Israeli shelling of Gaza village could be war crime: UN report

Palestinian women march in Gaza city to protest against the Israeli army operation in Beit Hanoun in November 2006. The UN Human Rights Council voted Wednesday to adopt a report of inquiry that says the Israeli shelling of a Palestinian village in which 19 people died could be construed as a war crime. (AFP/File/Said Khatib)

The 24-page report on the November 8, 2006 attack on Beit Hanoun, in the Gaza Strip, was prepared by a high-level fact-finding mission led by South African bishop and Nobel peace prize laureate Desmond Tutu.

I wonder how it is that so-called Christians like Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, and George Bush can so completely reject the findings and recommendations of Christian Anglican Bishop and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu and take the side of Israel - a non-Christian and anti-Christ racist state? Go figure...

Colonising a metaphor

"There is a cry of anguish from the depth of my heart, to my spiritual relatives. Please, please hear the call, the noble call of our scripture," Bishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize beseeched Israelis at "The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel" conference sponsored by Friends of Sabeel North America, a Christian Palestinian group in Boston recently. "Don't be found fighting against this god, your god, our god, who hears the cry of the oppressed," Tutu said.

Desmond Tutu Likens Israeli Actions to Apartheid

by Adrianne Appel - October 29, 2007

South African Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu compared conditions in Palestine to those of South Africa under apartheid, and called on Israelis to try and change them, while speaking in Boston Saturday at historic Old South Church."We hope the occupation of the Palestinian territory by Israel will end," Tutu said.

"There is a cry of anguish from the depth of my heart, to my spiritual relatives. Please, please hear the call, the noble call of our scripture," Tutu said of Israelis.

"Don’t be found fighting against this god, your god, our god, who hears the cry of the oppressed," Tutu said.

Tutu spoke with political activist and lecturer Noam Chomsky and others to a largely religious audience about "The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel," a conference sponsored by Friends of Sabeel North America, a Christian Palestinian group.

Israeli policy toward Palestine is an inflammatory topic in the U.S. and is not commonly discussed in large, public forums.

In Boston, complaints were lodged with Old South Church in the weeks prior to the event, in an effort to halt the conference. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting complained that Sabeel is "an anti-Zionist organisation that traffics in anti-Judaic themes," according to press reports.

Outside the church Saturday, Christians and Jews United for Israel demonstrated against Tutu and the conference.

"Sabeel is an organisation that seeks to demonise Israel. Tutu several years ago made anti-Semitic comments," May Long, president of the group, told IPS. Long did not hear Tutu’s speech, she said.

Tutu was an inspirational leader in the South African fight against apartheid, which officially ended 13 years ago. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 and today continues to speak around the globe for peace and justice, and to call for Palestinian rights.

The 76-year-old Tutu also appears to have won a battle against prostate cancer, which he was last treated for in 2000.

"Because of what I experienced in South Africa, I harbour hope for Israel and the Palestinian territories," said Tutu, who invoked passages from the Christian bible throughout his talk.

Tutu drew parallels between the apartheid of South Africa and occupied Palestine of today, including demolitions of Palestinian homes by the Israeli government and the inability of Palestinians to travel freely within and out of Palestine.

"I experienced a déjà vu when I encountered a security checkpoint that Palestinians must negotiate every day and be demeaned, all their lives," Tutu said.

Tutu said that Palestinian homes are being bulldozed, and new, illegal homes for Israeli’s built in their place.

"When I hear, 'that used to be my home,’ it is painfully similar to the treatment in South Africa when coloureds had no rights," Tutu said.

Tutu is a pacifist and he said only non-violent means should be used to confront the oppression at play in Palestine.

"Palestinians ought to try themselves to restrain those who fire the rockets into Israeli territory," Tutu said.

Tutu said that while fighting apartheid in South Africa he drew inspiration from the Jewish struggle as the bible describes it.

"Spiritually I am of Hebrew decent. When apartheid oppression was at its most vicious, and all but knocked the stuffing out of those of us who opposed it, we turned to the Hebrew tradition of resistance," and the belief that good will triumph over evil, and that a day of freedom from oppression will come, he said.

"The well-to-do and powerful complain that we are mixing religion with politics. I’ve never heard the poor complain that 'Tutu, you are being too political,"' he said.

"I am not playing politics when it involves children who suffer," Tutu said. "A human rights violation is a human rights violation is a human rights violation, wherever it occurs."

Tutu recently bumped up against U.S. discomfort with discourse about Palestine, when a Minnesota university president yanked an invitation to Tutu that had been extended by a youth group.

Rev. Dennis Dease, president of the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul Minnesota, said he did not want Tutu to speak because the Nobel Laureate’s position on Palestine was viewed by some as anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic.

Dease also fired Cris Toffolo as head of the university’s peace and justice programme, who had supported the invitation to Tutu.

Dease apologised to Tutu three weeks ago.

Tutu said Saturday that he accepted Dease’s "handsome apology", but that he will not consider speaking at the school until Toffolo is reinstated and her record cleared.

At the conference, Chomsky said the U.S. provides heavy financial support to Israel and has a profound influence on Israeli policies, including those toward Palestine and foreign trade.

"If the U.S. doesn’t like what Israel is doing, it just kicks Israel in the face," Chomsky said. In 2005, Israel wanted to sell improved missiles to China. The Bush administration halted the sale, Chomsky said.

"It blocked them and refused to allow Israeli officials to come to the U.S. The U.S. demanded an apology from Israel. It dragged Israel through the mud," Chomsky said.

The U.S. began its close relationship with Israel after the Israeli victory in the 1967 "Six Day War" against Egypt, Syria and Jordan, Chomsky said.

DECISION TO BAN DESMOND TUTU REVERSED AT UNIVERSITY

ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND!

by DesertPeace - Oct 11, 2007

Father Dennis Dease, president of the University of St. Thomas, has asked that the letter below be sent to St. Thomas students, faculty and staff:

Dear members of the St. Thomas community,

One of the strengths of a university is the opportunity that it provides to speak freely and to be open to other points of view on a wide variety of issues. And, I might add, to change our minds.

Therefore, I feel both humbled and proud to extend an invitation to Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak at the University of St. Thomas.

I have wrestled with what is the right thing to do in this situation, and I have concluded that I made the wrong decision earlier this year not to invite the archbishop. Although well-intentioned, I did not have all of the facts and points of view, but now I do.

PeaceJam International may well choose to keep the alternative arrangements that it has made for its April 2008 conference, but I want the organization and Archbishop Tutu to know that we would be honored to hold the conference at St. Thomas.

In any event, St. Thomas will extend an invitation to Archbishop Tutu to participate in a forum to foster constructive dialogue on the issues that have been raised. I hope he accepts my invitation. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas has agreed to serve as a co-sponsor of the forum, and I expect other organizations also to join as co-sponsors.

Details about issues to be addressed will be determined later, but I would look forward to a candid discussion about how a civil and democratic society can pursue reasoned debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other emotionally charged issues.

I also want to encourage a thoughtful examination of St. Thomas’ policies regarding controversial speech and controversial speakers. In the past, we have been criticized externally and internally when we have invited controversial speakers to campus – as well as when we have not. Rather than just move from controversy to controversy, might there be a positive role that this university could play in fostering thoughtful conversation around difficult and highly charged issues? We also might explore how to more clearly express in our policies and practices our commitment to civility when discussing such issues.

I have asked Dr. Nancy Zingale, professor of political science and my former executive adviser, to oversee the planning for the forum. If you have suggestions regarding either the topic or other participants, please contact her at nhzingale@stthomas.edu.

I sincerely hope Archbishop Tutu will accept our invitation. I continue to have nothing but the utmost respect for his witness of faith, for his humanitarian accomplishments and especially for his leadership in helping to end apartheid in South Africa.

Sincerely,

Father Dennis Dease

President

Zionists stop Archbishop Tutu from speaking at a Catholic university in Minnesota

by Ernesto Cienfuegos - Oct 9, 2007

Last spring the Justice and Peace Studies program at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota had arranged for the world renown humanitarian Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak on campus. In 1984 Archbishop Tutu was awarded both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism and is greatly respected all over the globe.

Some people in the US and Israel however hate Archbishop Tutu because of his stand against "apartheid" in Palestine and the ongoing ruthless genocide of the Palestinian people. It did not take long for the powerful Pro-Israel Jewish Lobby to go to work to stop Archbishop Tutu from speaking at the "Catholic" University of St. Thomas. As a result, the president of the university, Rev. Dennis Dease, has now cancelled Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a speaker.

The Jewish Lobby in America wields great influence on all major institutions and this includes the federal government. Influence over Catholic universities is no exception. A close inspection of who is on the University of St. Thomas Board of Trustees is very revealing. Also, the late Jesuit priest Father Malachi Martin exposed how the Vatican has been infiltrated by Judeo-Masonic conspirators.

The world has now witnessed how the Zionist Neocons in the Bush Administration led the country into attacking Iraq. They are now engineering an attack on Iran as well. The shocking revelation that they can easily twist the arm of a president of a major Catholic university should then come as no surprise. For a long time, a major agenda for "Zionism USA" has been the take over of America's institutions of higher learning. They have succeeded greatly in public and private universities and it looks like their tentacles now reach deeply into even Catholic colleges and universities.

On Friday, a spokesman at the University of St. Thomas said that this week president Dennis Dease might reconsider his orders to ban Archbishop Desmond Tutu from campus . Do not hold your breath though, Zionists seem to have too strong a grip on his arm.

Archbishop Tutu barred by U. of St Thomas because of criticism of Israel

by Cecilie Surasky - Oct 3, 2007

Rumors have been circulating for some time that Archbishop Desmond Tutu was banned by the University of St Thomas in Minnesota because of statements he made that some consider anti-Semitic. Now it’s official: winning the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t protect you from charges of anti-Semitism if you criticize Israeli human rights practices. Neither, apparently, does being one of the most compelling voices for social justice in the world today, or even getting an honorary degree from and giving the commencement address at Brandeis.

(WRITE LETTER TO U OF ST THOMAS ADMINISTRATORS HERE.)

Minneapolis/St.Paul’s City Pages just reported that members of the St Thomas Justice and Peace Studies program were thrilled when Bishop Tutu agreed to speak at the University– but administrators did a scientific survey of the Jews of Minneapolis, which included querying exactly one spokesperson for Minnesota’s Jewish Community Relations Council and several rabbis who taught in a University program– and concluded that Tutu is bad for the Jews and should therefore be barred from campus.

…in a move that still has faculty members shaking their heads in disbelief, St. Thomas administrators—concerned that Tutu’s appearance might offend local Jews—told organizers that a visit from the archbishop was out of the question.

"We had heard some things he said that some people judged to be anti-Semitic and against Israeli policy," says Doug Hennes, St. Thomas’s vice president for university and government relations. "We’re not saying he’s anti-Semitic. But he’s compared the state of Israel to Hitler and our feeling was that making moral equivalencies like that are hurtful to some members of the Jewish community."

St. Thomas officials made this inference after Hennes talked to Julie Swiler, a spokeswoman for the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.

"I told him that I’d run across some statements that were of concern to me," says Swiler. "In a 2002 speech in Boston, he made some comments that were especially hurtful."

Just to send the message home, Swiler says

"I think there’s a consensus in the Jewish community that his words were offensive."

To be clear here, Swiler and the other rabbis have the right to say whatever they think, though representing those opinions, as Swiler does, as a Jewish consensus, is laughable.

Ultimately, groups like Minnesota’s JCRC, the right wing fringe group Zionist Organization of America, and the increasingly embarrassing Anti-Defamation League, who have all attacked Tutu for his criticism of Israeli policies, will face the consequences of smearing Tutu –a hero to millions and leader of a movement that was known for the massively disproportionate involvement of numerous South African Jews.

But it’s the craven behavior of the administrators of St. Thomas that will likely be a mark of shame for years to come. While it’s understandable, given the Church’s history of virulent anti-Semitism, that a Catholic institution would be extra sensitive about relations with Jews, it’s not clear here that there was any real pressure to cave in to. Did groups threaten to picket? Who knows what administrators were thinking?

Regardless, the backlash has already begun. Marv Davidov, an adjunct professor within the Justice and Peace Studies program said:

"As a Jew who experienced real anti-Semitism as a child, I’m deeply disturbed that a man like Tutu could be labeled anti-Semitic and silenced like this," he says. "I deeply resent the Israeli lobby trying to silence any criticism of its policy. It does a great disservice to Israel and to all Jews."

To make matters worse, when Cris Toffolo, the chair of the Justice and Peace Studies program told Tutu what happened and warned him of a possible smear campaign, she was immediately demoted.

Davidov again:

"This is pure bullshit," says Davidov. "As far as fighting for civil rights, I consider Tutu to be my brother. And I consider Cris Toffolo to be my sister. They’re messing with my family here. If Columbia permits a Holocaust denier [Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] to speak at their university, why are St. Thomas officials refusing to let Tutu, an apostle of nonviolence, speak at ours?"

"What happened at the University of St. Thomas is not an isolated event," says Toffolo. "Until we have an honest debate about U.S. policy related to Israel, and about Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories, the spiral of violence will continue."

Why Tutu? Why now? Are his statements anti-Semitic?

Bishop Tutu is closely associated with Sabeel, a Jerusalem based Christian liberation theology organization started by Palestinian Anglican pastor Rev. Naim Ateek. Sabeel is "an international peace movement initiated by Palestinian Christians in the Holy Land who seek a just peace based on two states-Palestine and Israel-as defined by international law and existing United Nations resolutions." The group, and founder Naim Ateek in particular, have come under considerable attack by mainstream Jewish organizations that see their influence on domestic Christian organizations as a threat.

Sabeel works with local Christian partners to hold conferences in major cities across the United States. To the consternation of many, Bishop Tutu will be the featured speaker in late October at the Boston Sabeel conference. The conference title? "The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel:Issues of Justice and Equality."

Members of my group, Jewish Voice for Peace, have spoken at a handful of Sabeel conferences, and our Boston chapter is sponsoring a peace walk at the Boston conference.

As one JVP colleague who participated in several Sabeel conferences told me, she believed that Naim Atteek was guilty, at most, at times of being unaware of Jewish sensitivities around using certain Christian theological language (in fact, she publicly challenged him on this issue), but that he is ultimately advocating for a nonviolent resolution that recognizes the humanity and rights of both Jews and Palestinians. Of that, she has no doubt. (There are, to be sure, plenty of Palestinian sensitivities around language as well, though there is little interest among leaders of a variety of faiths in learning what those might be.)

Interestingly, the same can perhaps be said for Bishop Tutu, whose 2002 Sabeel speech seems to be the primary evidence offered for the cancellation of his talk. It’s impossible to convey the spirit of his talk by quoting only bits and pieces, so read it. Read the whole thing, especially the part cited by St. Thomas’ Doug Hennes where he says Tutu compared Israel to Hitler.

The talk is notable for its philo-Semitism and its equally passionate condemnation of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and people. For anyone who has been to the Occupied Territories, let alone lived through it, his words of condemnation are impossible to argue with. His language is challenging in part because it is imbued with the disappointment of a Christian raised to look up to Jews, and the heartache of an anti-apartheid leader who was once buoyed by passionate Jewish support. He struggles to make sense of the checkpoints, the home demolitions, the land confiscations, done by a state that says it represents the very same people.

What is clear is that he at times uses language loosely without understanding how it might hurt or offend us Jews. Does that make him an anti-Semite? Of course not. Should he be banned for using a term like "Jewish lobby" that makes many of us uncomfortable? Are you kidding?

Tutu never wavers in expressing his love of and hope for peace and security for both peoples. "Peace based on justice," Tutu says, " is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God’s dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers."

My Favorite ‘Anti-Semite’

by Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan - Oct 4, 2007

The utterly charming thing about the Zionist Thought Police is their apparent inability to restrain themselves, even from the very excesses that will prove to be their own undoing.

Having asked sane and rational people to believe that Jimmy Carter is a Holocaust denier simply for pointing out the obvious about the apartheid regime Israel maintains in the occupied territories, the same crew now want us to believe that Archbishop Desmond Tutu is an anti-Semite. No jokes!

That was the reason cited for Tutu being banned from speaking at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis. "We had heard some things he said that some people judged to be anti-Semitic and against Israeli policy," explained university official Doug Hennes.

The "anti-Semitic" views Tutu had expressed were in his April 2002 speech "Occupation is Oppression" in which he likened the occupation regime in the West Bank, based on his personal experience of it, to what he had experienced as a black person in South Africa. He recalled the role of Jews in South Africa in the struggle to end apartheid, and expressed his solidarity with us through our centuries of suffering. But then turning to the suffering inflicted on the Palestinians, he issued an important challenge, one that might just as well have been uttered by a Jewish biblical prophet:

"My heart aches. I say, why are our memories so short? Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?

"Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured.

"The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred.

"Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or – and I hope this will be the road taken – to strive for peace based on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state on those territories side by side with Israel, both with secure borders.

"We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. South Africa is a beacon of hope for the rest of the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land."

Tutu is absolutely right, of course, nor would those Israelis who embody the same tradition of indivisible human rights that Tutu personifies disagree with him.

Frankly, I think this case underlines precisely how absurd the policing of discussion about Israel in the U.S. has become. As a South African veteran of the liberation struggle, I can testify that there are few, if any, more decent, humane, courageous and morally unimpeachable individuals in the world than Bishop Tutu. Speaking truth to power is what he’s always done, both to the old regime in South Africa as much as to the new, when the latter has failed to live up to the standards it professes on AIDS, crime and other issues.

He has spoken forcefully on human rights struggles around the world, and his statements about the West Bank are based on what he has seen there. The diminutive Bish is a moral giant of our times, and the fact that he is condemning Israel for maintaining an apartheid system on the West Bank should serve as a wake-up call to liberal Americans who prefer not to think about these things. Yes, of course Bishop Tutu makes people uncomfortable; that’s what he’s always done, like a good cleric, challenging his flock to consider their own actions and omissions against the morality they profess to embrace. Instead, thanks to the atmosphere created by the right-wing nationalists of AIPAC and the ADL etc., many mainstream institutions would now prefer to shoot the messenger, if only to avoid incurring the wrath of those who have stripped the very term "anti-Semitic" of its meaning (by using it as a bludgeon in defense of behavior utterly abhorrent in the Jewish tradition as much as anything else), and as such, commit a great crime against Jews and Judaism.

Not that Tutu would have been surprised by this clumsy attack on him. As he said in that Boston speech,

"But 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 the Palestinians were not Semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?

"People are scared in this country [the U.S.] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful – very powerful. Well, so what? This is God’s world. For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosovic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.

"Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: What is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment.

"We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God’s dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers."

Tutu is challenging American institutions to put morality above the power of a lobby. (Yes, I know he called it "the Jewish lobby" and I don’t think of it as that; I think of it as a rightwing Likudnik lobby open to right-wing jingoists of every religious and ethnic stripe who share the Likudnik vision, but then again, I can understand Tutu’s confusion here, because it’s not as if any mainstream Jewish institutions have stepped forward and said no, these people who would suppress honest discussion of Israel speak only for themselves, not for the Jews…)

More power to him.