Juan Cole: Bishop Desmond Tutu Excluded, Ann Coulter isn't at U. of St. Thomas

[babylonsister]

http://www.juancole.com/2007/10/tutu-excluded-double-standard-at.html

Thursday, October 04, 2007
Tutu Excluded
Double Standard at the University of St. Thomas

Bishop Desmond Tutu has stood all his life for nonviolent peace-making and an end to racism. Obviously, he would be upset about the Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians, and has said so.

For that stance he was uninvited from speaking at the Catholic University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis.

(See also Richard Silverstein on this issue). The "quote" attributed to Bishop Tutu supposedly comparing Israel to Hitler and Nazi Germany was completely made up by the Zionist Organization of American (which has a long history of such cult-like lying and smearing) and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency printed it without fact-checking.

The Israel lobby strikes again, limiting what can be heard in public in the United States about those policies of Israel that are contrary to basic human rights norms.

And here is the kicker. UST is guilty of a whopper of a double standard. Two years ago, the university allowed Ann Coulter to speak on its campus.

Ann Coulter once said of Muslims, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

Coulter can speak at UST. But not Desmond Tutu.

[madrchsod]

1. let`s not upset the israel lobby in america

this shit really has to stop..of course it won`t until someone stands up to them...but that would be the kiss off death for anyone who would dare

[babylonsister]

2. I think Juan Cole is the voice of reason and insight, so hope this doesn't

annoy anyone.

[EST]

4. BS, you're the best!

Thanks for all you do.

[EST]

3. Is there not one single line of reasoning that the rabid

perverts have not infected and ruined?
Outrage overload is a never-ending nightmare.

[Behind the Aegis]

5. Why the second posting of this story?

[babylonsister]

6. I hadn't seen Juan Cole's take on this, I don't think. And not everyone

reads the articles you do. I also happen to think this is an outrage.

[Behind the Aegis]

8. Think what you want, this is a "tempest in a teapot."

You posted an original article (one of four in GD, one in GD-P, and one in I/P), so why not just update your post?

Hate Israel? That is OK at DU. No one cares. We can even watch people defend Holocaust-denying assholes, more so than Israel. I take exception to this bullshit because it is nothing more than scapegoating Jews. Don't see how? Let me know. I will PM you the details. And, so you know, I am not implying, suggesting, "coloring," or anything else that you are anti-Semitic...but...you know what...PM me, and I will explain it, as well as why I won't post an explanation here.

[papau]

7. Juan Cole's not quite right re Tutu - Guardian reported the following re "nazi" 2002 speech

Tutu did work a reference to Nazi's into his speech, knowing the reaction it would cause.




http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,706911,00.html

Apartheid in the Holy Land

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,706911,00.html
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 , 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 , 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.