A Canadian professor claims he was dismissed from his position at the University of Guelph-Humber after defending Israel in a social media post amid a surge in antisemitic incidents across Canada following the October 7 attacks by Hamas.
Paul Finlayson, who is not Jewish, shared with Fox News Digital that his termination followed a strong online defense of Israel regarding the brutal attacks and abductions of Israelis and foreigners, including citizens from the United States and Canada.
In November 2023, Finlayson responded to a LinkedIn post from an international educator, whom he accused of advocating for the destruction of Israel. While the original post and its comments were subsequently removed, the National Post reported on Finlayson’s comments in a December 2023 piece.
Finlayson’s response was emphatic: “If you say ‘from the River to the Sea’, you’re a Nazi,” he wrote. “I’m not neutral. I stand with Israel. I stand against antisemites who want nothing but dead Jews: who take millions from their education and health care budgets and spend it on making war…You stand with Palestine means you stand with Hitler. You don’t want peace, you want dead Jews…They murdered 1,400 innocents and took 250 hostages and the people celebrated rapist monsters as heroes.”
Finlayson maintains that his forthright stance against the Hamas attacks on Israel led to the loss of his academic position.
Since the post, Finlayson says he has faced a targeted campaign against him which has affected his professional standing and job prospects.
Finlayson said that students at the school found his LinkedIn reply before the post’s author erased the thread, leading to outcry. While meeting with a student in his office on Nov. 27, Finlayson said an administrator waited outside, eventually presenting him with a suspension letter.
A copy of the suspension letter, provided by Finlayson, cites “inappropriate online comments” and places the professor “on leave pending the outcome of the investigation.” It directed Finlayson not to contact “any of your departmental staff or students or broader members of the [university].”
Finlayson said he was “very well-liked” by students, who ranked him among the highest in the business department faculty. He said that rumors about the accusations against him destroyed his academic reputation, which included formulating courses and writing textbooks.
“My trial has been by defamation, and it continues by defamation,” Finlayson said of the “Kafkaesque” situation that ensued.
Anti-Israel protesters hold antisemitic posters in Edmonton, Alberta, on April 13, 2025. (Artur Widak/NurPhoto)
He says that his union, OPSEU Local 562, refused to represent him. The union did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Finlayson was officially fired by the university in July 2025. He provided a copy of his termination letter, which stated that after a “formal complaint of discrimination and harassment,” an investigator found that his “conduct violated the Ontario Human Rights Code and Humber’s Human Rights and Harassment Policy, and that [he] engaged in reprisal under both of those instruments.”
The Humber harassment policy states that “anyone who attempts Reprisal or threatens Reprisal against a person who initiates a complaint or participates in proceedings under this Policy may be subject to disciplinary action.”
The same policy says that “Humber upholds and supports the right to equal treatment without Discrimination” based on prohibited grounds, which include antisemitism.
Temple Emanu-El in Toronto was shot at on March 3, 2026. No injuries were reported. (Nick Lachance/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
The University of Guelph-Humber did not respond to Fox News Digital’s questions about Finlayson’s suspension, investigation and firing, and about whether anti-Israel posts shared by its students and a professor at the University violate the Humber Human Rights and Harassment Policy.
The University of Guelph’s “UofGforPalestine” Instagram page, which presents itself as the account of “students, staff, and faculty who stand in solidarity with Palestine,” has shared posts with the inverted red triangle that Hamas uses to mark targets. Like the U.S., Canada designates Hamas as a terror group.
In November 2024, the group shared photos on its Instagram account of a guillotine that “appeared on a walking path” in Guelph, which featured photos of the heads of Canadian, American and Israeli leaders coated in red paint. Though purported to be an “anonymous submission,” the post notes its “message” as “Death to empire, death to colonialism and imperialism, death to the war machine.”
The University of Guelph Humber in Ontario, Canada. (Google Maps)
A University of Guelph-Humber professor whom Finlayson believes brought the case against him has posted inflammatory rhetoric on his own LinkedIn account, calling Israel a “terrorist state,” and stating that the world “cannot have both” peace and Israel.
The professor did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
While Finlayson lost his position, elsewhere in Canada, activism led to starkly different circumstances for three staffers at York University, who were among 11 individuals charged with “hate-motivated mischief” in Nov 2023 for plastering a bookstore with photos accusing a Jewish CEO of genocide, and splashing the store with red paint, as reported by the National Post.
Though they were initially suspended from the school, at least two staff members appear to have current profiles on the York University website. One, a professor, most recently taught courses at the school in the Winter 2026 semester. York University did not respond to requests for comment about its restoration of staff members’ roles.
Since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, antisemitism has exploded in Canada. In April, B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights released a report showing that 6,800 antisemitic incidents took place in the country in 2025, representing a 9.4% increase over 2024. On average, this represented 18.6 incidents a day and was the “highest volume” the group has recorded since it began tracking incidents.