Open Letter to Professor Roland Paris and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa
Dear Professor Roland Paris,
We are alumni of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GPSIA) at the University of Ottawa, writing to you in your role as Program Director with significant concerns about a current Senior Fellow, Artur Wilczynski. Both before and after his appointment as the University’s Special Advisor on Antisemitism in June 2024, Mr. Wilczynski's social media activity—including his posts, re-posts, and shared memes—have been deeply troubling. His feed is a fairly constant stream of intentional misinformation and hate speech, towards both Muslims and Jews, with a significant increase since the recent Israeli cyberattack in Lebanon.
He’s called Canadian Jewish organizations “ideological tokens” and “disinformation machines” and Jewish authors, scholars, and rabbis racist, describing their books as “calling for ethnic cleansing….keeping Jews in a state of perpetual vulnerability to discrimination, violence, expulsion, and genocide”. He’s said that student protests are directly responsible for terrorism by inciting violence. He has re-posted videos of Palestinian students on campus speaking factually about Gaza and accused them of antisemitic hate speech; posts delighting in and making light of the death and wounding of children and civilians as “100% morally justifiable”; posts calling for Jews to be excommunicated for simply naming the genocide and occupation in Gaza; posts accusing the University administration of failing to protect Jewish students for allowing a supportive MPP to visit the sit-in; and posts accusing the UNWRA of being complicit in October 7th. And that’s only since the beginning of the 2024-25 school year.
GPSIA is a training ground for future academics, public servants, and political leaders and well known for its expertise in international affairs, conflict studies, security studies, and the Middle East. As a Senior Fellow, his role is as a teacher and mentor, providing academic supervision on research, and advice on the transition into the workforce. It is clear from Mr. Wilczynski’s online activities and public content that, despite his professional credentials, he regularly violates University policy, and is not equipped to serve in this role or to provide a safe or effective learning environment for students in general, and Muslim, Arab, and Jewish students specifically.
As two Jewish and Palestinian alumni, we are ashamed of our graduate institution. We are deeply concerned that by allowing Artur Wilczynski's dissemination of misinformation and support of violence and hate to go unchecked, GPSIA demonstrates that it places little value on academic scholarship in this field; the educational needs and wellbeing of it’s student population; or the lives of Palestinians who have been killed, raped, injured, displaced, and subjected to Israeli violence over the past year since October 7th, as well as Lebanese and Syrian nationals and other civilians in the region. The graduate program has the potential to play a significant role in contributing to research, knowledge translation, public scholarship, and academic convenings on this important topic. Yet, GPSIA has been notably silent, other than very vocal representatives such as Mr. Wilczynski, whose commentary carries significantly more weight through his academic affiliation and university roles than it would as a retired public servant.
We call on the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs to remove Mr. Wilczynski from his role as a Senior Fellow and any affiliation with the school. Additionally, we insist on an urgent meeting with the program and faculty administration to address GPSIA’s responsibility at this critical historical juncture in the Middle East and within our university community.
Sincerely,
Sabrien Amrov (2013) and Nisa Malli (2014)