Pres. Obama Should Rescind Tutu’s Presidential Medal of Freedom

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has condemned veteran Israel-basher and Jew-hater, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for his campaign to boycott and delegitimize Israel.

In recent months, Tutu:

·         Persuaded the University of Johannesburg to end its relationship with Israel’s Ben-Gurion University as part of a boycott against Israeli academic institutions;

·         Promoted the boycott of all Israeli goods by the US Food Co-Cop;

·         Sponsored a call for an arms embargo against Israel;

·         Tutu just promoted an appeal to the US pension fund of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association for cutting the partnership with Israeli companies;

·         Helped the Australian Marrickville Council approve a boycott of Israel’s goods.

·         Late last year, Tutu urged the Cape Town Opera to cancel a planned trip to Israel on spurious and malicious comparison of Israel to apartheid.

Also, next November, Tutu will open in Cape Town the third session of the anti-Israeli Russell Tribunal, a standing organization that held two tribunals against Israel last year in Barcelona and London. During this event, Tutu will seek to determine whether Israel’s policies fit the international legal definition of the crime of “apartheid.”

In view of these activities and more, the ZOA has urged President Barack Obama to rescind the Presidential Medal of Freedom that he bestowed on Tutu in 2009.

Italian journalist Giulio Meotti writes that Tutu has “became the poster leader of the Western NGOs promoting campaigns for divestment and sanctions against the Jewish State … The Archbishop perfectly knows that charging Israel with apartheid is simply a blood libel, as Arabs and Jews live and work together in Israel, while sharing all public facilities (hospitals, schools, malls, buses, cinemas, parks.) Making apartheid accusations against a state that undertook major operations to save black Jews in Africa is ludicrous. But the Christian Archbishop is not interested in preaching the truth, but rather, in promoting the liquidation of Israel, creating a new, horrible Jewish Diaspora … Thanks to Tutu, the World Conference against Racism, held by the United Nations in Durban in 2001, was transformed into a racist conference against Israel” (Giulio Meotti, ‘Special: Archbishop Tutu leads vile, racist campaign against Israel and Jewish people,’ Yediot Ahronot, August 11, 2011).

In 2007, former slave and current human rights activist, Simon Deng, slammed Tutu’s unscrupulous attempts to have Israel branded as an apartheid state, writing:

“The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. 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.

I also know countries that do deserve the apartheid label: My country, Sudan, is on the top of the list, but so are Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. 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. Bishop Tutu, I see black Jews walking down the street here in Jerusalem. Black like us, free and proud.

Tutu said Israeli checkpoints are a nightmare. But checkpoints are there because Palestinians are sent into Israel to blow up and kill innocent women and children. Tutu wants checkpoints removed. Do you not have doors in your home, Bishop? Does that make your house an apartheid house? If someone, Heaven forbid, tried to enter with a bomb, we would want you to have security people ‘humiliating’ your guests with searches, and we would not call you racist for doing so. We all go through checkpoints at every airport. Are the airlines being racist? No.

Yes, the Palestinians are inconvenienced at checkpoints. But why, Bishop Tutu, do you care more about that inconvenience than about Jewish lives? …Slaughter and genocide and slavery are lashing Africans right now. Where are you for Sudan, Bishop Tutu? You are busy attacking the Jewish state. Why?” (Quoted by Melanie Phillips, ‘The Question of a Freed Slave,’ Spectator [U.K.], November 26, 2007).

Archbishop Tutu, whose international fame stems from his involvement in the anti-apartheid cause and the Nobel Prize it won him, lends his reputation to vicious attacks upon Israel. Tutu has an ugly record of statements slurring Israel, Jews and Judaism:

·         Compares Israel to Hitler, Stalin and apartheid and prophesies its demise on account of its alleged evil: “I have been very deeply distressed in all my visits to the Holy Land, how so much of what was taking place there reminded me so much of what used to happen to us Blacks in Apartheid South Africa … The Apartheid government was very powerful, but we said to them: Watch it! If you flout the laws of this universe, you’re going to bite the dust! (applause) Hitler was powerful. Mussolini was powerful. Stalin was powerful. Idi Amin was powerful. Pinochet was powerful. The Apartheid government were powerful. Milosevic was powerful. But, this is God’s world. A lie, injustice, oppression, those will never prevail in the world of this God. That is what we told our people. And we used to say: those ones, they have already lost, they are, they are going to bite the dust one day. We may not be around. An unjust Israeli government, however powerful, will fall in the world of this kind of God” (Tutu in an address delivered at Old South Church, Boston, to the Friends of Sabeel North America’s conference, [ZOA: a body whose leaders say that Israelis are “crucifying” Arabs like the Jews did Jesus], April 13, 2002). [ZOA: The full text of this address was once available on-line at  http://media.startribune.com/smedia/2007/10/03/19/Archbishop_Tutu_Transcript.source.prod_affiliate.2.doc, but disappeared sometime after ZOA cited it at length in a press release of October 12, 2007.  The speech is presently available here].

·         Further false comparison of Israel to apartheid: “Cape Town Opera should postpone its proposed tour next month until both Israeli and Palestinian opera lovers of the region have equal opportunity and unfettered access to attend performances … By luring international artists to perform there, it advances Israel’s fallacious claim to being a ‘civilised democracy’. Yet, every day, millions of citizens are denied the right to educational and cultural opportunities in Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies. … To perform Porgy and Bess, with its universal message of non-discrimination, in the present state of Israel, is unconscionable” (Aziz Hartley and Sapa, ‘Boycott Israel, Tutu tells opera,’ IOL News, October 27, 2010).

·         G-d sides with the Palestinians: In a speech delivered to a two-day conference titled, ‘The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel,’ Tutu was reported to have cited passages from the Bible to argue that the God worshiped by Jews would champion the cause of Palestinians, “Remembering what happened to you in Egypt and much more recently in Germany — remember, and act appropriately … If you reject your calling, you may survive for a long time, but you will find it is all corrosive inside, and one day you will implode” (‘Tutu urges Jews to challenge oppression of Palestinians,’ Boston Globe, October 28, 2007).

·         Condemns Israel before investigation:  In November 2006, Tutu was appointed by the same UN Human Rights Commission previously headed by Mary Robinson to head its “investigative commission” to the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun to investigate “human rights violations” by Israel” which Tutu had already condemned as “an outrage that cries out to heaven and we must condemn it unequivocally.” The commission never investigated Sudan, or other scenes of genuine, massive human rights abuses.

• Criticizes Jewish Arrogance & lobbying efforts on behalf of Israel: Tutu accused Jews of exhibiting “an arrogance–the arrogance of power because Jews are a powerful lobby in this land and all kinds of people woo their support,” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin, November 29, 1984).

• Jewish Monopoly of the Holocaust: Tutu complained about “the Jewish monopoly of the Holocaust.” (Jerusalem Post, July 26, 1985).

• Forgive the Nazis: During his 1989 visit to Israel, Tutu “urged Israelis to forgive the Nazis for the Holocaust” (Jerusalem Post, Dec. 31, 1989), a statement which the Simon Wiesenthal Center called “a gratuitous insult to Jews and victims of Nazism everywhere.” (Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Response magazine, January 1990).

•  Offers absurd disavowal fn any anti-Semitism: During the 1989 visit to Israel, Tutu remarked “If I’m accused of being antisemitic, tough luck,” and in response to questions about his anti-Jewish bias, Tutu replied, “My dentist’s name is Dr. Cohen.” (Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Response magazine, January 1990).

• Zionism Is Racism: Tutu has claimed that Zionism has “very many parallels with racism.” (American Jewish Year Book 1988, p.50).

• Jews Thought They Had a Monopoly on G-d: Speaking in a Connecticut church in 1984, Tutu said that “the Jews thought they had a monopoly on God; Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings.” In the same speech, he compared the features of the ancient Holy Temple in Jerusalem to the features of the apartheid system in South Africa. (Hartford Courant, Oct. 29, 1984).

• Palestine, Not Israel: In conversations during the 1980s with the Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Eliahu Lankin, Tutu “refused to call Israel by its name, he kept referring to it as Palestine.” (Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Response magazine, January 1990)

• Jews Cause Refugees: Asked about the Zionism-is-racism resolution, Tutu complained that “the Jewish people with their traditions, religion and long history of persecution sometimes appear to have caused a refugee problem among others.” (South African Zionist Record, July 26, 1985)

• The Jewish lobby intimidates: “People are scared in this country [the U.S.], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful–very powerful.”

• Critics of Israel are being smeared: “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 Palestinians were not Semitic.”