Jewish MP demands union dump academic over swastika

Jewish Labor MP Josh Burns has demanded the tertiary education union stop backing a left-wing academic who was sacked for superimposing a swastika onto the Israeli flag.

Dr Tim Anderson was dismissed by the University of Sydney in 2019 after misconduct findings by the university over his use of Nazi symbolism in lecture materials and social media to highlight what he believes to be Israel’s inhumane occupation of the West Bank.

The lecture slide that is the subject of the controversy related to a 2014 war in which thousands of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces.

The economics and politics author has appealed against the university’s decision and has been legally supported by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). The union, which is facing criticism from politicians and a prominent Jewish association, insists it is backing Dr Anderson to uphold academic freedom but that does not mean it agrees with the veteran activist’s views.

“The swastika is used by people who intend to signify their support for the Nazi regime that murdered six million Jewish people – and who would have murdered my own grandmother, had she not been lucky enough to flee before they could,” Mr Burns wrote in a letter to the NTEU on Monday.

“The swastika is not a symbol of intellectual or academic freedom. It is a symbol of hate.

Read the article by Paul Sakkal in The Sydney Morning Herald.