Desmond Tutu: Brave Opponent of Apartheid and Libeler of Israel https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/israel-zionism/2021/12/desmond-tutu-brave-opponent-of-apartheid-and-libeler-of-israel/

December 30, 2021 | Jonathan Tobin
About the author:

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.

Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/archbishop-tutu-and-the-disturbing-power-of-intersectionality/