A major university official told me about how unpleasant it was to deal with Desmond Tutu. Out of the dozens of big-name speakers she worked with, he ranked as among the most obnoxious.
He didn’t want to take questions but it was pointed out to him it was part of his speech contract. So he took a couple of questions and then said, “Have I sung for my supper?”
Centrist talkshow host Ronn Owens notes that people on the right (including Patrick Buchanan) are invariably more pleasant to deal with while people on the left (Ralph Nader et al) think so much about society, that they don’t care about individuals.
An old saying has it that “liberalism is always being surprised.” That is the only possible explanation of Jewish expressions of “surprise” and “shock” that Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu in late October urged the South African Opera troupe to cancel its engagement to perform “Porgy and Bess” in Israel.
Turning a blind eye to Tutu’s disparagement of Israel and indeed of Jews generally is, to be sure, not exclusively a Jewish failing. Just a few months ago, on the occasion of the Anglican clergyman’s 79th birthday, President Obama lauded him as “a moral titan – a voice of principle, an unrelenting champion of justice, and a dedicated peacemaker.”
In this year alone Tutu has demonstrated his dedication to peace, justice, and principle in the Middle East in particular by speaking up for Hamas and supporting the “Freedom Flotilla” of Islamist jihadists and “internationalist” do-gooders (people who confuse doing good with feeling good about what they are doing) who last spring tried to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
He has also repeatedly endorsed the activities of the BDS (Boycott/Divest/Sanction) movement. This reincarnation of the Nazis’ “Kauf nicht beim Juden” campaign of the 1930s constantly invokes Tutu’s “authoritative” condemnation of Israel (where Arabs and Jews use the same buses, beaches, clinics, cafes, and soccer fields, and attend the same universities) as an “apartheid” state.
But his fulminations against Jews have a long history, so well-documented that one wonders how the “surprised” Jewish leaders or President Obama can possibly be ignorant of it, especially now that the latter has a “director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism” named Hannah Rosenthal, who has shown herself adept even at spotting that evanescent phenomenon called “Islamophobia” at a distance of ten miles.
Here are just a few examples of the “moral titan” Tutu on the Jewish question:
On the day after Christmas 1989, Tutu, standing before the memorial at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem to the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis, prayed for the murderers and scolded the descendants of their victims. “We pray for those who made it happen, help us to forgive them and help us so that we in our turn will not make others suffer.” This, he said, was his “message” to the Israeli children and grandchildren of the dead.
Moral obtuseness, mean spite, and monstrous arrogance do not make for sound ethics and theology. Neither Tutu nor the Israelis he lectured can “forgive” the Nazi murderers. Representatives of an injured group are not licensed (even by the most sanctimonious of preachers) to forgive on behalf of the whole group; in fact, forgiveness issues from God alone. The forgiveness Tutu offers the Nazis is truly pitiless because it forgets the victims, blurs over suffering, and obliterates the past.
Tutu is always far less moved by the actuality of what the Nazis did (“the gas chambers,” he once said, “made for a neater death” than apartheid resettlement policies) than by the hypothetical potentiality of what, in his jaundiced view, Israelis might do. His speeches against apartheid returned obsessively to gross, licentious equations between the former South African system and Jewish practices, biblical and modern.
“The Jews,” Tutu declared in 1984, “thought they had a monopoly on God” and “Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings.” Tutu has been an avid supporter of the Goebbels-like equation of Zionism with racism. He has alleged that “Jews think they have cornered the market on suffering” and that Jews are “quick to yell ‘anti-Semitism’ ” because of “an arrogance of power – because Jews have such a strong lobby in the United States.”
Jewish power in America is, in fact, a favorite Tutu theme. In late April 2002 he praised his own courage in resisting it. “People are scared in [America] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful, very powerful. Well, so what? Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.”
Voice of Reason: Why the Left and Right Are Wrong
One of my favorite talkshow hosts of all time is Ronn Owens of KGO radio in San Francisco. In 2004, he published this book. It’s mediocre. I don’t think it will stand the test of time. But I find his comments here important:
I have found that arch-conservative Republicans have a great deal of concern for the individual, but don’t seem to care about the group. One on one, they come across as caring, decent, even fun people, even as they support issues that either take away our rights or otherwise work to the disadvantage of large bodies of people.
A typical right-wing Republican sees a poor little Black kid panhandling in front of the Capitol. He’s likely to stop, pull out his wallet, hand the kid a buck…then promptly vote against a bill that would fund a Head Start program or affordable housing for minorities.
Radical liberal Democrats, on the other hand, are very passionate when it comes to the group, but can’t be bothered with the individual.
Senator Orrin Hatch is about as right-wing as you can possibly get. I watch this man whenever I talk to him, and I’m always impressed by how he deals with others and the genuine attention he pays to what you have to say. He is one of the nicest people you ever want to meet.
On the far left side, Representative Barney Frank comes off like someone who really cares about the group as a whole… Yet when you try to talk to him on a personal level, when you sit and watch him get ready to be interviewed, he comes across as really arrogant. He’s pompous, he screams at people, he’s just unpleasant to be around.
Pat Buchanan is another classic extreme… And yet on a personal level, he’s terrific. You sit down for an interview…you joke and shmooze…
Ralph Nader…is the quintessential champion of the underdog. And yet when you first sit down with him one on one, it’s as if he doesn’t even know you exist.
By and large, extreme conservative Republicans are more pleasant to be around.
Jane writes: “Ronn Owens is dead-on in that quote. Back when my child was an infant and I (wrongfully) lost my job, had to resort to welfare for awhile. Interestingly enough, it was a group of arch-conservative Christians who befriended me and helped me out, while my former artsy liberal friends scattered to the wind and were nowhere to be found.”
