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B’nai Brith Canada said it is “deeply disturbed” by what it termed as the “nonchalance” of the University of Toronto’s law school toward a professor who on social media compared a Toronto Jewish judge to an infamous Nazi lawyer.

“Professor Mohammad Fadel teaches Business Organizations at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, a mandatory course for undergraduate law students. For months, his Twitter profile picture has depicted Justice David Spiro, a Jewish member of Canada’s Tax Court. At the bottom of Spiro’s photo, Fadel has written the words: ‘The sovereign is he who decides the exceptions.’ This is a quote from Carl Schmitt, a bitterly anti-Semitic German jurist who joined the Nazi Party and facilitated its rise to power in the 1930s,” said B’nai Brith in a statement.

B’nai Brith pointed out that under the photo, Fadel added the words “Schmitt lives in Toronto.”

“Justice Spiro in fact lives in Toronto, making Fadel’s equation clear,” B’nai Brith said.

The advocacy group noted that Fadel’s Twitter profile contains a direct link to his Faculty of Law website.

As B’nai Brith explained, Spiro faced an accusation that in 2020 he had interfered in the hiring process for the faculty’s International Human Rights Program. However, in May the Canadian Judicial Council found that while he had erred in judgement, his error was not grave enough to warrant his removal from his position as a judge, and that he did not in fact habor an anti-Muslim bias.

The decision is currently under a judicial review application.

“Recent Jewish graduates of the faculty repeatedly raised this issue with Dean Jutta Brunnée over the summer, emphasizing the anti-Semitic nature of this baseless comparison of a Jewish judge to a Nazi,” B’nai Brith said. “But the Dean refused to intervene, while declining to explain whether she considered Fadel’s Nazi comparison a legitimate exercise of his ‘academic freedom.’ The faculty’s own official Twitter has directed followers to Fadel’s account.”

With Fadel being quoted extensively in the media as an expert source on the controversy surrounding the faculty’s decision not to hire an anti-Israel academic as head of its human rights program, B’nai Brith said it remained a “troubling mystery” why the academic had compared Spiro to a Nazi on his Twitter feed.

“Whatever one thinks of the U of T Law controversy, comparing Jews to Nazis is always beyond the pale,” said B’nai Brith CEO Michael Mostyn. “These comparisons are particularly deplorable given the dramatic rise in both anti-Semitism and inappropriate Nazi comparisons in Canada over the past few months.”