Terminate Archbishop Tutu as a Holocaust Patron

Petition calling for the termination and/or resignation of Archbishop Tutu as a Patron of the Cape Town Holocaust Centre and the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre.

The Petition

We the undersigned, with deep regret, do respectfully demand the resignation or termination of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu as a Patron of the Cape Town Holocaust Centre and the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre.

In this we call upon and respectfully urge the trustees of both Holocaust Centres in South Africa to take the most earnest will of the undersigned members of the South African Jewish Community, their friends and supporters into serious consideration, have the courage to avoid the politically correct and cowardly route, stand up for what is right and act on our request and this petition and terminate Archbishop Tutu's patronage of both Holocaust Centres in South Africa. We believe that neither "quiet diplomacy or engagement" works, nor do we think the Archbishop is uninformed. Some of Archbishop Tutu's anti-Israel and anti-Semitic statements, quoted below, go back as far as twenty two years up to the present time.

With this petition and hoped for action, including a wise resignation by Archbishop Tutu, we wish to convey a clear message that no one is above the truth and no matter what that person's record in other areas of endeavour, no matter what honours have been earned and bestowed upon that person, no matter what position that person may hold, no one is beyond scrutiny, criticism and sanction when they are wrong and as in this case, against the Jewish people and Israel.

We not only question how Archbishop Tutu can remain a Patron of the Holocaust Centres, but completely reject his holding such positions. His track record regarding Israel and his many anti-Israel pronouncements speak volumes as to his being the wrong person to hold this position.

Archbishop Emeritus Tutu's most recent endeavours at coercing world academic institutions to cut ties with those in Israel as well as his most recent attempt to stop the Cape Town Opera Company from performing in Israel are only the most recent examples of Archbishop Tutu's anti-Israel behaviour. Archbishop Tutu's support for the sanctions campaign against Israel is morally repugnant because it is based on horrific and grotesquely false accusations against the Jewish people.

Furthermore, we completely reject Archbishop Tutu's false, bigoted and politically motivated accusation that Israel is in any way an Apartheid State and his attempt, as with the enemies of Israel, to hijack the jargon of Apartheid and to equate the history of South Africa with that of Israel. In doing so, he not only buys into the false propaganda spewed forth about Israel, but also aids and abets the enemies of Israel and the Jewish people. In so doing, he also undermines and devalues the suffering of the people who were subject to the real Apartheid in South Africa.

Over the years, Archbishop Tutu has been guilty of numerous anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements - at one time causing the South African Board of Deputies to retort that he was guilty of , "at the least ignorance; at the most intellectual dishonesty".

Motivation and Proof

Herewith Archbishop Tutu's most recent vicious, harsh statements against Israel and Judaism:

In a letter to the opera company, Archbishop Tutu wrote that, "Cape Town Opera should postpone its proposed tour next month until both Israeli and Palestinian opera lovers of the region have equal opportunity and unfettered access to attend performances. Only the thickest-skinned South Africans would be comfortable performing before an audience that excluded residents living, for example, in an occupied West Bank village 30 minutes from Tel Aviv, who would not be allowed to travel to Tel Aviv, while including his Jewish neighbours from an illegal settlement on occupied Palestinian territory. The Tel Aviv Opera House is state sponsored. By luring international artists to perform there, it advances Israel's fallacious claim to being a 'civilized democracy'. Yet, every day, millions of citizens are denied the right to educational and cultural opportunities in Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies. In South Africa, people opposed apartheid in many different ways. Those of us who believed in peaceful means of forcing change, received enormous assistance from our friends abroad in isolating the apartheid state: economically, politically, socially and culturally ... Much as it offers you opportunities to travel abroad and show the world what we can do, listen to your conscience. God loves Jews and Muslims equally. To perform Porgy and Bess, with its universal message of non-discrimination, in the present state of Israel, is unconscionable (Aziz Hartley and Sapa, 'Boycott Israel, Tutu tells opera,' IOL News, October 27, 2010).

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has a long record of hatred of Israel and defamation of Judaism:

• Compares Israel to Hitler, Stalin and apartheid:  "I have been very deeply distressed in all my visits to the Holy Land, how so much of what was taking place there reminded me so much of what used to happen to us Blacks in Apartheid South Africa ... The Apartheid government was very powerful, but we said to them: Watch it! If you flout the laws of this universe, you're going to bite the dust! (applause) Hitler was powerful. Mussolini was powerful. Stalin was powerful. Idi Amin was powerful. Pinochet was powerful. The Apartheid government was powerful. Milosevic was powerful. But, this is God's world. A lie, injustice, oppression, those will never prevail in the world of this God. That is what we told our people. And we used to say: those ones, they have already lost, they are, they are going to bite the dust one day. We may not be around. An unjust Israeli government, however powerful, will fall in the world of this kind of God" (Tutu in an address delivered at Old South Church, Boston, to the Friends of Sabeel North America's conference, [a body whose leaders say that Israelis are "crucifying" Arabs like the Jews did Jesus], April 13, 2002). [Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA): The full text of this address was once available on-line at  http://media.startribune.com/smedia/2007/10/03/19/Archbishop_Tutu_Transcript.source.prod_affiliate.2.doc, but disappeared sometime after ZOA cited it at length in a press release of October 12, 2007].

• G-d sides with the Palestinians: In a speech delivered to a two-day conference titled, 'The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel,' Tutu was reported to have cited passages from the Bible to argue that the God worshiped by Jews would champion the cause of Palestinians, "Remembering what happened to you in Egypt and much more recently in Germany -- remember, and act appropriately ... If you reject your calling, you may survive for a long time, but you will find it is all corrosive inside, and one day you will implode" ('Tutu'  Boston Globe, October 28, 2007).

• Condemns Israel before investigation:  In November 2006, Tutu was appointed by the same UN Human Rights Commission previously headed by Mary Robinson to head its "investigative commission" to the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun to investigate "human rights violations" by Israel" which Tutu had already condemned as "an outrage that cries out to heaven and we must condemn it unequivocally." The commission never investigated Sudan, or other scenes of genuine, massive human rights abuses.

• Criticizes Jewish Arrogance & lobbying efforts on behalf of Israel: 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, November 29, 1984).

• Jewish Monopoly of the Holocaust: Tutu complained about "the Jewish monopoly of the Holocaust." (Jerusalem Post, July 26, 1985).

• Forgive the Nazis: During his 1989 visit to Israel, Tutu "urged Israelis to forgive the Nazis for the Holocaust" (Jerusalem Post, Dec. 31, 1989), a statement which the Simon Wiesenthal Center called "a gratuitous insult to Jews and victims of Nazism everywhere." (Simon Wiesenthal Center's Response magazine, January 1990).

• Offers absurd disavowal on any anti-Semitism: During the 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).

• Zionism Is Racism: Tutu has claimed that Zionism has "very many parallels with racism." (American Jewish Year Book 1988, p.50). 

• Jews Thought They Had a Monopoly on G-d: Speaking in a Connecticut church in 1984, Tutu said that "the Jews thought they had a monopoly on God; 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).

• Palestine, Not Israel: In conversations during the 1980s 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)

• Jews Cause Refugees: 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)

• The Jewish lobby intimidates: "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."

• "Obama's Other Anti-Semitic Guru":  To furnish more proof of Tutu's statements, please refer to http://frontpagemag.com/2010/10/15/obamas-other-anti-semitic-guru/ which is included below as an addendum.

Summary and Conclusion

Having observed Archbishop Desmond Tutu's conduct over many years as illustrated above, we, the undersigned, are outraged by his malicious distortions, paraded with hypocritical sanctimony and his latest foray into demonising Israel. Archbishop Tutu knows that his claims about Israeli racism to be a lie. Tutu is dishonest when he tries to argue that Israel is a racist society. This is the same, discredited and internationally repudiated libel imposed on the world via the UN in 1975 by the majority of dictatorships that to this day dominate it -- which Tutu repeats, while ignoring the racist Palestinian program seeking a Jew-free Palestinian state and the appalling, genuine human rights violations that occur in Palestinian-controlled areas, which cannot be ignored or dismissed.

In the light of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's latest vicious maligning of Israel as an Apartheid state -- and let us be clear; anyone who calls Israel an Apartheid state supports its disappearance, just as one would support the disappearance of the Apartheid regime in South Africa -- we would urge the trustees of the Holocaust Centres in South Africa to terminate, however tactfully they wish, the appointment as a patron a defamer of Israel and the Jewish people like Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.

Better still, we call on Archbishop Tutu to resign his patronage.

Similarly, we also call on the trustees of both South African Holocaust Centres to terminate the appointments of Professor Kader Asmal and Judge Richard Goldstone and we also call upon these two gentlemen to resign their patronage.

ADDENDUM

Obama's Other Anti-Semitic Guru

Posted By Edward Alexander On October 15, 2010 @ 12:28 am In FrontPage |

The disclosure, during the 2008 presidential campaign, that Barack Obama had for two decades sat contentedly (perhaps with his cerebral hearing aid turned off) listening to the tirades of his pastor Rev. Jeremiah ("God Damn America") Wright against "them Jews" caused him some brief embarrassment but no harm at the polls, certainly not among Jewish voters. No attention whatever was paid to the possible link between Obama's moral tone-deafness in the presence of clergyman Wright and his intense admiration of another, more unctuous, political clergyman with even less charity toward Jews than Wright: namely, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Obama and Tutu have long admired each other. They first met in 2006 when then-Senator Obama visited Tutu in South Africa. In August 2009, Obama awarded Tutu the Congressional Medal of Freedom. Earlier this month, on the occasion of the Anglican clergyman's 79th birthday, the president lauded him as "moral titan -- a voice of principle, an unrelenting champion of justice, and a dedicated peacemaker."

In recent months, Tutu has demonstrated his dedication to peace, justice, and principle in the Middle East, in particular, by speaking up for Hamas and supporting the "Freedom Flotilla" of Islamist jihadists and "internationalist" do-gooders (people who confuse doing good with feeling good about what they are doing) who, in the spring, tried to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. He has also repeatedly endorsed the activities of the BDS (Boycott/Divest/Sanction) movement. This reincarnation of the Nazis' "Kauf nicht beim Juden" campaign of the 1930s constantly invokes Tutu's "authoritative" condemnation of Israel (where Arabs and Jews use the same buses, beaches, clinics, cafes, and soccer fields, and attend the same universities) as an "apartheid" state.

But his fulminations against Jews have a long history. They are so well-documented that one wonders if President Obama can possibly be ignorant of them, especially now that he has a "Director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism" named Hannah Rosenthal, who has shown herself adept at spotting that evanescent phenomenon called "Islamophobia" at a distance of ten miles away. Here are just a few examples of Tutu's "moral titanism" on the Jewish question, chosen from the same period in which Obama was attending the sermons of Jeremiah Wright.

On the day after Christmas, 1989, Tutu, standing before the memorial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis, prayed for the murderers and scolded the descendants of their victims. "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."(1) This, he said, was his "message" to the Israeli children and grandchildren of the dead.

Moral obtuseness, mean spite, and monstrous arrogance do not make for sound ethics and theology. Neither Tutu nor the Israelis he lectured can "forgive" the Nazi murderers. Representatives of an injured group are not licensed (even by the most sanctimonious of preachers) to forgive on behalf of the whole group. In fact, forgiveness issues from God alone. The forgiveness Tutu offers the Nazis is truly pitiless because it forgets the victims, blurs over suffering, and obliterates the past.

Tutu is always far less moved by the actuality of what the Nazis did ("the gas chambers," he once said, "made for a neater death" than apartheid resettlement policies(2) than by the hypothetical potentiality of what, in his jaundiced view, Israelis might do. His speeches against apartheid returned obsessively to gross, licentious equations between the former South African system and Jewish practices, biblical and modern. "The Jews," Tutu declared in 1984, "thought they had a monopoly on God" and "Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings."(3)

Tutu has been an avid supporter of the Goebbels-like equation of Zionism with racism. He has alleged that "Jews ... think they have cornered the market on suffering"(4) and that Jews are "quick to yell 'Anti-Semitism''" because of "an arrogance of power -- because Jews have such a strong lobby in the United States."(5) Jewish power in America is, in fact, a favorite Tutu theme. In late April 2002, he praised his own courage in resisting it. "People are scared in [America] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful, very powerful. Well, so what? Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust."(6)

Tutu has repeatedly declared that (as he once told a Jewish Theological Seminary audience) "whether Jews like it or not, they are a peculiar people. They can't ever hope to be judged by the same standards which are used for other people."(7) Certainly Tutu has never judged Jews by the standards he uses for other people. Although South African and American Jews were more, not less, critical of apartheid than the majority of their countrymen, Tutu in 1987 threatened that "in the future, South African Jews will be punished if Israel continues dealing with South Africa."(8) Israel's trade with South Africa was about seven percent of America's, less than a tenth of Japan's, Germany's, or England's. But Tutu never threatened South African or American citizens of Japanese, German, or English extraction with punishment. Citizens of Arab nations supplied 99 percent of the one resource without which apartheid South Africa could not have existed: oil. Tutu made countless inflammatory remarks about Israel's weapons sales to South Africa (mainly of naval patrol boats) but said almost nothing about South Africa's main Western arms supplier, France, which built two of South Africa's three nuclear reactors -- the third being American. He was also silent about Jordan's sale of tanks and missiles to the apartheid regime.

Tutu's insistence on applying a double standard to Jews may explain an otherwise mysterious feature of his anti-Israel rhetoric. He once asked Israel's ambassador to South Africa, Eliahu Lankin, "how it was possible that the Jews, who had suffered so much persecution, could oppress other people."(9) On another occasion, he expressed dismay "that Israel, with the kind of history ... her people have experienced, should make refugees [actually she didn't] of others."(10) In other words, Jews, according to Tutu, have a duty to behave particularly well because Jews have suffered so much persecution. The mad corollary of this proposition is that the descendants of those who have not been persecuted do not have a special duty to behave well, and the descendants of the persecutors can be excused altogether for behavior it would be hard to excuse in other people. This may explain not only Tutu's decision to pray for the Nazis while berating the descendants of their victims, but also his long and ardent devotion to the PLO, whose leader, Yasser Arafat, was both the biological relative and spiritual descendant of Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem who actively collaborated with Hitler in the destruction of European Jewry.

Rabbinical tradition, however, provides a simpler explanation of Tutu's eagerness to "forgive" the Nazis while excoriating the descendants of their victims: "Whoever is merciful to the cruel," the rabbis warn, "will end by being indifferent to the innocent." President Obama himself may wish to ponder this warning in his future relations with the archbishop.

Notes:

[1] New York Times (27 December 1989).

[2] G. Shimoni, %u201CSouth African Jews and Apartheid,%u201D American Jewish Year Book (New York, 1988), 51.

[3] Hartford Courant, 29 October 1984.

[4] Shimoni, 51.

[5] New York City Tribune (27 November 1984).

[6] Ha%u2019aretz, 29 April 2002.

[7] Religious News Service, 28 November 1984.

[8] Courrier Austral Parliamentair, February 1987.

[9] Jerusalem Post, 11 November 1989.

[10] Religious News Service, 28 November 1984.

Edward Alexander's most recent book is The Jewish Wars (Transaction Publishers, 2010).

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/10/15/obamas-other-anti-semitic-guru/

Petition url on Internet: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/tutupetition/

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