At first blush, the suggestion that a Nobel Peace Prize winner would have
anything in common with a pack of unabashed, poison-tongued Jew-haters
seems preposterous. But Desmond Tutu, the former archbishop of Cape
Town, South Africa, who in 1984 won the coveted Nobel award for his
campaign against apartheid in that country, is today one of the most
celebrated supporters of the “Divest from Israel” movement.
Particularly widespread on university campuses across America, this
movement routinely offers a high-visibility propaganda forum for some
of the most rabid, combative anti-Semites of our time.
At its heart, the campus divestment movement aims to cripple Israel’s
economy by compelling universities to withdraw whatever funds they may
have invested in Israeli-based or -affiliated corporations. These
efforts are founded on the premise that Israel is guilty of practicing
apartheid and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people.
According to the divestment movement’s leaders, the human rights
violations perpetrated by Israel are on par with those of the former
apartheid regime in Desmond Tutu’s South Africa; many critics go so far
as to liken modern Israel to Nazi Germany. When UC Berkeley
administrators recently decided to divest the university’s money from
Israel, Tutu praised their “principled stand” against the “injustice of
the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and violation of Palestinian
human rights.” “[I]t is always an inspiration when young people [the
Berkeley students who pressured the administrators] lead the way and
speak truth to power,” said Tutu.
The philosophy underlying the divestment movement has been displayed in
stark relief recently at a number of University of California campuses,
where Muslim student groups sponsored events under the banner of
“Israeli Apartheid Week: A Call to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction
Israel.” At a Muslim Students Association (MSA) event at UC San Diego,
for instance, one MSA member explicitly affirmed that she supported
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s assertion that “if Jews all gather
in Israel, it will save us [jihadists] the trouble of going after them
worldwide.” Meanwhile, UC Irvine’s Muslim Student Union promoted its
own “Israeli Apartheid Week” festivities by featuring, as guest
speakers, such luminaries as Norman Finkelstein (who asserts that
the Holocaust has been exaggerated and exploited by Jews to justify
Israeli human-rights violations and crimes against humanity); Hedy
Epstein (who contends that the only “lesson” Jews “learned from the
Holocaust” was how to “become the persecutors” of vulnerable people
like the Palestinians); Hatem Bazian (who, at an American Muslim
Alliance conference promoting the creation of an Islamic State of
Palestine, approvingly quoted a hadith calling on Muslims to “come and
kill” the Jews); Alison Weir (who characterizes the Israeli-Arab
conflict as nothing more complex than a battle between “the brutalizer
and the brutalized”); and Amir Abdel Malik-Ali (an open supporter of
Hamas and Hezbollah who has warned that he and his fellow Muslims “will
fight” the Jews “until we are either martyred or until we are
victorious”).
Such are the worldviews and sentiments of the leading lights in today’s
“Divest from Israel” movement. By no means, however, is it surprising
that Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu would support such bellicose
rhetoric, given his own long history of condemning and smearing Israel
and the Jews. Noting that divestment campaigns helped bring about the
end of apartheid in South Africa, a development he calls “one of the
crowning accomplishments of the past century,” Tutu is delighted that a
“similar movement” now aims to put “an end to the Israeli occupation”
in the Middle East. Notably, Tutu makes no call for divestment from any
other Middle Eastern nation – though the political oppression, human
rights abuses, and barbaric atrocities characterizing life throughout
much of that region dwarf anything that the Palestinians have ever
suffered in Israel, to which Tutu refers as America’s “client state.”
