Shiraz Dossa

Shiraz Dossa is a tenured professor of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. He previously held positions at the University of Toronto and University of Calgary. Professor Dossa acquired his B.A. (Hons) in Political Science at Makerere University in Uganda. He later earned both an MA and Ph.D. in Political Theory at the University of Toronto in Canada. Dossa's work focuses on issues of Politics and Identity, Human Rights, the Global South, and Political Theory.
In 2006, Dr. Dossa attended conferences on Hannah Arendt (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Ethics and Development (Kampala, Uganda), and the Holocaust: A Global View (Tehran, Iran). He was the only Canadian to attend the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust and described the paper he read at the conference as an essay "about the war on terrorism, and how the Holocaust plays into it." Dossa wrote that it was a fallacy "that the event was a Holocaust-denial conference because of the presence of a few notorious western Christian deniers/skeptics, a couple of a neo-Nazi stripe. It was nothing of the sort. It was a Global South conference convened to devise an intellectual/political response to western-Israeli intervention in Muslim affairs. Holocaust deniers/skeptics were a fringe, a marginal few at the conference. The majority of the papers focused on the use and abuse of the Holocaust in Arab, Muslim, Israeli and western politics, a serious and worthy subject for international academic discussion... It was not a Holocaust-denial conference by any stretch. That’s all false." For Dossa, the widespread condemnation of the "conference" by world leaders (including the UN Secretary General), the media and established Holocaust scholars (many of whom organized a "counter conference" in Berlin, with Raul Hilberg as Keynote speaker) can be explained by their acceptance of "the denial fallacy that had been concocted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish Defense League." Dossa explicitly dismissed Holocaust deniers as "hacks and lunatics ... I frankly wouldn't even shake hands with most of them."
Dossa also wrote that "It was the Zionists and the neo-Nazis who, for very different, self-serving reasons, depicted it as a Holocaust-denial conference and sold it to willing, anti-Iranian Islamophobes." Dossa responded to public criticism of his attendance of the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust by John Ibbitson and Rex Murphy, stating that their argument(s) "impresses those intellectually just a cut above the Trailer Park Boys. It is worth noting that these Christian boys have unlimited latitude in The Globe and Mail to trash Muslims even as they defend "civilization," Israel and Jews."
Regarding anti-Semitism in the Islamic World, Dossa has stated that: "Anti-Semitism is a Euro-American problem, not an Islamic one. Iranian opposition to Israel and its wars on Muslims/Palestinians is ethical and political; it has absolutely nothing to do with hating Jews qua Jews."<ref name=Dossa1/>

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