Should they change JTA’s name to Pump & Dump Telegraphic Agency? JTA has a very short piece about the University of St. Thomas cancelling Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s speech at the school because a Minneapolis JCRC flack told them he was anti-Israel. But here’s the eyebrow raising quote from the story:
The uproar apparently was linked to a speech Tutu made in Boston in 2002. According to a news release from the Zionist Organization of America, Tutu said that “Israel is like Hitler and apartheid.”
I don’t have a copy of the ZOA press release in front of me. But the plain fact of the matter is that this “quote” is an utter fabrication. Tutu has never said that, not even close. Muzzlewatch, Rootless Cosmopolitan, and this blog have all in the past 36 hours published what Tutu actually said regarding Hitler in a speech about the Israeli Occupation. Would it have taken much research for the JTA writer to have actually checked to see whether Tutu actually said the words put into his mouth by the odious ZOA liars?
Once again, for those who missed it yesterday, here’s what Tutu said in his 2002 speech:
But 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 the Palestinians were not Semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?
People are scared in this country [the U.S.] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful – very powerful. Well, so what? This is God’s world. 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, Milosovic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.
Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: What is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment.
We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God’s dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers.
So as we’ve seen in the Nadia Abu El Haj and Khalil Gibran Academy campaigns, right-wing Jews have placed quotations around words they CLAIM their opponents to have spoken. And no doubt this is what they believe their opponents believe. But it isn’t what they actually said. And that is called lying, duplicity and fraud.
I just wrote an e mail to JTA’s managing editor, Ami Eden, asking him why I should have to tell him and his reporters not to trust the lies emanating from the offices of ZOA. Anyone with any experience working in this community knows that. Why would JTA allow itself to become a mouthpiece of Mort Klein?
I googled the words “Israel is like Hitler and apartheid” and the first retun was the ZOA press release, so you can now go over it and judge it yourself. By the way, they atribute the quote to Ha’Aretz so if you can find the original HaAretz article, which so far I haven’t you can judge for yourself.
Here’s a letter that I wrote to the St. Paul Minnesota Jewish Community Relations Council, which is responsible for pressuring St. Thomas University to cancel Desmond Tutu’s appearance. I also signed the Jewish Voice For Peace petition to the university.
October 3, 2007
Dear Minnesota JCRC,
As a Jew whose family came to the United States to escape Nazi Germany, I am writing to you to protest your successful efforts to bar the South African fighter against apartheid Desmond Tutu from speaking at the St. Thomas University in St. Paul. Recently, someone sent me an article condemning those who say that there is a powerful and moneyed Israel Lobby in this country, but your actions show that such a lobby does indeed exist. This is not the first time that this practice has been employed by the Israel Lobby. Not too long ago, organizations such as your’s blocked the showing of “Who Is Rachel Corrie?” in New York, although it eventually played.
Our government’s unconditional support of Israel exists largely but not only because of organizations such as your’s. Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians is wrong. Recently the Arab League proposed a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state with Israel withdrawing back to the pre-June 1967 borders, and proposed this as a basis for negotiations. The Hamas Prime Minister accepted this proposal, which was ignored by the Israeli government and President Bush, and the Israel Lobby has much to do with this. I must also note that during the 1980’s, Israel was one of only a few nations besides the U.S. in the United Nations that refused to condemn the former South African government for its apartheid practices, which are very similar to Israel’s practices in the Palestinian occupied territories.
So in view of what I mentioned above, organizations such as your’s cannot convincingly state that there is no Israel Lobby and at the same time employ those practices. I urge you to contact the St. Paul University to re-schedule Desmond Tutu. I also urge you to reconsider your unethical practices.
Sincerely Yours,
Walter Ballin
Chico, CA
Thanks to you, I’m sure, JTA has updated their news story. It now says:
“A news release from the Zionist Organization of America, which condemned Tutu’s remarks, cited a report from Ha’aretz that quoted Tutu as saying that ‘Israel is like Hitler and apartheid.’ A transcript of the speech available online does not include the Hitler quote.”
Apparently they don’t think it’s any of their business whether or not the quote was correct. (Just on stylistic grounds, it seems almost inconceivable.)
Keep up the good work.
Tutu did not say that Israelis acted like Hitler. Even though some aspects of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians could make one begin to think of the Warsaw Ghetto and its terrible story. I suppose it’s all debatable, and Jews should be admired for their ability to still debate such things with a vigor and wit not often seen in so much of today’s world. But, I must add that that in their actions toward Tutu, the ZOA sounds a bit like Herr Goebbels!
Haaeretz article:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/rosnerBlog.jhtml?itemNo=909918&contrassID=25
&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=1&listSrc=Y&art=1
Sam Rosner’s Domain, which he links to Tutu’s “offensive” article in t he Guardian:
Comment
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Desmond Tutu
Monday April 29, 2002
The Guardian
In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.
What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I’ve been very 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.
On one of my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?
I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said: “Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews.”
My heart aches. 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? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?
Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured.
The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred.
Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or – I hope – to strive for peace based on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state on those territories side by side with Israel, both with secure borders.
We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land?
My brother Naim Ateek has said what we used to say: “I am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I am anti- injustice, anti-oppression.”
But you know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?
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.
Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment.
We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God’s dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers.
Desmond Tutu is the former Archbishop of Cape Town and chairman of South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission. This address was given at a conference on Ending the Occupation held in Boston, Massachusetts, earlier this month. A longer version appears in the current edition of Church Times.
comment@guardian.co.uk
Weasely Rosner (from Wobbly’s post) still can’t bring himself to condemn the ZOA’s smear.
And shouldn’t the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, who told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that Tutu had “compared Jews in Israel to Hitler”, offer a retraction and apology?
Read this thread:
http://www.mnspeak.com/mnspeak/archive/post-3996.cfm