Tutu, Yesterday's Apartheid Clown

Tutu’s visits to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, passing through Israeli checkpoints, “brought back memories of what things had been like at home” in South Africa under apartheid, he recalled, as reported by The (UK) Guardian. “The arrogance of the police or the soldiers, you depend on their whim whether they’ll allow you through or not.” But some Israeli misdeeds are even worse than old South Africa’s, citing the “collective punishment” that Israel ostensibly wages against Palestinians suspected of terrorism, such as home demolitions.

He believes the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the linchpin of world peace. “You can give up on all other problems,” Tutu warned his British audience. “You can give up on nuclear disarmament; you can give up on ever winning a war against terror, you can give it up. You can give up any hope of our faiths ever working really amicably and in a friendly way together.”

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Although a champion of human rights, Tutu was never overly concerned about the crimes of Communism before the Soviet Union’s fall. During the 1980’s, he even praised such Soviet client states as the monstrous FRELIMO regime in Mozambique, which persecuted the church. Similarly, the depredations of radical Islam, including its treatment of Christian and other religious minorities, do not arouse his interest.

Instead, in Britain, Tutu excoriated critics “who have glibly said because of September 11 that Islam is a violent faith.” He elaborated with the usual Western guilt-trip, which identifies Western religion as the planet’s chief curse: “One has to keep saying that Christians are the last people to say that. We burned witches, we burned those we said were heretics, and more recently the Holocaust – it wasn’t pagans, it was Christians,” Tutu asserted. “The people who proposed apartheid were not heathens – they said they had the support of the Bible.” Amid dry British laughter, Tutu declared: God “is not a Christian.”

 

 

 

Tutu has turned against Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe and often criticizes the failures of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress. But more predictably, the Archbishop just rehashes the bromides of the international left, slamming the U.S. and Israel, while silent about nearly all other repressive regimes.  In 2007 he repeated his usual Israel-equals-Apartheid canard in a “sermon” at Old South Church in Boston. Sudanese human rights activist and former slave Simon Deng, who escaped the clutches of Khartoum’s Islamist regime, attended and was unimpressed.

Commending Tutu for having brought “reconciliation between blacks and whites in South Africa,” Deng lamented that the Archbishop would “lead a conference that damns the Jewish state.” Israel does not equal apartheid, Deng wrote: “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.”

If any regime deserves the Apartheid label, Deng suggested, it is his native Sudan and its genocidal Islamist rulers. “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.” Deng wondered why Tutu was more distressed over the “inconvenience” of Israeli security checkpoints and walls than about Jewish lives.   

“Bishop, when you used to dance for Mandela’s freedom, we Africans all over Africa joined in,” Deng remembered. “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.” Deng concludingly asked: “Where are you for Sudan, Bishop Tutu? You are busy attacking the Jewish state. Why?” 

Commendably, Tutu has denounced the Khartoum regime’s “ghastly” war in Darfur against African Muslims. But the far lengthier struggle for survival by mostly Christian southern Sudanese against Khartoum’s Islamists, in a conflict killing 2 million, never seems to have perturbed the Nobel Prize winner. Perhaps he does not want distraction from ensuring that “our faiths [are] ever working really amicably and in a friendly way together.” 

And denouncing jidadist Islam probably would not excite standing ovations at British literary conferences, where Bishop Tutu is playing to a safe crowd when he exclusively faults Israel , the United States, and Christians for blocking world peace.