A German law professor has found himself subject to smear tactics by students and fellow faculty after expressing a negative opinion on the migrant crisis.
Legal scholar and University of Leipzig professor Thomas Raucher is currently embroiled in a fight against the powers of a liberal student body and his own colleagues after students discovered a Twitter post from December in which he said, “It is, of course, right to fight back when their own culture goes,” in reference to native and ethnic Europeans who have seen their own cultures whittled away in recent years in the name of diversity.
The effect on Germany in particular is the most striking, given the recent comments from Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker who told women to be more modest in the aftermath of the mass sex attacks on New’s Years Eve.
Prof. Raucher tweeted in response to the New Year’s attacks , “Dublin III broken. Schengen destroyed. Marauding bands of Arabs and Africans on New Years Eve. Thank you, Mrs Merkel,” which led the Leipzig University management to declare that he was promoting “intolerant and xenophobic ideas.”
The tweet that got the University interested in finding ways to fire the Professor came in January when he said, “Islam terror in Dresden. JE SUIS PEGIDA!” a reference to the “Je suis Charlie” slogan that millions around the world adopted after the offices of Charlie Hebdo were attacked by Islamic terrorists last year and multiple people shot dead.
But there may not be a lot the university can do to fire Prof. Raucher. German law has not regressed yet to the point where university professors can be fired for speaking a private opinion, and a commentator told Junge Freiheit that the university might just have to separate themselves from his comments but in the end they will have to just “deal with it.”
Political science academic Werner Patzelt managed to weigh in on the matter in support of Prof. Raucher, stating: “when university authorities decide the freedom of private exchanges, it promotes only moral cowardice.”
Prof. Raucher himself commented that the whole ordeal reminded him of the inquisition, and that he saw little difference in what was happening to him because of his opinions and what happened historically to gays in 1930s Germany, or Blacks before the civil rights era.
Germans are becoming increasingly concerned with the policing of free speech in the country following the migrant crisis. The revelation that a senior member of a government task force designed to prevent “hate speech” is also a former Stasi employee shows that while some things in Germany have changed a great deal, a lot of the old still remains.
The task force is said to exert overt influence with critics claiming it is behind the shut down of Facebook posts such as that of a young girl who spoke out against migrants in her city. The government is also presumed to be behind a court threatening Facebook users with 250,000 euro fines for criticising a pro-migrant journalist.
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