The Vanishing Archbishop:

Solomonia quotes a thoughtful article by Simon Deng, who, with clarity and reason, demonstrates the oddity of Desmond Tutu's moral illiteracy.

Late last month, I went to hear Bishop Desmond Tutu speak at Boston’s Old South Church at a conference on "Israel Apartheid." Tutu is a well respected man of God. He brought reconciliation between blacks and whites in South Africa. That he would lead a conference that damns the Jewish state is very disturbing to me.

The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. I know because I write this from Jerusalem where I have seen Arab mothers peacefully strolling with their families – even though I also drove on Israeli roads protected by walls and fences from Arab bullets and stones. I know Arabs go to Israeli schools, and get the best medical care in the world. I know they vote and have elected representatives to the Israeli Parliament. I see street signs in Arabic, an official language here. None of this was true for blacks under Apartheid in Tutu’s South Africa.

I also know countries that do deserve the apartheid label: My country, Sudan, is on the top of the list, but so are Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. What has happened to my people in Sudan is a thousand times worse than Apartheid in South Africa. And no matter how the Palestinians suffer, they suffer nothing compared to my people. Nothing. And most of the suffering is the fault of their leaders. Bishop Tutu, I see black Jews walking down the street here in Jerusalem. Black like us, free and proud.

Tutu said Israeli checkpoints are a nightmare. But checkpoints are there because Palestinians are sent into Israel to blow up and kill innocent women and children. Tutu wants checkpoints removed. Do you not have doors in your home, Bishop? Does that make your house an apartheid house? If someone, Heaven forbid, tried to enter with a bomb, we would want you to have security people "humiliating" your guests with searches, and we would not call you racist for doing so. We all go through checkpoints at every airport. Are the airlines being racist? No.

Yes, the Palestinians are inconvenienced at checkpoints. But why, Bishop Tutu, do you care more about that inconvenience than about Jewish lives?

Bishop, when you used to dance for Mandela’s freedom, we Africans – all over Africa – joined in. Our support was key in your freedom. But when children in Burundi and Kinshasa, all the way to Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in particular in Sudan, cried and called for rescue, you heard but chose to be silent.

Today, black children are enslaved in Sudan, the last place in the continent of Africa where humans are owned by other humans – I was part of the movement to stop slavery in Mauritania, which just now abolished the practice. But you were not with us, Bishop Tutu.

So where is Desmond Tutu when my people call out for freedom?

Slaughter and genocide and slavery are lashing Africans right now. Where are you for Sudan, Bishop Tutu? You are busy attacking the Jewish state. Why?

I have a few questions of my own:

Where can Desmond Tutu be found?

Here, at a "giant gathering in Istanbul of thousands of high level representatives from hundreds of radical Islamist organizations and institutions from Morocco to Indonasia"

What is being sought in this "giant gathering"?

"[T]o fight Jerusalem’s ‘judaicization’, and to continue the jihad against Zionist Israel until it no longer exists."

Who are some of the participants in this "giant gathering" that seeks to annihilate the state of Israel?

High level representatives from Hamas and Hizbullah, Lebanese Cemaa-i Islamiya Pres. Faisal Mavlawi, Palestinian Islamic Movement leader Raid Sallah, Iranian Pres. Ahmadinejad’s Counsellor Ayatollah Ali Akbar Muhtashemi, former Iranian PM Sayyid Hussein Musavi, Sheikh Yousuf al Karadawi, former Lebanese PM Salim al Hoss, former Egyptian PM Aziz Siddiki, former Jerusalem Mufti Ikrima Sabri, and the present Mufti Mohammed Hussein, Bishop Attallah Hanna, Fahmi Huwaydi, Hossain Ahmed, Desmond Toutou, OIC Sec. Gen. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, British MP George Galloway are some of the participants.

What is Desmond Tutu doing at such a conference and with such people?

The saintly antisemite

From the blog "Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War":

To Tutu Or Not To Tutu?

by Transmontanus, 5 October 2007

So far as I can tell, for all the noise about banning and free-speech trampling and whispers about the Power of The Lobby, all we really have here is a case of some daft Catholic university officials passing on a proposal to invite a Protestant archbishop to speak on their campus because some local Jews said their feelings would be hurt on account of certain intemperate remarks the archbishop has made. While certain other local Jews said they were fine with the invitation, the Catholics decided to pipsqueak and defer to the feelings-offended, who we are now admonished to blame, even though they didn’t make the decision, and the archbishop is coming to town to speak anyway, at a different venue.

I bet you ten bucks the shouters in this rumpus would be switching sides in a heartbeat if hurt-feelings Muslims prevailed in a case of some other prospective lecturer known for other kinds of intemperate remarks. We’d have the formerly free-speech side boasting a victory in the great Struggle Against Islamophobia, looking around for someone braying about Dhimmitude to pick an argument with. Betcha.

La vie, c’est absurde.

Mind you, His Grace appears to be putting himself to some good use in the Sudan: “We are hoping not to be seen as another tourist group seeking photo opportunities in Darfur.”
Very well then.

Is Desmond Tutu antisemitic? Yes, I definitely think so, considering comments he made about Jews recorded for over 25 years or so. Some examples:

* Israel is like Hitler and apartheid: “I’ve been deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa … I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about … “I say why are our memories so short? Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? … The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust. Injustice and oppression will never prevail.”

* “The Jewish lobby is very powerful”: “People are scared in this country [the U.S.], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful—very powerful.”

* “Critics of Israel are being smeared”: “You know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the U.S.] and to criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic, as if Palestinians were not Semitic.”

Ben, who posted a comment on "Drink-soaked", makes some good points:

Desmond Tutu is a moral illiterate, and a Jew-baiter par excellance. Like many Christian clerics, he unjustly projects onto the Jews the sins and crimes of other peoples, and then judges the Jews relentlessly and mercilessly. The idea that the Jews should ever be forgiven for anything they might have done just does not cross his mind. Tutu’s perverseness also extends to other areas. He forgives the perpetrators of necklacing, instead of asking forgiveness from the victims for allowing it to take place.

On a visit to Yad Vashem he infamously gave a “message” to the Israeli sons and grandsons of murdered Jews, saying “…we pray for those who made it happen, help us to forgive them and help us so that we in our turn will not make others suffer.” He has the effrontery to forgive Germans for what they did to the Jews, and also to urge Jews to forgive them. This would be offensive even coming from a true and trusted friend of Israel and the Jewish people, but Tutu is a figure who advocates economic war against Israel and forges friendships with anti-Jewish terrorists who have the blood of countless innocents on their hands.Another poisonous comment from him was ““…the gas chambers made for a neater death than apartheid resettlement policies.” To speak of the Holocaust and apartheid in the same breath and, as he does, to suggest that apartheid was in some ways worse, is another clear indicator of his malice and contempt for Jews.

Is this fracas really about academic freedom or is it just another opportunity to whip hapless Jews with the bogus claim that they undermine the democratic ethos of the United States? In other words, there is an inexorable drive to give antisemitism the respectability of an academic subject. This is not about freedom of academia, just as inviting Ahmadinejad to Columbia had nothing to do with the pursuit of knowledge, free of dogma. Universities should be a place where knowledge is gained, not manufactured. They should be a place where one hopes to find truth, not defamation and fantasy.

Here is what I think. There is a great thirst out there to have speakers of any stripe proclaim against Jews and Israel. The recent outbreak of books and speeches and tenure cases and boycott proposals and divestment advocacies seem to suggest almost an epidemic. And Tutu is riding high on this tidal wave. A saintly antisemite. Now where have we had this unlikely combination before? (Be alerted, the irony-challenged: this is an ironic statement). What cracks me is how some people who have nothing but contempt for any religion and in particular so when it comes to Christianity, all of a sudden find that this archbishop is an exception to their rule.

Let me repeat here what I said before: antisemites do not get to define what antisemitism is.

What is the meaning of this strange rationality, that Jews are required to pay for the Holocaust by abandoning their self interests and their hopes for survival? I have encountered this bizarre convolution of moral thinking before many times and from many (so-called) ”Left” thinking people. Jews have been genocided, therefore Jews must pay for any suffering that happens in their neighbourhood and elsewhere. Jews are expected to just brace themselves, refute their own interests, futures, life, and why? Because they suffered the Holocaust!

Show me one people or country, in the entire world upon which such demands are being made, as though it makes perfect, irrefutable moral sense. There is a premise underlying this kind of thinking. It goes beyond mere antisemitism. It's the sort of saintly antisemitism being promoted by someone like Tutu. And if there are enough people who are hungry for this unholy combination, there is nothing the Jews, and other right-thinking people, can do about it, but watch in dismay and chagrin.

Cognitive dissonance

is one symptom of the garbled thinking and shaky ethics of Rococo-Leftism. What could be more illustrative of this break between claim and fact than this picture which appeared here.

The article starts, promisingly enough with this introductory fanfare:

What happens to a group like the ADL or any other hate group associated with the infamous Lobby when there is no one left to hate? Think about it.... groups whose sole existence is based on the destruction of any group or individual they label as an enemy.... what happens when the 'enemy' is gone? What would a professional hate monger like Abe Foxman do to continue collecting his salary?

Having established the inevitable Jew-baiting classical trope of the money-grubbing Jewish leader, later on, the article provides the following information:

"The Anti-Defamation League is urging the president of a Minnesota university to invite Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak just days after it was revealed that he had been disinvited because of fears he might offend Jews...."Tutu has certainly been an outspoken, sometimes very harsh critic of Israel and Israeli policies, and has sometimes also used examples which may cross the line," said Abraham Foxman, the ADL's national director. But, he added, Tutu "certainly is not an anti-Semite and should not be so characterized and therefore refused a platform."

I would suggest that the latter paragraph sort of ... contradicts the claims made in the introductory paragraph, yet the entire insalata is marketed under the appetizing title: JEWISH HATE GROUPS ARE CHANGING TACTICS. In other words, beware of Jews when they mind antisemitic speakers, but be doubly on your guard when they don't mind an antisemitic speaker. There is a double message here, a dark intent, and the reader would be well advised to follow the money... or whatever....

Two saintly antisemites:

Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter formed the glamorous part of a mission of International elder statesmen to Darfur. The group issued its conclusions, claiming that "Darfur has witnessed mass or widespread rape", among other atrocities.

Still, Jimmy Carter remains his usual restrained self (except when it comes to Israel and the Jews): The "use of the term genocide to describe the situation in Darfur, where international estimates say 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million driven from their homes, was unhelpful."There is a legal definition of genocide and Darfur does not meet that legal standard. The atrocities were horrible but I don't think it qualifies to be called genocide," he said."

What is the legal difinition of genocide?

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious or national group. While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, the legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of the CPPCG defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

200,000 dead, every woman raped, millions of refugees, and still, it is no genocide.

Jeff Weintraub has a blog about Darfur, here. For anyone who is interested in a reality check.