If the forum rules had allowed me, i would have typed only one word : Respect !
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He was a great man. He’ll be missed.
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Bishop Tutu will be missed. He was a good activist.
No he was not anti semite. I can tell you, as a heretical apostate, racism is a sin in the Episcopal Church. Yeah, I’m very similar to Robert M. Price, except I don’t attend anymore, I’m not a lay minister anymore, or any other service of the Church, but I do know that Bishop Tutu, as an Episcopal priest, would not have had his position if he committed the sin of racism.
One more thing, That is a 2008 article. Maybe you should attempt to find something more recent than that.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center today criticized South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu for stating that criticism of Israel by the West is muted because of guilt over the Holocaust.
Tutu made the remarks at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva while reporting findings of his investigation of an Israeli attack in Gaza.
Sounds about right.
Israeli has acted ruthlessly for as long as I can remember - Israel has made any sort of solution absolutely impossible, then are surprised that their vicious repression is resented and fought against. So what’s to do, escalate the ugly cycle.
No one is right over there. But still it’s appalling watching Israel constantly acting the poor victim, when they are down right vicious and act in ways that invite retribution from their victims.
What the Palestinians didn’t have their land stolen?
Does original sin make payback right?
Takes two to tango and all that.
Palestinians weren’t ethically cleansed from thier lands? Are you a nakba denier??
No, I’m not a “nakba denier” it’s history,
The 1948 Palestinian exodus occurred when [more than 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes.
Ethnic cleansing would have been those 700,000 Arabs being plowed into mass graves. So let’s be careful with the terms we use. Then again, I thought I’d check myself and see that I’ve held a too narrow definition:
“Ethnic cleansing” has been defined as the attempt to get rid of (through deportation, displacement or even mass killing) members of an unwanted ethnic group in order to establish an ethnically homogenous geographic area. Though “cleansing” campaigns for ethnic or religious reasons have existed throughout history, the rise of extreme nationalist movements during the 20th century led to an unprecedented level of ethnically motivated brutality, including the Turkish massacre of Armenians during World War I; the Nazis’ annihilation of some 6 million European Jews in the Holocaust; and the forced displacement and mass killings carried out in the former Yugoslavia and the African country of Rwanda during the 1990s.
The 1948 Palestinian exodus occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of prewar Palestine’s Arab population – fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Palestine war.[1] The exodus was a central component of the fracturing, dispossession and displacement of Palestinian society, known as the Nakba,[2][3] in which between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed and others subject to Hebraization of Palestinian place names,[4] and also refers to the wider period of war itself and the subsequent oppression up to the present day.[5]
The precise number of refugees, many of whom settled in refugee camps in neighboring states, is a matter of dispute[6] but around 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel (half of the Arab total of Mandatory Palestine) left or were expelled from their homes.[7][8] About 250,000–300,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, before the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948, a fact which was named as a casus belli for the entry of the Arab League into the country, sparking the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
" … Why is dreaming of return laudable for Jews but pathological for Palestinians? Asking the question does not imply that the two dreams are symmetrical. The Palestinian families that mourn cities such as Jaffa or Safed lived there recently, and remember intimate details about their lost homes. They experienced dispossession from Israel-Palestine. The Jews who for centuries afflicted themselves on Tisha B’Av – and those who created the Zionist movement in the late 19th century, in response to rising nationalism and antisemitism in Europe – only imagined it. …"
So semantics asides, at this point, all I see from my comfortably distance perspective, is two rabid dogs locked in an endless war that has robbed both sides of what humanity they once possessed - and that won’t end until they destroy each other.
That’s possible.
Now if you look at the map of Palestine since 1967, you see that ethnic cleansing is being implemented systematically against Palestinians.
To have an Eretz Israel dominating the whole area of the legendary empire of Salomon, in the names of imaginary historical rights, has been the dominant project of Israel.
Isaac Rabin was killed the day he understood the inhumanity of this project.
[1.3 The Zionist colonization of Palestine | Visualizing Palestine 101]
No shock that this person at post 9 has no idea that ethnic cleaning includes the mass displacement of people as well as cultural extermination. He dumbs this down to two party’s of equal footing, of equal responsibility and guilt when one has all the power over the over. Perhaps he even disagrees here in a 2015 letter with Tutu in his comparison of apartheid South Africa with the Palestinian plight, maybe even agreeing with the calls of anti semitism.
Someone shared this letter that he wrote to the United Church of Canada in 2015:
25 June 2015
My dear sisters and brothers in the United Church of Canada:
I recall so joyously the witness and generosity of your Church in helping those of us caught in the shackles of apartheid during those dark days of our oppression. You were an enormous strength to us, and we forever remain bonded in our commitment to justice for all people everywhere.
In recent years, I have been increasingly dismayed at the deteriorating conditions of the Palestinian people living under occupation, which has now gone on for 47 years with no end in sight. Even a decade or more ago when I first visited the Holy Land I saw the marks of apartheid in the policies of the Israeli government continued to the present day. The Palestinians are forced to live in segregated areas, often relocated to less desirable land so Jewish settlers can live in fine red ceramic-roofed houses with paved roads while most Palestinians live in squalor in villages and refugee camps. Water is diverted to settlers so that they can have nice green lawns, irrigated fields and community swimming pools while Palestinians endure shortages and dusty roads. I have looked at this and seen the ugly face of apartheid and the racism within it. I have been vilified numerous times for making this comparison to apartheid. I shrink not one step backwards. I saw and I name what I saw: apartheid, separation, segregation. I might add that these settlements are illegal under international law, as is the occupation itself, and an affront to the world.
Where this wall or fence or barrier violates Palestinian land, it serves as a form of segregation. I remain heartbroken to see the gross injustice of the occupation being imposed by Jewish people who, themselves, have endured so many centuries of oppression and suffering, much of it at the hands of Christians, culminating in the tragedy of the Holocaust. One would have expected just the opposite, a country, Israel, which would be a light to the nations, a beacon of justice. Other Jewish voices have arisen to denounce what is done in their name through this shameful occupation.
I understand the enormous burden western Christians carry for the many centuries of anti-Semitic behavior towards our Jewish sisters and brothers. It is a dreadful record which will require years of healing and reconciling work to overcome fully the depredations of the past. But I must point out to you quite emphatically that the injustices borne by Jewish people in Europe and later Canada cannot be corrected at the expense of another injustice perpetrated against the Palestinian people. Why should the Palestinians be the bearers of the sins of western complicity in anti¬ semitism and the Holocaust? Your rightful initiative to reconcile with the Jewish people should not come with a blind eye for the inhumane policies inflicted by the state of Israel on the Palestinians.
I therefore commend you to carry on with and expand your Unsettling Goods campaign. I urge the United Church of Canada to join with other denominations around the globe who have decided to boycott and divest from companies that benefit from the occupation. Also I urge you to recognize your own country’s complicity in Palestinian suffering under occupation. Please read and study the proposals before you that advocate furthering boycotts and divestment. You proved with us in South Africa that only economic pressure could force the powerful to the table. As you have courageously done before, may you once again witness to the cause of Christ’s justice to free the oppressed and by so doing to liberate the oppressor so that these two peoples can finally be reconciled and live together in dignity, security and peace.
God bless you all as you as a Church wrestle to discern what God requires of you in this hour. With a heart full of love to a people I will always embrace, I am
Yours sincerely
+Desmond Archbishop Emeritus Cape Town
Yada, yada, yada, may I repeat the bottom line for you.
Both sides have plenty of excuses to treat the other inhumanly.
Still, both sides are the losers.
What do you want from me?
Trying to act as though you can cleanse either side of that mess to appear the innocent victim - seems way sillier than a semantics slip, that at least I was decent enough to cop to my error up front.
Utterly avoided what Tutu was saying. Seems to me you are making the case for a apartheid South Africa status quo
Here’s a great interview Democracy Now did with Bishop Tutu.
Very true. The Palestinians say that the Israelis come over, take their land, and kill them. The Israelis say, “They kill us.” It does take two to tango and the fact is, both sides are guilty. Neither wants the other to have a country, much less live in their country. The U.S. is just as guilty, for they did the same with the Native Americans.
It was beautiful what he said, but what good has it been?
It ranks right up with demanding how I would fix the climate crisis we created for ourselves.
The place for fixing things was a half century ago when life, on balance, was going better than it ever for humanity.
While Tutu may have given one beautiful, enlightening, uplifting speech, after another, I still got to watch our country go down the worm-hole into a hateful mess, where more people seem interested in encouraging vandalism, than in finding solutions. While the other side of the globe has been just as bad.
Wish I could be more optimist, but it’s gone in me, I have no faith in the future.
Today and how I behave to others within my life’s reach is all I have any power over.
(And according to my lil B, I’m doing pretty good in that department, so life is good. Even while I feel strapped into the chair impotently watching one huge failure after another, drive our global society into a genuine free fall down into its own self created destruction, with the awareness that a genuine nightmare Earth awaits my young buddy and his younger bro.)
But that a different question. To deny who holds responsibility for the plight of Palestinian today simply leads to being apathetic on the topic. Were you apathetic over apartheid SA?
Who holds responsibility to the Israeli plight? My point is, they need to resolve their differences and learn to get along with each, living together, instead of killing each other. It does no good to kill each other. Nothing is solved that way.
Do we live in the same world today we did two, three decades back?
Maybe I am apathetic, but then I wouldn’t hurt so much, perhaps I’m just a cynic. Perhaps it’s more a case of accepting my utter impotence to make any difference, except on a very, very small scale, so that’s what I engage in these days. Plus I’ve been aware of that nightmare since the Six-Day War (1967) - since then for all the promises from all sides, I seen nothing but escalating dog chasing tail situation like none other, that only encouraged contempt for leaders on both side, I mean Arafat, as much as I wanted to see him as a good guy, a full airing of his dirty laundry blasts the halo off his head.
Allow me to repeat, maybe you’ll notice it this time, at this point, all I see from my comfortably distance perspective is,
two rabid dogs locked in an endless war that has robbed both sides of what humanity they once possessed - and that won’t end until they destroy each other.
After all, go back a few more years and what happened to the Jews, that was genocide with a capital G, they weren’t sent off on a trail of tears, they were put to death. So where do we start???
And no I’m not forgetting Nazi camps killed even more Russian prisoners, and there were also huge numbers of Non-Jewish Polish civilians, Serb civilians, People with disabilities living in institutions, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, even Jehovah’s Witnesses (who knew).
Yes Palestinians kill Israelis, and Israelis kill Palestinians.
But for me, when Palestinians kill Israelis, it is self defense. If Israel wanted peace, they would retire their colonies to the 1967 borders.
There cannot be peace as long as Israel has the project of Eretz Israel .
I underline that i am not for the eradication of the Israeli state. I just want it to go back to its legitimate borders.
And i want it to recognize that the expulsion of hundred of thousands of Palestinians after the 1947 war create a wrong needing some recognition and compensation.
Brilliantly said Morgan. Anyone who inserts Nazis into this conversation should lose everyone’s attention.
Oh so you want ignore some of the history of this mess in Israel. The world started in 1967 for you or what? Oh wait a minute, Salomon has just been invoked, but the WWII death camps you want to ignore as if that’s irrelevant to Israel’s story?
What’s going on?
Morgan is right in a moral sense, but our leaders and diplomates have been saying that since 1968 and we just seem to get further away from that. Don’t we? What about the population explosion on both sides that has over crowded the place since then? If wishes were horses then beggars would ride. Unfortunately after decades of blahblahblah while both sides are lobbing one bomb or another at each other, and each attack justifying the next attack.
It’s not nice. It’s not good. It would be wonderful if humans weren’t such A holes - but alas we love killing the other and destroying everything that was once good. The Middle East has been just one example of that. That’s all I’m say - it has nothing to do with justifying one side or the other, since both have lost their moral bearings and both have shown themselves to be incapable of any sort of different approach.
Oh, and yes, Tutu was a great man and made many superlative uplifting speeches and deserved the 1984 Nobel Prize for Peace. But that’s a different story from what’s unfolded in the Middle East.