Dumped academic Tim Anderson offers just another study in hypocrisy

Tim Anderson meets Syrian president Bashar Assad.

Tim Anderson is a zealot. It’s a word he uses often himself, to condemn those who don’t support the murderous tyrants to whom he pays obeisance. A word he’s used most recently to slime a young Australian woman held by Iran for reasons he knows well but hasn’t the courage to admit.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert was not a spy. She was a hostage.

But if Anderson were to admit that, perhaps even to himself, the house of cards upon which he has built his grievances would come tumbling down.

And what a twisted pile of contradictions it would be.

Twitter screen grabs showing the trolling activity of Tim Anderson against Kylie Moore-Gilbert.

Anderson, the activist twice jailed on trumped-up murder and attempted murder raps who now cheers on a regime that imprisons and tortures its critics on the most spurious of charges.

The university professor who demands unfettered free speech for himself but celebrates an Islamic theocracy that tortures and executes its own academics.

The “anti-imperialist” who claims to stand for the oppressed, but invariably sides with the oppressors: Syria’s barrel-bombing Bashar al Assad; Iran’s hanging mullahs; Russia’s mafia state boss Putin; China’s ruler-for-life Xi.

Anderson’s latest targets are the Uighurs, hundreds of thousands of whom have been herded into internment camps in China.

The self-styled director of the Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies says it’s all a hoax: “Washington’s latest fabricated war propaganda campaign, the Uighur Genocide Scam.” It’s the pea-and-thimble trick: highlight an arguable issue — whether the atrocities amount to genocide — to divert from what’s in front of you: human rights abuses on an overwhelming scale.

It makes for a glib tweet but has no place in a lecture theatre.

And there’s the rub.

Anderson is supposed to be a teacher, but was fired for posting offensive material about Israel, not for the substance of his work. I think that’s a pity.

I’d rather see an independent review of his research and teaching standards.

As Kylie Moore-Gilbert notes: “We are, as academics, tasked with conducting research and teaching that is informed by data, and informed by the facts — and the kind of narratives that this guy’s promoting do not at all appear to me to be informed by any research basis or factual basis that an academic would be speaking from.”

That’s the issue. What kind of academic rigour is he bringing to the job, if any?