Today: September 6, 2010

 

Tutu's Demand of Israel

Posted: Thu 3rd September 2009 3.41 PM  | Author: David Soakell

I came across a statement this week by one of the world's leading Archbishop's. According to South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Israel have no choice but to talk to Hamas and pursue peace with them.

In a recent interview Desmond Tutu stated, "You don't make peace with friends, you negotiate with those who are regarded as pariahs." Tutu was in Judea & Samaria ("West Bank") this past week for the final leg of a delegation visit by the Elders, a group of world leaders brought together in 2007 by his anti-apartheid comrade Nelson Mandela, the former South African president and activist. The archbishop drew parallels between Israel's Hamas boycott and white South Africa's refusal to engage Mandela's anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC) which, like Hamas today, was once labelled a terrorist organization by much of the international community.

"It's the same thing that happened in South Africa for a very long time," Desmond Tutu said. "The apartheid government said they wouldn't negotiate with Nelson Mandela, and so on - and they had to."

But hang on Archbishop Tutu.... by this very statement, if you are comparing Mandela's anti-apartheid ANC with Hamas, then you are implying that Israel (in the same way that white South Africa was), is an apartheid state! This is clearly not so. If apartheid was in Israel there wouldn’t be Arab members of the Knesset (Parliament); there wouldn't be Arab justices in the Israeli High Court; there wouldn’t be Arab university students studying the same subjects as their Israeli peers in Israeli universities, and there wouldn’t be Jewish doctors treating Arab patients and Arab doctors treating Jewish patients.  

The International Quartet of the United States, United Nations, European Union, and Russia has set preconditions for the Islamic movement Hamas, insisting that it renounce violence, recognize Israel and agree to previously signed agreements before being allowed to enter into negotiations. But Tutu said as former representatives of many of these nations, "We do not have those constraints."

On whether or not members of the delegation, including former presidents Jimmy Carter of the US and Mary Robinson of Ireland, were willing to personally talk to Hamas officials now that they have left government, Tutu said, "We want to be able to speak with everybody... It is precisely, as it were, part of our CV, our job description, we don't represent a government, we don't represent any particular segment of society except the people who want to see peace in the world."

So, if as he states, Tutu doesn't represent "any particular segment of society" what is he doing with the title of Archbishop? Surely, isn't he representing the world-wide Church?  

Unable to visit the besieged coastal strip of Gaza during this latest trip to Israel due to security concerns, Tutu said the Elders had "raised this issue, the issue of the blockade," which Israel imposed on Gaza shortly after the Hamas takeover in 2007. "We did intend to go... This morning we were speaking with [Israeli] President [Shimon] Peres and expressed our concerns. That was one of the issues we wanted to be able to highlight as part of the program of our visit," he said. "The humanitarian situation is incorrigible, really. So we did raise it, and hope that the fact that we have raised it will be a fact that will be considered." And even though the war over apartheid in South Africa was resolved in a single democratic state, Tutu concluded that most Palestinians and Israelis maintain the now-conventional wisdom of a two-state solution, with notable exceptions, as the only path forward.
 

The group of ‘Elders’ visiting Israel started out with a sympathetic visit to Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem), but they ended it on a bitter note as Archbishop Desmond Tutu stated that the Palestinians are now paying penance for Western guilt over the Holocaust.

Tutu told Israeli news Ha’aretz that "the lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns." He added that the Palestinians are paying the price for Europe's maltreatment of Jews. As mentioned, Tutu was joined on his visit by fellow Nobel Peace laureate Jimmy Carter, who has likewise equated Israel with Apartheid.

In explaining his pro-Palestinian views to Israeli's, Tutu claimed, “my own positions are actually derived from the Torah. You know God created you in God's image. And we have a God who is always biased in favour of the oppressed."

So, obviously Archbishop Desmond Tutu sees Israel as the aggressor, and the Palestinians as the oppressed! It makes sense really... after all the Arab world only controls 99.9% of the Middle East, have all the oil wealth, attacked Israel in three major wars (1948, 1967, 1973), have inflicted two Intifada's on Israel, taken land for peace (Gaza) and turned it into a Hamas training camp for terrorists, and have continually fired bombs and missiles at Israel since. Cafes, discos and shopping centres have been blown up by Palestinian terrorists, and now Israel face the threat of nuclear weapons. How shocking of Israel to be the aggressor!

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