German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas (right) and German philosopher Martin Heidegger (Getty)
In his report published by the British website Middle East Eye, writer Hamid Dabashi called for imagining that a Middle Eastern country supported and armed militarily and diplomatically by Russia or China has the will and means necessary to bomb Tel Aviv for three months, day and night, and kill tens of thousands of Israelis. It maimed countless people and displaced millions, turning the city into an uninhabitable pile of rubble, like Gaza today.
The professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University continues, “Just imagine this for a few seconds: Iran and its allies are deliberately targeting populated areas in Tel Aviv, hospitals, synagogues, schools, universities, libraries - or in fact any populated place - to ensure maximum security.” Civilian casualties."
The author of the book “Post-Orientalism... Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terrorism” continues: They will tell the world that they are only looking for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war government. “Ask yourself what the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia and Germany in particular would do within 24 hours of an attack in such a fictional scenario.”
He continues, "Now return to reality, and think about the fact that since last October 7 (and for decades before that date), Tel Aviv's Western allies have not only witnessed what Israel did to the Palestinian people, but also provided it with military equipment, bombs, ammunition, and diplomatic cover, in When the American media provided ideological justifications for the slaughter and extermination of Palestinians.”
The Iranian-American philosopher and historian believes that the existing world order will not tolerate the imaginary scenario mentioned above, even for a single day. In light of the full military support provided by the United States, Europe, Australia and Canada to Israel, we, the helpless peoples of the world, like the Palestinians, do not care. This is not just a political reality, it is also closely related to the moral and philosophical imaginary world of the thing that calls itself “the West.”
He considers that “the people who belong to us and who live outside the European sphere of moral imagination do not exist in their philosophical world. We Arabs, Iranians, Muslims, or people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, have no existential reality for European philosophers except a metaphysical threat that must be overcome and silenced.” ".
He continues, "Starting with Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and continuing with Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Žižek, we are anomalies and well-known things that orientalists were tasked with deciphering. Therefore, the killing of tens of thousands of us at the hands of Israel, or the United States and its European allies, does not raise the slightest inconvenience in The minds of European philosophers.
European tribal masses
If you doubt this, Dabashi continues, just look at the leading European philosopher Jürgen Habermas and a few of his colleagues, who came up with an astonishingly crude act of cruel platitude in support of Israel's massacre of the Palestinians.
The question is no longer what idea we should take about the human Habermas, who is currently 94 years old, but rather how can we think about him as a social scientist, philosopher, and critical thinker? Does what he believes matter to the world anymore, if it does?
The world was asking similar questions about another great German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, in light of his Nazi affiliations. In my opinion - continues Dabashi - we must now ask such questions about Habermas's violent Zionism and the important consequences for what we can think about his entire philosophical project.
If Habermas does not have an iota of space in his moral imagination for people like the Palestinians, do we have any reason to consider his entire philosophical project to be in any way connected to the rest of humanity beyond his immediate European audience?
In an open letter to Habermas, prominent Iranian sociologist Asef Bayat said he "contradicts his own ideas" when it comes to the situation in Gaza.
The writer stated that he believes that Habermas's disregard for the lives of Palestinians is completely consistent with his Zionism. It is entirely consistent with the worldview that non-Europeans are not fully human, or that they are “human animals,” as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant has publicly stated.
According to the writer, this absolute disregard for the Palestinians is deeply rooted in the German and European philosophical imagination. The prevailing wisdom is that Germans, because of Holocaust guilt, developed a strong commitment to Israel.
But for the rest of the world, as is now clear from the document that South Africa submitted to the International Court of Justice, there is complete consistency between what Germany did during its Nazi era and what it is currently doing during its Zionist era, according to the writer.
Dabashi believes that Habermas's position is in line with the German state's policy of participating in the Zionist massacre of the Palestinians. It is also in line with what is seen as the “German left,” with its racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia of Arabs and Muslims, and its blanket support for acts of genocide committed by the Israeli settler colony.
Moral decadence
The charge of Eurocentrism that is constantly leveled against European philosophers' perception of the world is not only based on a cognitive flaw in their thinking, as the writer sees it, but rather it is a constant sign of moral decadence.
This moral decline is not just a political misstep or an ideological blind spot, but is deeply engraved in their philosophical imagination, which remains irreparably tribal.
Habermas seems unaware that his support for the slaughter of Palestinians is entirely consistent with what his predecessors did in Namibia during the Herero and Namaqua genocides. Like an ostrich, German philosophers stuck their heads inside their European illusions, believing that the world did not see them as they really were, says Dabashi.
In the end, Habermas did not say or do anything surprising or contradictory, quite the opposite. It was entirely consistent with the incurable tribalism of his philosophical lineage, which wrongly took a universal approach.
The world has now been freed from this false sense of universality. Philosophers like V. Y. Mudimbe of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Walter Mignolo or Enrique Dussel in Argentina, or Kojin Karatani in Japan have far more legitimate claims to cosmopolitanism than Habermas and his ilk ever had.
The writer pointed out that the moral bankruptcy of Habermas's statement regarding Palestine represents a turning point in the colonial relationship between European philosophy and the rest of the world. The world has awakened from the false slumber of European racial philosophy. Today, we owe this liberation to the global suffering of people like the Palestinians, whose heroism and long-standing historical sacrifices have dismantled the blatant barbarism on which “Western civilization,” as he described it, was based.
Source: Middle East Eye