Tutu’s No-Nos The not-so-noble laureate. Bruce Bawer
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/tutus-no-nos-bruce-bawer/
EXCERPTS
Tutu’s glow faded even more for me after 9/11. Of course he lamented the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon – how could he do otherwise, given all the checks he’d received, drawn on New York banks? – but he sounded far more emotionally worked up when he condemned the subsequent acts of retaliation by NATO. Indeed, while he soft-pedaled his criticism of Islamic terrorists – and stubbornly refused to criticize Islam itself, asserting in 2006 that “no religion is inherently violent or encourages violence” and that people of one faith “mustn’t despise, disparage or speak ill of another faith” – he savaged George W. Bush and Tony Blair, both of whom, he maintained, should be tried for war crimes in The Hague. (No Truth and Reconciliation Commission, apparently, for them.)
And although he’d publicly proclaimed his love for Winnie Mandela, Tutu refused to sit down with Blair at a 2012 conference, lecturing the prime minister afterwards in a Guardian op-ed: “You are a member of our family, God’s family. You are made for goodness, for honesty, for morality, for love; so are our brothers and sisters in Iraq, in the U.S., in Syria, in Israel and Iran.” Pondering this op-ed in Canada’s National Post, a writer named Wayne K. Spear rightly dismissed it as so much “greasy pontification,” pointing out that
Whether or not our brothers and sisters were “made for goodness,” some of them are committed to the destruction of apostate and infidel. Saddam Hussein seems to have been made, like the communist Russian dictator he both admired and emulated, for engendering terror among his rivals. As long as our world produces people such as these, leaders must from time to time have recourse to the necessary evil of war.
By this point, for me, the bloom was definitely off Tutu’s rose. But I didn’t fully grasp the scale of his awfulness until he started speaking up frequently about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His sympathies, he made clear, were entirely with Yasser Arafat and company. He compared Israel to Nazi Germany. He used his clout to get the University of Johannesburg to sever its ties with its Israeli fellows. But he wasn’t just critical of Israel. He criticized Jews. In fact, it became pretty apparent that he hated Jews. In a 2011 article, Alan Dershowitz offered a brief summing-up of Tutu’s comments on the subject:
He has called the Jews “a peculiar people” and has accused “the Jews” of causing many of the world’s problems….He has said that “the Jews thought they had a monopoly of God: Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings.” He has said that Jews have been “fighting against” and being “opposed to” his God. He has “compared the features of the ancient Holy Temple in Jerusalem to the features of the apartheid system in South Africa.” He has complained that “the Jewish people with their traditions, religion and long history of persecution sometimes appear to have caused a refugee problem among others.” Tutu has minimized the suffering of those murdered in the Holocaust by asserting that “the gas chambers” made for “a neater death” than did apartheid. He has demanded that its victims must “forgive the Nazis for the Holocaust,” while refusing to forgive the “Jewish people” for “persecute[ing] others.”
In 2014, Jay Nordlinger, author of the definitive book about the Nobel Peace Prize, suggested that of all its winners, the “most harmful…is Desmond Tutu: because he is a South African hero who, for decades, has peddled the lie that Israel is an ‘apartheid state.’ Coming from him, it is more harmful than from (the countless) others.” And in 2008 a staff writer for the Weekly Standard described Tutu as “our least favorite prince of the church” – for although he’d been “a principled opponent of apartheid in South Africa,” he seemed uninterested in “freedom anywhere else in the world.” Moreover, while Tutu was virtually mum about the depredations of the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and other evildoers, he made a habit of singling out the United States for obloquy.
That old poster of Tutu came down from the wall of my apartment in New York a long time ago. I’ve moved over a half-dozen times since, but I still have it. I kept it for the frame. After I learned of his death, I spent a half hour poking around in search of it. I finally found it, covered in dust, behind a piece of furniture. Someday we will all be free, it reads. That day has come. Please vote. The poster, I see, is a product of Project Vote, headquartered in Cape Town; online I was able to confirm that it was produced in 1994 for the election that resulted in Nelson Mandela’s historic ascent to the South African presidency. Who could have imagined back then that Tutu would end up being viewed by many former fans mainly as a loathsome bigot and apologist for terror?
One last thing. Toward the end of my years with my ex-partner, even he started to sour on Tutu. It began when he met Tutu’s kids. I see on Wikipedia that Tutu had four offspring. C. met two or maybe three of them, if I recall correctly. He came home from work that day with a look of shock and disillusion in his eyes. Tutu’s kids, he told me in a tone of astonishment, were among the most spoiled brats he’d ever encountered. (That’s saying something when you live in Manhattan.) At the time, note well, these brats were adults. According to C., they acted as if they were rock stars and talked to him and his colleagues at Trinity Church as if they were serfs. How, C. wondered, could a man whom he regarded at that point as a veritable saint be a father to such obnoxious creeps? Perhaps it’s a blessing to C. that he didn’t live to see his idol crumble so thoroughly. Then again, as a student of scripture, and, I daresay, a far more commendable Christian than Desmond Tutu, he knew very well that “there are last which shall be first, and there are first which shall be last.”
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