Meet Jay Tharappel, a tutor in human rights (!) at the Sydney University. Jay, as even a casual perusal of his Facebook page will show, is a communist fanboi, with a particular penchant for the original and the best – Lenin and Stalin. For example, he thinks, “most of the claims against him [Stalin] are exaggerated or false”. No wonder he’s happy to be photographed cradling the portrait of the much maligned Man of Steel so tightly and tenderly.

Universities being supposedly the forums of tolerance and free debate (nice theory), Jay has every right to tutor young Australians about human rights while at the same time defending probably the biggest and bloodiest human rights violator in human history (mind you, Mao probably racked up even more deaths on his watch). Just as I, and any other decent, right thinking person around, has a right to call him a scumbag without a moral compass.

I also have not an ounce of doubt that had a tutor at an Australian university been posting Hitler memes and claiming that most of the claims against Hitler are exaggerated or false, he or she would be out on their arse before they could say “Ein, Zwei, Drei”, for all the principled commitment by our higher educations institutions to academic freedom and free inquiry.

The reason I’m picking on Jay is that on top of his communist sympathies, he’s also a Bashar al-Assad fanboi. Not just because Assad is objectively lesser evil than ISIS, which is true, but that he is a genuinely popular, democratically elected leader who is bravely resisting an imperialist assault by proxy against his sovereign nation and his people. Really.

Jay’s mentor at Sydney Uni is another Assad apologist:

The University of Sydney is standing by a controversial senior lecturer, Tim Anderson, who has dismissed the sarin gas attack in the Idlib Province as a “hoax” and called Syria’s six-year civil war a “fiction” perpetrated by the US “to destroy an independent nation”.

Fairfax Media can reveal Dr Anderson is just one among a number of Australian academics who have formed a pro-Assad outfit called the Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies, based in Sydney, to counter “censorship” by their universities.

The centre was formed “after concern that many Western academic bodies constrain, censor and marginalise counter-hegemonic or anti-imperial research and discussion, due to their close ties with government and corporate sponsors”.

The sick Chomskyite/Pilgerite conviction that the United States and the West more broadly are the greatest forces of evil in human history lives on at our institutions of higher learning and lower morality. Hitler never harmed German civilians, apparently. They will fellate and swallow any tinpot despot as long as he is sufficiently anti-American.

When The Daily Tele’s Kylar Loussikian reported on Anderson’s man-crush on Assad under the typically tabloidish headline “Sarin Gasbag”, our old friend Jay jumped to his mentor’s defence, calling Loussikian “the traitorous scum who desperately wants a second Armenian genocide. How much did they pay you, traitor? I guess stabbing Syria in the back with that surname is the best way of telling the world that you’re for sale, right?” on the rather tenuous grounds that Assad is a self-styled protector of ethnic minorities, including the Armenian one (as far as it goes, if they don’t rock the boat).

Mr Tharappel defended the remarks when contacted by Fairfax Media on Tuesday. “If people like him wage war on our post-colonial homeland then I will wage war against them,” he said. “They can choose to fight me and I will fight them … with words.”

Them’s fighting words, guerrilla boy.

And, yes. These people are teaching your children.

Arthur Chrenkoff blogs at The Daily Chrenk where this piece also appears.

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