A Muslim professor at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia has denounced the university and the media that earlier denounced him for attending a conference in Iran allegedly about Holocaust denial.

Prof. Shiraz Dossa delivered a paper at the conference in Tehran last December that was widely criticized for being a forum for Holocaust denial.

But in a rebuttal published in the Literary Review of Canada on Monday, Dossa rejected the accusation that the meeting was about Holocaust denial, and that it was organized by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

He criticized St. FX president Sean Riley, who said at the time that Dossa's attendance at the conference caused "shock and regret" at the university.

He also criticized university colleagues and officials, and some media reports.

Dossa said the university engaged in "a small Spanish Inquisition of its own" in attacking him, and comments by university officials raise issues about academic freedom.

He said the attacks were based on two false premises:

• That Iranian President Ahmadinejad had dismissed the Holocaust as a "myth" and threatened to "wipe Israel off the map."
• That the conference was about Holocaust denial.

Dossa said Ahmadinejad was mistranslated when speeches in Farsi were rendered as denying the Holocaust and calling for an attack on Israel.

Ahmadinejad actually said "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," Dossa said. That is "a spiritual wish," not a call for an attack on Israel, as the erroneous translation is.

"There is a huge chasm between the correct and the incorrect translations," he said.

He also said the conference was called "to devise an intellectual/political response to western-Israeli intervention in Muslim affairs," and was not about Holocaust denial.

There were six Holocaust deniers who gave papers at the meeting, out of a total of 33 reports, but "none of us knew that a few deniers/skeptics would be in attendance," he said.

As for his personal position, "I have never denied the Holocaust, only noted its propaganda power," Dossa said. He described himself as "an outspoken critic of Israel’s brutality in occupied Palestine."

In an introduction to Dossa's report, Literary Review editor Bronwyn Drainie said the magazine had undertaken "rigorous fact-checking that went on for a number of weeks" before publishing the report.

Dossa's report "seemed to us a serious exploration of the right of academic freedom in Canada and who gets to exercise that right," she said.