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Palestinian activists at Auckland University appear to have helped - unwittingly or deliberately - to bring down one of their strongest champions in this country, sacked political scientist Paul Buchanan.
Weekend Herald inquiries indicate the university may have felt pressured to sack him because an offending email he
wrote was circulated widely in the two months before he was sacked.
Dean of Arts John Morrow dismissed Dr Buchanan on July 25 for an email sent on May 30 to Arab student Asma Al Yammahi refusing her a deadline extension because claiming her father's death as an excuse was "culturally driven and preying on some sort of Western liberal guilt".
Miss Yammahi sent the email to the student newspaper Craccum on July 18, and to Syed Akbar Kamal, a journalist with the Triangle TV programme Darpan The Mirror.
She filed a complaint about the email with the university's mediation service within days of receiving it and took two friends with her to an interview with the service.
One of those friends, Sahar Ghumkhor, is an activist in Students for Justice in Palestine. Last year she published a sympathetic interview in Craccum with Harmeet Sooden, the student held hostage in Iraq for four months until March last year.
Mr Sooden used the interview to hit back at an article by Dr Buchanan claiming the hostages suffered from a "martyr complex" and should have paid for their own rescue by British troops.
Dr Buchanan believes that "a small group of students believe I am a CIA-Zionist agent".
"Some of these students are pursuing degrees in my former department, and it is possible that at least one of them received a mark in my course that was less than expected (although a tutor did the actual marking)," he said.
Miss Yammahi returned to the United Arab Emirates soon after seeing the mediation service in early June to visit her family because of her father's death. She returned on July 12.
Dr Buchanan said the university first asked him about the email on June 9, but he had arranged to visit the United States on sick leave from June 13 because of bowel surgery in February, so he was also away until July 15.
By the time he had three meetings with Professor Morrow and a university human resources official in the subsequent few days, the offending email was already circulating.
Miss Yammahi and her friends considered the email racist.
"He is pointing at our culture - why?" Miss Yammahi said this week.
"Does he say that all the white people have the right to have this feeling when they lose their parents?
"Once he was talking to someone on Symonds St. I said, 'Hi.' He didn't reply."
She was sure he would have known who she was because there were only about 20 students in the class and she was the only one wearing a scarf.
But Dr Buchanan said he had not exchanged a single word with her except by email.
"If I were walking up to her in the street I wouldn't recognise her," he said. "She sat in the back of the class when she was there so it was very hard for me to gauge what her reactions were. I do know that she was struggling in the class."
Although the Herald has not found any previous formal complaint against Dr Buchanan, he said he had disagreements with Dr Morrow on "managerial" issues.
In 2004, Prime Minister Helen Clark accused him of lying when he claimed that the then head of the Security Intelligence Service, Richard Woods, was likely to have been involved in gathering intelligence about Algeria when he was ambassador to France in the early 1990s.
He said the university supported him but he received "a stern letter" from State Services Commissioner Michael Wintringham.
He disagreed with a political science colleague, Steve Hoadley, over political ideology and the university's policy of admitting overseas postgraduate students with minimal background in the subject they were studying.
Dr Buchanan was popular with students, telling them stories from his early years as an armed fighter against a right-wing government in Argentina and later working with the CIA in Central America.
"His tales of fighting for, and against, guerrillas in the South American jungle were intoxicating," said journalist Peter Malcouronne, a masters student in 1998.
"There was a macho side to him - he'd also often talk of his Hawaii Ironman efforts - and young men, especially, found this all rather alluring."
But he did not tolerate students who did not do the required reading or get essays in on time. In one honours class where most of the students misunderstood the deadline and submitted essays late, he made them all write an extra 2000-word essay every fortnight for about six fortnights.
Miss Yammahi said that at the beginning of this year he told her class that "you will never get an extension even [if] someone will die".
That tough line - expressed intemperately - was to cost him his job.
