My Take | More academic freedom in Macau than Germany, philosopher says

Among European countries, post-war Germany has enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for academic and artistic freedom. So it must have caused a profound sense of discomfort when even The New York Times ran a story this week headlined, “Berlin Was a Beacon of Artistic Freedom. Gaza Changed Everything … The home of boundary-pushing artists from around the world has been upended by debates about what can and can’t be said about Israel and the war.”

Well, it’s not just Berlin, but Germany itself. The latest furore concerns one of New York’s academic luminaries, Nancy Fraser, a Jewish-American feminist who happens to be one of the most influential philosophers writing today.

Cologne University has just cancelled her Albertus Magnus visiting professorship, one of the most prestigious of its kind in Europe. Her offence? Back in November, she joined more than 400 professional philosophers from around the world to sign the “Philosophy for Palestine” proclamation, calling for an end to the massacres in Gaza by the Israeli military.

In a public statement last week, the university said the reason was the public letter co-signed by Fraser.

The incident seems to be symptomatic of Germany’s uncritical and almost unconditional support for Israel. It has led to its legal defence of the country against charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice and diplomatic covers in numerous international arenas, including the United Nations, and which in turn led Nicaragua to bring a charge of complicity in genocide against Germany at the same court for supplying weapons to Israel.

I recently asked Hans-Georg Moeller, a philosophy professor at the University of Macau, to explain the political – perhaps even spiritual – crisis, over Palestine, of the country from which he originally came.