While Scotland’s Edinburgh University deems itself a bastion of progressive values, new revelations from its own commissioned inquiry, exposing its historic role in promoting colonial-era 'scientific racism' and slavery have forced a reckoning. The inquiry has recommended that, to atone, the university should divest from companies accused of complicity in Israel’s genocidal war of annihilation in Gaza and the West Bank, support the reversal of its adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, establish a Palestine Studies Centre to investigate the legacy of the Balfour declaration, and offer scholarships to students of Palestinian origin. All these proposals are extremely laudable, but it’s noteworthy that the report fails to acknowledge – at all - the bone-deep racism of two of the university’s current academics, Professors Paul McKeigue and Tim Hayward— a couple of ghoulish genocide-deniers who have spent years promoting far-right conspiracy theories that dehumanise Syrians, deny Assad’s war crimes, and amplify Islamophobic Kremlin propaganda, including depicting heroic Syrian Civil Defence (White Helmets) rescue workers as Al Qaeda.

While Professors McKeigue and Hayward – members of the all-British Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (a Kremlin-backed covey of Assad propagandists featuring zero Syrians) portray themselves as anti-imperialists and ardent defenders of Palestinian rights, their work and words tell another story. Both have constantly used the same Islamophobic language and War on Terror tropes as prominent far-right figures and white supremacists like Nigel Farage, David Duke, and Nick Griffin, and proudly neo-nazi sites like the Daily Stormer, to absolve Assad of war crimes and blame his victims for their own suffering. All the above helped sanitise and normalise genocide by portraying Syrians demanding freedom as Islamist terrorists, while lionising Putin’s role in propping up Assad and helping ethnically cleanse half of Syria’s population under the banner of “fighting extremism.”

This is largely indistinguishable from the same poisonous racist, Islamophobic rhetoric, propaganda and genocide-denial now deployed by Israel in Gaza, where carpet bombing and mass starvation are justified in the name of “security” and “anti-terrorism,” and victims are dehumanised on a mass scale. Even the perpetrators’ monstrously grotesque mockery of their victims — videos ridiculing the suffering of children being very deliberately starved — is eerily familiar. Only the map coordinates are very slightly different.
And of course, Netanyahu relies, as Assad did, on a global network of apologists and genocide-deniers, always ready to excuse or deny atrocities while presenting themselves, surreally, as principled defenders of human rights.

Professors Hayward, McKeigue, and their peers on the far-right are part of a larger intellectual ecosystem that treats murderous authoritarian violence as legitimate when it comes from the ‘right’ oppressors. Whether it’s Assad in Syria, Putin in Ukraine, or Netanyahu in Gaza, there’s always some handy laboured justification for the unjustifiable: Fighting Terrorism, Maintaining Stability, Opposing Imperialism, Civilisational Defence.

While the Western governments are rightly castigated for normalising such evil, Putin’s central role in shaping the current genocide-friendly geopolitical network cannot be overstated either. His regime has spent years cultivating ties with and promoting far-right leaders globally, including Netanyahu, and nurturing biddable dupes and zealots at both extremes of the political spectrum globally, using these to process disinformation and manufacture consensus around conspiracy theories that undermine what remains of democratic norms. His ideologue, Alexander Dugin, who lauds Donald Trump as Putin’s partner in a Russo-American ‘conservative revolution’ and describes non-white peoples as “animal people – dumb and brainless”, is lionised by white supremacists globally, while his books are required reading at Russian military academies. Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, Tim Hayward, prominent promoter of Kremlin conspiracy theories, is currently teaching a course on 'propaganda and censorship in democracies'.

Edinburgh University is certainly not alone in hosting academics who’ve helped popularize bigotry, now or in the past. Now, as then, this is symptomatic of a wider cultural climate—in academia and beyond—that cloaks authoritarian sympathies in the favoured language of the day. The same frameworks that once legitimised colonial conquest and scientific racism have been rebooted, with linguistic and ideological tweaks, to rationalise modern-day mass murder and repression; the fact that the same academics and universities may then rightly condemn the mass-murder and repression of another genocidal state elsewhere means precisely zilch since all authoritarians are fed and strengthened by the same dehumanizing fires they helped to fan and spread.

Whether in Syria or Palestine, East Turkestan or Ukraine, the pattern repeats universally: victims dehumanised, murderous tyranny rationalised, and dissent reframed as extremism. Whenever elites—academic or otherwise—echo authoritarian propaganda to normalize bigotry and inhumanity, whether on the basis of opposing terrorism, imperialism or any other ism, they don’t just whitewash the past. They prepare the ground for future horrors.

By: Ruth Riegler

Photo: Tim Hayward (r) pictured with fellow Assad propagandists and members of the Kremlin-backed Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, Vanessa Beeley and Piers Robinson (l), at a 'Media on Trial' event, Leeds, UK, May 2018