traitor” because of a story on the Armenian genocide and former US senator John McCain was a “war criminal”.

The political economy lecturer – who was convicted in 1990 over the 1978 Hilton hotel bombing in Sydney but acquitted the following year – leads the so-called Centre for Counter ­Hegemonic Studies, a network of pro-Assad and pro-Tehran ­academics.

Anderson, who once flew to Syria for an audience with Assad, conducted a vicious online trolling in 2021 of Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert after her release from Iran’s brutal Evin Prison, pushing Tehran’s unsupported claims that Dr Moore-Gilbert was a Mossad agent.