The death on Sunday of the South African Anglican clergyman Desmond Tutu has brought much well-deserved praise for his role in bringing about the end of apartheid in his home country, but his legacy contains an uglier aspect. Jonathan Tobin writes:

That Tutu viewed the world through the prism of his experiences in apartheid South Africa is understandable. But his embrace of the notion that the plight of the Palestinian Arabs was no different from that of non-whites in South Africa was not only misguided, but also gave an undeserved moral imprimatur to the big lie that anti-Zionists have peddled about Israel being an “apartheid state.”

Worse than that, a look at Tutu’s statements about Jews over the years reveals a man that adopted attitudes that are inconsistent with his status as a leader of the human-rights movement.

As the Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz noted in a critique of Tutu a decade ago, his unfortunate comments about Jews included repeating traditional [tropes] about their thinking “they had a monopoly on God,” which merited justified criticism from Jesus. When discussing the Holocaust, he claimed that “the gas chambers” led to a “neater death” than those suffered by the victims of apartheid, even though, for all of its horrors, the Afrikaner government did not attempt to exterminate non-whites but to subjugate them. . . . Tutu also demanded that Jews “forgive the Nazis for the Holocaust.” Yet, he never seemed capable of forgiving Jews for what he wrongly described as “oppressing” Palestinians.

We should remember Tutu’s heroism against apartheid. But that doesn’t excuse his efforts to justify hate against Israel and the Jews.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.