by DESERT PEACE
What happens to a group like the ADL or any other hate group associated with the infamous Lobby when there is no one left to hate?
Think about it.Groups whose sole existence is based on the destruction of any group or individual they label as an enemy.
What happens when the 'enemy' is gone? What would a professional hate monger like Abe Foxman do to continue collecting his salary?
Apparently these are real problems that te ADL is being confronted with these days. This was demonstrated just the other day when members were urged not to sign an on line petition to remove an anti Semitic group from Google.
It is once again being demonstrated by their appeal to the President of St. Thomas' University to reverse their decision and allow Desmond Tutu to speak there.
Either a harsh realisation has hit them that a hate group must have someone to hate.... or they are finally coming to their senses, which I doubt very much... Either way, things are taking an interesting turn.
School drops Tutu over remarks,
but ADL says let him speak
By Ben Harris
NEW YORK (JTA) -- The Anti-Defamation League is urging the president of a Minnesota university to invite Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak just days after it was revealed that he had been disinvited because of fears he might offend Jews.
Tutu had been slated to visit the University of St. Thomas next spring as part of a program that brings Nobel laureates to teach youth about peace and justice. But university administrators, after consulting with Minnesota Jewish leaders, concluded that Tutu has made hurtful comments about Israel and the Jewish people that rendered him inappropriate as a speaker.
"Tutu has certainly been an outspoken, sometimes very harsh critic of Israel and Israeli policies, and has sometimes also used examples which may cross the line," said Abraham Foxman, the ADL's national director. But, he added, Tutu "certainly is not an anti-Semite and should not be so characterized and therefore refused a platform."
Coming just weeks after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to Columbia University, the controversy over Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and icon of the peaceful struggle against apartheid, has become the latest point of contention in what is shaping up to be a fierce season of Middle East controversy on campus.
Jewish groups have long been drawn into battles over the acceptable parameters of the Middle East debate, an issue recently brought to the fore by the Ahmadinejad visit and the publication of "The Israel Lobby." In the book, two noted political scientists argue that Jewish influence has prevented a frank discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Tutu incident, however, offers an unusual twist: a Jewish organization now linked to a university refusing to invite a recognized civil rights luminary who also sits on the board of a Holocaust center in South Africa.
Tutu has condemned suicide terrorism against Israel and recognized the Jewish state's right to secure boundaries. He has spoken admiringly about the Jewish role in fighting apartheid, though he has also noted Israel's alliance with the apartheid South African government. He was even honored in 2003 by Yeshiva University's law school with an award for promoting world peace.
After the Tutu cancellation was reported last week in City Pages, the Minneapolis alternative weekly, the president of St. Thomas issued an explanation.
"We became aware of concerns about some of Archbishop Tutu's widely publicized statements that have been hurtful to members of the Jewish community," Father Dennis Dease said in a statement released last Friday. "I spoke with Jews for whom I have great respect. What stung these individuals was not that Archbishop Tutu criticized Israel but how he did so, and the moral equivalencies that they felt he drew between Israel’s policies and those of Nazi Germany, and between Zionism and racism."
Among the Jews with whom Dease spoke was Julie Swiler, the public affairs director for the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.
Swiler told JTA that after the university approached the JCRC for an opinion about Tutu, she discovered a speech he delivered in Boston in 2002 in which he compared the power of the "Jewish lobby" to Hitler, and Israeli policies to those of the South African apartheid regime.
"People are scared in this country to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful -- very powerful," Tutu said in the speech, a portion of which was reprinted in the Guardian newspaper. "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."
Swiler said she told the university that those comments go beyond legitimate criticism of Israel.
"I think most people in the Jewish community would find comparing the quote-unquote Jewish lobby to Hitler offensive," she said.
Swiler insisted that no recommendation was sought and none was given to the question of whether Tutu should be invited to campus. And though Swiler said that Tutu's views should be heard even though he has a "blind spot" when it comes to Israel, she would not offer an opinion on the university's decision to deny him a platform.
"We're not talking about David Duke here," said Cecilie Surasky, the communications director for Jewish Voice for Peace and editor of the blog Muzzlewatch, which chronicles suppression of dissenting voices in the Middle East debate.
"I think most people would agree they wouldn't want to spend their dollars giving David Duke a platform," Surasky said. "But what we are talking about is Nobel Prize winners, top academics. Those people are the ones that are having trouble speaking without fear of attack by what I could call self-appointed gatekeepers."
Surasky added that whatever the particulars of this case, the impression of the Tutu incident is that the pro-Israel lobby has again squashed views it doesn't like.
"This struck a chord because it's part of a pattern," Surasky said. "Even though it's their decision, what many people hear is it's Jewish pressure that caused them to bar, in this case, one of the world's great humanitarians. And I don't think there's any question that fuels anti-Semitism."
Both the university and the Minnesota JCRC have explicitly denied that any Jewish pressure was exerted to have the speech canceled. A school spokesman said the university's decision was informed in part by its experience two years ago hosting the conservative provocateur Ann Coulter.
Mindful that it might appear to outsiders that Jewish pressure played a role, Swiler emphasized repeatedly that she does not believe Tutu is an anti-Semite and that he has a right to be heard.
Not all Jewish groups, however, agree with that view.
"Desmond Tutu is an anti-Semite who hates Jews and is obsessed with demeaning and smearing the Jewish state," said Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America.
Tutu's 2002 speech was delivered at a conference sponsored by Sabeel, a Christian Palestinian group that some have described as anti-Semitic, and has become a prime exhibit of the archbishop's supposed hostility to Israel.
Tutu is slated to speak againat a Sabeel conference later this month in Boston titled "The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel."
According to Swiler, the university reached out to the local JCRC once before after the council complained that the Justice and Peace Studies program, the department that booked Tutu to speak, had a pattern of programming hostile to Israel. The JCRC argued that all voices on the Middle East should get a hearing.
The university responded by establishing a committee that the JCRC was invited to join. Soon after, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk was invited to speak on campus.
"I think that again, all viewpoints should be heard," Swiler said. Tutu's "viewpoint should be heard. And when we disagree with what somebody says about Israel, our viewpoint should be heard."
The following speech was delivered at a conference on "Ending the Occupation" at Old South Church in Boston, Massachusetts on April 13, 2002. The very speech that the Lobby used as 'evidence' that the Rev. Tutu is an anti Semite....
Occupation is Oppression
by Desmond Tutu
Thank you for how you cared for us in South Africa during the apartheid regime. You showed so much solidarity with us, supporting us and supporting sanctions against the regime. You know we are free in South Africa because of people like yourselves, people who cared. You cared even when it looked totally impossible. So I want to thank you.
God is weeping over what he sees in the Middle East. God has no one except ourselves, absolutely no one. God is omnipotent, all-powerful, but also impotent. God does not dispatch lightning bolts to remove tyrants, as we might have hoped he would. God waits for you, for you to act. You are his partner. God is as weak as the weakest of his partners, or as strong as the morally strongest.
The title of my talk is "Occupation is Oppression." I would like to change that to "Give Peace a Chance, for Peace is Possible"; for we are bearers of hope. To God’s people, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, we want to say: our hearts go out to all who have suffered the violence of suicide bombers and of military incursions. I want to say to all: peace is possible. These two peoples are God’s chosen and beloved, with a common ancestor in Abraham.
I give thanks for what the Jews have given us. During apartheid we told our people God has heard their crying. And God will deliver us as God delivered Israel from bondage. God never abandoned us through tribulation and suffering.
Comparison: Apartheid to Occupation
In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were the Jews. Jews almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust center in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.
What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visits to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us blacks in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about. They seemed to derive so much joy from our humiliation.
Collective punishment.
We know of the horrific attacks on refugee camps, towns, villages, and Palestinian institutions. We don’t know the exact truth because Israelis won’t let the media in. What are they hiding?
Perhaps more sinister is why is there no outcry in the United States about the Israeli siege in the West Bank? You see the harrowing images of what suicide bombers have done, something we all condemn, but we see no scenes of what the tanks are doing to Palestinian homes and people.
On one of my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and their homes?
I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Israeli Jews. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Center) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said: "Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews."
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.
My brother Naim Ateek has said what we used to say: "I am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I am anti-injustice, anti-oppression."
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.
http://desertpeace.blogspot.com/2007/10/jewish-hate-groups-are-changing-tactics.html
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