Jason Arday, a Cambridge professor, took his own life after weeks of hostile criticism and ridicule in the press and on social media about his alleged plagiarism.
Allegations of plagiarism against Arday were not new and had been cleared up before he became professor at Cambridge but were dug up again by a disgruntled ex Cambridge professor, an open white supremist, eugenist and pro Zionist, Nathan Cofnas. Cofnas seized upon Arday’s exaggerated claims about running numerous marathons in a short number of days and raising millions in charity that if brought to light would reopen doubts about his credentials as a professor.
The Telegraph and Times, UK’s right wing unequivocally pro-Zionist press, aired Cofnas’s racist allegations against Arday and gave them mainstream legitimacy. Although there have been other plagiarist Cambridge professors and even though plagiarism is common in the academic sector, Arday was worthy of forensic scrutiny, from the right’s perspective, because he was an example of Cambridge’s diversity and inclusion policy failures.
Arday was Cambridge’s poster boy for D&I because the university has done little else to improve ethnic diversity among staff.
In a Trumpinian world, the great pushback against leftish-wokeism is well underway with the right leading the charge and Zionists behind in the wings. Both are at pains to turn the tide of public opinion against Israel. Public opinion supporting the desperate situation of the Palestinians and against Zionism and Israel’s genocide has found fertile ground among the left, and is now widespread in the mainstream, led and initiated by university students and academia staff despite McCarthyism type policies from university funders and leaders.
In fact what hurt Arday most according to a friend, who was one of the last to speak to him, was criticisms of his credentials from the left. The left fell for the ‘freedom of speech’ playbook from the right. Arday had faced attacks from the right since he was made professor at Cambridge but when the likes of the Guardian, Novara Media and other left publications including leftist professors from Cambridge weighed in on his credentials, even after his forced resignation, he had no one or where to turn to.
The left has been fatally wounded by the right’s use of the freedom of speech playbook to persistently criticise D&I policies seen to be protecting grooming gangs, foreign criminal suspects and asylum seekers. Will the death of a black man with ADHD, and vulnerable to suicide, who was literally hounded to death, change things?
There is also a lesson in this for the Muslim community in the west. The dividing lines of left and right are fluid in secular liberalism and aligning to either comes with political risks. We need to become more politically astute and ideological aware and root our defence of Muslims and Islam, in an increasingly hostile west, on Islamic principles and not pragmatism.
