In Australia, Allegations of Offensive Cartoons on a Professor's Door

"One speaks about the Holocaust at one's own personal peril.  Institutions, in my view, are scared to death of being associated with me because I guess they are afraid of being accused of having some sort of Holocaust-denier in their faculty"

That's what Canadian-born Aussie academic Thomas A. Fudge reportedly told the vile (see its Holocaust-denying thrust here) Adelaide Institute back in 2005, referring back to the notorious 1993 Joel Hayward Affair.

As the antisemitic Institute explained the matter,

'Fudge had been commissioned to write an article about the impact on masters student Joel Hayward of the widespread condemnation of his 1993 thesis questioning the validity of the Holocaust. Hayward suggested the gas chambers used to systematically kill Jews and other minority groups could not have existed and questioned the number of people who died at the hands of the Nazis in World War 2. Hayward's mental health and job prospects suffered.

But university heads objected to Fudge's article, sacking the editor of department publication History Now and controversially destroying 500 copies that carried Fudge's article. Though the books were shredded, it became known as the "book-burning" scandal in academic circles. Fudge left New Zealand in November 2003, on leave, and later resigned [as a history lecturer at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand]. Hayward has also relocated overseas.

Speaking to The Press from Washington, Fudge said the Holocaust had become a modern taboo of such potency that any mention of it that was less than emphatically apologetic was unacceptable.'

 Read Fudge's apologia for Hayward's thesis here

On the unsavoury Adelaide Institute's website here we read inter alia:

 Fudge attributed the Holocaust taboo to the reach of the more radical factions of the powerful Jewish lobby.

"There are some radical Zionist-types that bring a lot of pressure.

"The roads of the world should not, and do not, run through Jerusalem."

For New Zealand-born  Hayward (who had a Jewish granny, it seems),  now a Sunni Muslim and a professor in the Arab world (his career prospered in Britain despite his thesis, the furore it provoked, and Fudhe's pessimism)  see here 

Hayward's  "career highlights," we read, "include having been Dean of the [UK] Royal Air Force College, Cranwell for five years (2007-2011)".

Now Fudge, a full professor who has taught at the University of New England (in New South Wales) since 2012, has hit the headlines again. The Australian Jewish News (AJN) reports today that on his office door cartoons by Carlos Latuff, runner-up in the 2006 Iranian Holocaust cartoon competition, have allegedly been displayed.

(These pictured were the ones, reportedly.) 

The university is investigating.

As the chair of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission, himself an academic, observes:

"Imagine being a Jewish student, about to enter the office for a consultation, and being confronted with these disturbing and offensive posters which demonise and portray Jews and Israelis in a negative way....

Imagine the outcry if other ethnic, religious and cultural groups were depicted in such a way."

 Meanwhile, read of current outbreaks  of antisemitism in the "Lucky Country" here (trade union BDS activity) and here (cemetery desecration)