It must be Hate Nobel Peace Laureates Month for Abe Foxman and other Jewish leaders who first denounced Jimmy Carter’s allegedly ‘anti-Israel’ book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Now, Foxman is on the warpath against another Nobel Peace laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The latter was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council (remember, in the Jewish greybeard leadership playbook all UN bodies hate Israel and are up to no good as far as it is concerned) to investigate recent incidents of IDF brutality in Beit Hanun. Here’s what Abie had to say:
“The appointment of Desmond Tutu as head of the fact-finding mission to Beit Hanun is an extension of the anti-Israel kangaroo court tactics used by the UN Human Rights Council…
“No fact-finding mission can produce balanced and trustworthy results if its leader professes to know all the answers beforehand.
“Tutu has already publicly expressed his anti-Israel views and his opinions regarding what happened in Beit Hanun, and combined with the one-sided anti-Israel mandate provided by the resolution, the results of the mission are all-but preordained…”
And what was Tutu’s sin? What “unbalanced,” “anti-Israel views” has he expressed about Beit Hanun?
“It is an outrage that cries out to heaven and we must condemn it unequivocally as we do the atrocities committed by suicide bombers against Israeli civilians.”
Could it be that in that Evelyn Wood speed reading class Abe took they never taught him to read complete sentences? Or is ANY criticism of Israel, even if balanced by criticism of Palestinian terror ipso facto unfair and biased?? C’mon all you ‘defenders of the faith,’ you know Tutu could’ve danced the hora and sang Hatikva, but if he still denounced IDF massacres of Palestinians he’d be a ‘perfidious Israel-hater,’ at least as far as the Foxmans of the Jewish world see it.
I am not defending the overall work of the UN Human Rights Council which people like Foxman detest as being heavily biased against Israel. There may be valid criticisms of the body’s work. But as far as I’m concerned Desmond Tutu is a towering moral figure who has earned, through his courage in fighting injustice, my trust that he will conduct a fair-minded inquiry. That’s all I’m saying here.
Actually, it is Foxman who not being fair-minded in this instance. It is Foxman who is being overly defensive and downright churlish. Let’s wait till Abie wins his own Nobel before we accord him the right to denounce the world’s towering moral figures. Oh, and in case Mr. Foxman or one of his major domos is reading, I don’t have any upcoming speaking engagements you can sabotage like you did Tony Judt’s.
Tutu is not Just Anti Israel he is anti Jewish
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)
People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful – very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We live in a moral universe. 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 (Source:Monday April 29, 2002, The Guardian UK)
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
I have some more on my site if you would like to read
Sammy: You’re getting a little over the top in yr interpretations.
Tutu is speaking of the priests who conducted affairs of the Holy Temple, not all Jews and certainly not Jews of today. In fact, if you review the conduct of the Temple priests or of any religion, almost all believe they have a monopoly on God. Look at the current crop of Israeli Orthodox rabbis who run their little attempt at a theocracy. In my opinion they’re nothing but a glorified racket–and I say this as someone who is a Conservative Jew w. great respect for a good many rabbis. No doubt, Jesus and his followers had the same criticisms of the ancient priest as my criticism of Orthodox supremacist ideology/theology.
I certainly wouldn’t have phrased this criticism in this way. But the truth is that the Israel Lobby IS very powerful. A critique of this corrosive power is one of the major subthemes of this blog.
I don’t think it promotes any sort of dialogue to equate, even implicitly as he does here, the leaders of the Israel Lobby with some of the great tyrants of history. That’s flat out wrong & deserves our criticism.
This too is a regrettable statement since it uses the blanket–and imprecise–term “Jews” as a substitute for specific Jewish leaders who hold rightist views on Israeli politics. But again, his critique of the Israel Lobby is dead on accurate. Aipac is a perfect representative of a group that adheres to the “arrogance of power” in its dealing with Congress and the rest of the Jewish community. Why, for example, does it falsely claim to speak w. a unified voice for the entire American Jewish community on Israel, when it does nothing of the sort as attested by all national Jewish opinion surveys about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?? The very fact that Aipac makes such an arrogant claim gives a huge opening to people like Tutu to state that Aipac’s arrogance represents the views of all Jews.
That is why it is so important for the new progressive American Jewish lobbying campaign that is under discussion to get off the ground. There must be no monopolies on truth in our community. Israeli peace and security is far too important to have a terribly narrow set of policy options placed before the American Jewish community. We need diversity of discourse & not hegemony.