Tutu the vicious antisemite drops dead

 

At a time when the statues of good people who had done bad things are being torn down, the world must reckon with the mixed legacy of Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, even in the immediate aftermath of his death.

 He did much good in fighting apartheid but he also has long history of ugly hatred toward the Jewish people, the Jewish religion and the Jewish state. He not only believed in anti-Semitism, he actively promoted and legitimated Jew hatred among his many followers and admirers around the world. 

Tutu minimized the suffering of those killed in the Holocaust. He has attacked the “Jewish” — not Israeli — “lobby” as too “powerful” and “scary.” He has invoked classic anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes about Jewish “arrogance,” “power” and “money.” He has characterized Jews a “peculiar people,” and has accused “the Jews” of causing many of the world’s problems.

 Tutu’s good deeds should not shield him from accountability for his long history of anti-Jewish bigotry. Let the record speak for itself, so that history may judge Tutu on the basis of his own words — words that he has often repeated and that others repeat, because Tutu is a role model for so many people around the world. 

Here are some of Tutu’s hateful words, carefully documented in a petition by prominent South Africans to terminate him as a “patron” of the two South African Holocaust Centers, because he used his status with these fine institutions as legitimization for his anti-Jewish rhetoric. 

I have publicized Tutu’s evil words in the past, but they warrant republication now that he is being lionized all over the world. 

He minimized the suffering of those murdered in the Holocaust by asserting that “the gas chambers” made for “a neater death” than did Apartheid. 

He complained of “the Jewish Monopoly of the Holocaust,” and demanded that its victims must “forgive the Nazis for the Holocaust,” while refusing to forgive the “Jewish people” for “persecute[ing] others.” 

Tutu asserted that Zionism has “very many parallels with racism,” thus echoing the notorious and discredited “Zionism equals racism” resolution passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations and subsequently rescinded.