On February 19, Berlin’s so-called “Free” University (FU) was set to host an event entitled “Conditions of Life Calculated to Destroy: Legal and Forensic Perspectives on the Ongoing Gaza Genocide” featuring UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, and the director of renowned research agency Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman.

A week before the planned event, the spineless FU administration yielded to Zionist political pressure and cancelled the lecture, citing reasons that are copy-pasted straight out of Western hegemonic discourse’s anti-Palestinian playbook, such as the “present polarisation” and an “incalculable security situation.”

What is there left to say about the moral compass of a country where standing up for the human rights of Palestinians who continue to brave "Israel’s" genocidal war machine is considered to be both a polarising issue and a threat to public safety?

Caving in to Germany’s reason of state

Kai Wegner, Berlin’s centre-right, pro-policing mayor who routinely downplays the vicious police violence at Palestine solidarity protests, had urged the university to cancel the event, citing Albanese’s alleged “hatred of Israel” and “trivialisation of the Hamas terror organisation.”

Ron Prosor, "Israel’s" ambassador to Germany, even likened the university to a “Hamas terror camp”, employing the signature toxic hyperbole that is the hallmark of official Israeli rhetoric under far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a fugitive war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court for his role in the Gaza genocide.

A statement by the Palestine Committee FU Berlin condemned what it called the university’s “caving in to German Staatsräson”, the country’s self-imposed pro-"Israel" raison d’état. “Not we students make the university an unsafe place, but the police who far too often at the behest of Kai Wegner are sicced on us by our own university president,” the group posted on Instagram.

Albanese herself, who recently advocated that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and other EU officials should be tried for complicity in "Israel’s" war crimes, slammed the FU’s cowardly decision on social media.

“When I think that for 16 months Palestinian academics and teachers have kept teaching their student in tents or through mobile phones, while enduring carpet bombing, sniper fire, mass forcible displacement, starvation, trauma and grief - the unpredictable security situation claimed by @FU_Berlin truly strains credulity,” she wrote on X at the time.

The FU’s silencing of Albanese came on the heels of Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) cancelling a planned February 16 talk with her, entitled “Colonialism, Human Rights and International Law” due to, lo and behold, security concerns.

Organised by the Decolonial Practices Group made up of LMU students and faculty members, the group condemned the university’s decision, saying that it “follows a troubling pattern in Germany, where discussions on Palestine and human rights are censored, posing a direct threat to free speech and academic freedom.”

Fabricating antisemitism

The first quarter of 2025 saw many such instances of German institutions of higher learning aiding and abetting the repression of Palestine solidarity, setting what the group Students For Palestine Heidelberg describes as “a dangerous precedent in how narratives on anti-semitism are fabricated and employed to bar the development of critical discussions” on college campuses across Germany.

In January, Frankfurt’s Goethe University rescinded an offer to host an international academic conference, entitled “Talking About (the Silencing of) Palestine”, citing administrative reasons. Yet it is an open secret that the decision was the result of political pressure from conservative State (Weaponisation of) Antisemitism Commissioner, Uwe Becker, who defamed the event as a “travelling circus of known Israel haters.”

That same month, in what is a prime example of the unholy alliance between the pro-"Israel" lobby, policing and academic institutions that has coalesced in authoritarian post-October 7 Germany, the administration of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), with the help of the police, locked 30 anti-genocide student protesters and academics into a room for over three hours after luring them inside with fake promises of wanting to engage in a dialogue with them, say the activists.

During their unlawful detention, police harassed the participants, subjected them to body searches, forbade them from going to the bathroom on their own, and slapped them with bogus trespassing charges, according to grassroots left-wing news website klassegegenklasse.org.

When university administrators start assuming the role of snitches and jailers, you know that academic freedom is in the poorest of shapes.

Subcontractors of Zionist hasbara

Not surprisingly, the repressive atmosphere prevalent at German universities since "Israel" launched its campaign of annihilation against Gaza 19 months ago has led to a downgrading of the country’s academic freedom credentials.

In the 2025 update of the Academic Freedom Index, Germany dropped out of the top 10% due to its response to pro-Palestinian protests and the fact that academics are having their research scrutinised for voicing opposition to genocide.

As "Israel’s" relentless attacks and continued blockade on Gaza pushes a starving population to a breaking point in what is the world’s second largest humanitarian catastrophe after war-ravaged Sudan, the role of Germany’s academic institutions in either covering up or supporting the industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinian civilians shows no sign of changing.

At the time of writing, the University of Tübingen is set to host a propaganda event designed to deny the dystopian reality of anti-Palestinian repression in Germany by manufacturing a fictional threat to Jews, entitled “Turning point October 7 - The situation of Jewish students at German universities.”

The counterfactual get-together is organised by the German-Israeli Society (DIG), a Zionist lobby group which emphatically proclaims “Solidarity with the Israeli military!” (whose service members proudly post footage of their heinous war crimes on social media) on the website of one of its local chapters.

Such is the level of contempt in Germany for the unimaginable suffering Palestinians have been forced to endure for the last 19 months of colonial genocide, with the country’s university administrations continuing to act as self-deputised lackeys of authoritarian law-enforcement and subcontractors of Zionist hasbara.