An article about Minister of Immigration Jason Kenney’s University of Haifa doctorate by conservative commentator Julia Gorin has mysteriously disappeared from the pages of the Huffington Post without explanation.

Here’s her archived piece of a mere five days ago, deeply critical of Haifa University for awarding an honorary doctorate to citizenship and immigration minister Jason Kenney. And here’s what appears at HuffPo now.

Let me say straight out that Gorin is not of my politics. Here she is the week after 9/11:

Only the most enlightened society could evolve so highly as to put itself into a position to be held hostage by some lower, alien species…. Only could an enlightened society do something like inform a cockroach that it’s sitting on top of oil—then drill it for him and pay him for it. Instead of doing what every other great power in history would have done and just conquering the cockroach and taking the oil, we set up diplomatic relations…. So what now? Retaliate? A more appropriate verb would be ‘erase’. … Indeed, it seems our enemies are practically begging us to put them out of our misery. And we should heed their call—before the Islamic fundamentalists become indestructible and emerge as the only life form left to reign the earth after a nuclear holocaust. Them and the cockroaches.

But more recently she has gained some composure and garnered enough journalistic street cred to be a frequent contributor to HuffPo and other mainstream publications. As the latter link indicates, she is interested in what might be called post-Holocaust history, and has spent time researching the course of events in the Balkans during and after World War Two.

She makes a very strong point about Kenney’s political predilections, about which I’ve commented from time to time myself. The Minister’s odd fixation on the Roma people may well be intertwined with his veneration of Croatian war criminal Alojzije Stepinac, whose leader, Ante Pavelic, didn’t much care for them either.

Presently, under the Minister’s benign gaze, a cell of Greek neo-Nazis has comfortably set up house in Montreal. And his “outreach” to various ethnic communities has just been revealed as a cynical and costly political game.

But that takes us back to the HuffPo suppression. Does part of this image-making include political pressure to vapourize articles that are unkind to him? Is this self-censorship by HuffPo (if that’s what it was) related to other incidents recently reported of direct and indirect political pressure on our so-called free press?

The Huffington Post editors owe us an explanation. And so might the Harper government.

UPDATE: Julia Gorin responds. [H/t reader Holly Stick]