The many faces of conformity

Canceled teacher Jim McMurtry on the assassination of truth

Image of Amy Hamm from the Justice Center

By Jim McMurtry, Ph.D.

A French history teacher was murdered and beheaded three years ago for his instruction on freedom of expression, his crime being that he showed students cartoons from a 2012 edition of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo which depicted Muhammad – one of the cartoons allegedly showing the Islamic prophet with his genitals exposed. Of course, any depiction of Muhammad is prohibited. Chapter 42, verse 11 of the Koran states: “[Allah is] the originator of the heavens and the earth... [there is] nothing like a likeness of Him.” This is taken by Muslims to mean that Allah cannot be captured in an image by human hand, and any attempt to do so may not end well.   

Another French teacher, Dominique Bernard, was murdered on October 13 of this year by a Muslim terrorist who was looking for a history teacher. In the clash of civilizations across the world, there is a side which opposes the values of the Enlightenment and French Revolution, as French President Emmanuel Macron pointed out. 

In the cultural clash of the west, there is a side which opposes the values of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. British Columbia nurse Amy Hamm faces potential discipline for a series of social media posts, podcast appearances, videos, and other writings dating from July 2018 to March 2021 in which she is said to have made, according to a citation from the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives, “discriminatory and derogatory statements regarding transgender people” while identifying herself as a nurse. Her online posts “mocked various transgender women as ‘a man in a dress’ and referred to ‘them’ using the pronouns ‘he’ or ‘him.’” 

In 2020, she co-sponsored a billboard on Hastings Street in Vancouver which read, “I love J.K. Rowling” in support of the author. This week she referred to the college as a “witch trial” and asked, “Should a nurse be allowed to keep her job after saying that trans women are men.” You can follow her hearing, which resumes next Tuesday, at the following address: https://healthreg.webex.com/healthreg/j.php?MTID=me90fe7268452d7287892ac419749de6b

In the first case, the assassinations of history teachers Paty and Bernard were to eliminate dissent from a particular worldview. Any criticism or perceived denigration of Muhammad, an historical figure of importance, is dangerous wherever one lives on the planet. The newspaper Charlie Hebdo found this out in 2015 when eleven of its cartoonists and journalists were gunned down. 

In the second case, the persecutors of Amy Hamm advance the idea that any denigration of transsexualism is verboten, which means nurses are to ignore biological science, pretend that the binary of male and female is a social construct, and support the concept of lipstick-and-chaps-wearing men with beards and penises as women qualified to enter private female spaces. 

In my case, the forces of irrationality are also strong. My regulatory body, called the B.C. Teachers Regulation Branch, actually asked me to sign an agreement that would ban me from teaching for life. While the fatuous allegations against me keep changing, I was walked out of classroom and career during the mass hysteria of late May 2021 which saw students at my school wearing orange shirts, wristbands and face-paint and walking through the corridor in mood swings ranging from sullen silence to voluble indignancy against their own society because of disturbing reports from a long-ago-shuttered residential school in Kamloops of 215 students tortured, murdered and clandestinely buried at night by their Christian teachers and 6-year-old conscripts. 

While there was no murder in Kamloops – no mass graves, no hidden graves, no bodies, no police investigation, no access to the archeological report by Sarah Beaulieu, no documentation of anyone ever missing a child – my employer, the Abbotsford School District, wrote the following to me (the first of two sentences being a sentence fragment): “It in [our] view cannot be overemphasized that Mr. McMurtry having no knowledge of his students and more particularly whether any of these students had Indigenous descent in making his comments that provoked a strong student response and which was contrary to the school’s message of condolences and reconciliation. Regardless of his intent he left students with the impression some or all of the deaths could be contributed to ‘natural causes’ and that the deaths could not be called murder or cultural genocide.”

After media platforms around the world broke news of the apocryphal story of mass child murder in Kamloops, the principal of Robert Bateman Secondary School asked all teachers to speak about this news with their students. Although I was teaching Calculus 12 at the time, I led a brief discussion on Indian residential schools in which I said that most deaths at these schools were from disease, particularly Tuberculosis. Within half an hour I was frog-marched out the school by two vice principals. That I was right about disease and not murder mattered not a whit to anyone. Like Paty and Bernard and Hamm, I was swimming against a powerful current of opinion. Who was I to tell students historical truth when people above me were better served by a monstrous lie? 

 Whether it be Islamic or trans or government authoritarianism, it brooks no criticism. I lost my job and have no prospect of getting another one, so I watch Amy on Zoom sitting forlornly in her bedroom as the world of embittered orthodox-sniffers spins.  

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Are we too embarrassed of ourselves to teach Canadian history?

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