by Steven Greer, spiked
A Canadian academic was fired and persecuted for reviewing a book on Islamic imperialism.
n September 2022, following an accusation of ‘Islamophobia’, Collin May was dismissed from his post as director of the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC). May’s new book, From Cancel Culture to Incarceration Culture: Prosecutorial Democracy and the Future of Cancellation, not only documents his own bitter experience of cancellation but also assembles a collection of his own published essays, deeply rooted in the expanding literature on the wider issues around cancel culture.
In common with many of those against whom such allegations are made, May is an unlikely Islamophobe. Among other things, he has degrees in law, political philosophy and Islamic studies from Harvard and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He is a qualified lawyer, university lecturer and human-rights activist – focussing on LGBTQ+ rights, health-equity issues relating to indigenous and elderly people, and academic freedom. He has also worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The campaign to unseat May, an openly gay Christian conservative, began in the spring of 2022, not long after he was appointed to the AHRC. The left-wing Alberta New Democratic Party (NDP) was quick to denounce his appointment as an attempt by Alberta’s conservative government to further its political agenda. That July, Duncan Kinney, an NDP-affiliated blogger, publicised a review by May, which appeared in 2009. This was about the book Islamic Imperialism: A History, published by Yale University Press and authored by Efraim Karsh, a distinguished though controversial history professor at King’s College London. As May stated in a 2024 interview: ‘Both my review and professor Karsh’s book were characterised as “Islamophobic”, racist and hate speech. My review was even linked to violence against black Muslim women in hijab in Alberta more than 10 years after its publication.’