The Monitor will pay tribute next week to Michael Kelly, the exemplary journalist and true friend of Israel who died so tragically in Iraq. This week, however, we take a look at some choice remarks made over the course of the past 20 years by South African Arch-bishop Desmond Tutu, Kelly’s opposite in just about every way imaginable.
Why Tutu, and why this week? Because on April 1, Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University did the unthinkable and awarded Tutu its International Advocate for Peace Award. According to news reports, Cardozo officials “beamed with pride” as Tutu received his
award, and Cardozo Dean David Rudenstine “was visibly excited…as he heaped praise on the archbishop.”
Truly we are a people with no spine and no shame. Behold the man so disgracefully honored by an affiliate school of the bastion of Modern Orthodoxy:
As reported by Ha’aretz, Tutu recently told a conference in Boston that “Israel is like Hitler and apartheid.” He also said he was “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…”
Tutu is given to castigating those (read: Jews) who possess what he describes as short memories: “Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? [Monitor’s note: Isn’t it interesting how charlatans like Tutu always refer to Jews as “sisters and brothers” whenever they’re about to hit us over the head with a barrage of criticism?] Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon?”
Not only does he equate Israelis with Nazis, but Tutu apparently looks forward to Israel’s meeting the same fate as the 20th century’s most notorious villains: “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.”
Here are just a few more of the many other examples of Tutu’s ugly rhetoric, compiled by the Zionist Organization of America’s Morton Klein:
* “People are scared in this country [the U.S.], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful – very powerful.”
* Tutu accused Jews of exhibiting “an arrogance” the arrogance of power because Jews are a powerful lobby in this land and all kinds of people woo their support.” (Jewish Telegraphic
Agency Daily News Bulletin, Nov. 29, 1984)
* During a 1989 visit to Israel Tutu remarked, “If I’m accused of being anti-Semitic, tough luck,” and in response to questions about his anti-Jewish bias, Tutu replied, “My dentist’s name is Dr. Cohen.” (Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Response magazine, January 1990)
* Tutu has claimed that Zionism has “very many parallels with racism.” (American Jewish Year Book 1988, p. 50)
* Speaking in a Connecticut church in 1984, Tutu said that “Jews thought they had a monopoly on G-d; Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings.” In the same speech, he compared the features of the ancient Holy Temple in Jerusalem to the features of the apartheid system in South Africa. (Hartford Courant, Oct. 29, 1984)
* In conversations during the 1980’s with the Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Eliahu Lankin, Tutu “refused to call Israel by its name, he kept referring to it as Palestine.” (Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Response magazine, January 1990)
* Asked about the Zionism-is-racism resolution, Tutu complained that “the Jewish people with their traditions, religion and long history of persecution sometimes appear to have caused a refugee problem among others.” (South African Zionist Record, July 26, 1985)
Jason Maoz can be reached at [email protected]