An engineering lecturer in the United Kingdom has been fired for making racial remarks, including saying Jews “are the cleverest people in the world” and had “a particular gift” for physics.
An employment tribunal this week heard that Stephen Lamonby, 73, of Solent University in Southampton, made the remarks during a meeting last year with course leader Janet Bonar, who is Jewish and took offense when, in response to mentioning that she had a degree in physics, Lamonby asked if she was Jewish.
In self-defense, he told her: “I believe that the Jewish are the cleverest people in the world. They are much maligned because of it.”
At the tribunal, Lamonby said he was “excited to think she might be one of them—excited to meet a Jewish physicist, who had been my heroes since boyhood.” He also noted that Germans, too, were “good at engineering,” as were the Japanese and Americans.
She told the tribunal she was “concerned about our students being taught by someone with his entrenched racist views.”
Lamonby told The Daily Mail that he would appeal his termination from the university, where he had worked part-time for six years.
He blamed “woke” culture, adding that today “you can’t make any comments [in universities] now because they are totally obsessed with racism and to talk about Jews in the context of racism is crazy because they are not even a race, they are an ethnicity.”
In the end, he deduced, “I think the judgment came down to the fact the judge was a woke judge.”