Desmond Tutu and the Jew Haters

The estimable Walter Russell Mead has a disturbing story about the so-called Free Gaza Movement.

The website of the Free Gaza Movement, a sponsor of the Gaza Flotilla, lists some impressive celebrity endorsements. One of the most impressive names on the list is that of Desmond Tutu, revered throughout the world for his courageous stand against South Africa’s apartheid government and for his leadership of initiatives like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which did so much to heal the wounds apartheid left behind.But there was something the Free Gaza Movement didn’t tell the archbishop: its co-founder and board chair is a Jew-hater named Greta Berlin who uses the organization as a platform form which to spread the ugliest anti-Semitic legends and, literally, Nazi propaganda and lies.

Free Gaza now alleges that Jews and Germans cooked up the Holocaust together.  It

posted this on its Twitter Feed: “Zionists operated the concentration camps and helped murder millions of innocent Jews” with a link to this awful video.

Ironically, the mad evil of this is an inadvertent confirmation of the Holocaust, something that the kind of people who despise Israel’s very existence typically assert either never happened or was history’s greatest event.  They just can’t make up their mind.

Oh, and you will be delighted to learn that Free Gaza believes the word Nazi is a portmanteau of nationalist and Zionist.  Seriously.

Then there’s the group’s cinematic taste.

The Free Gaza Movement is also touting an anti-Semitic film actually produced under the Propaganda Ministry of Joseph Goebbels during the Third Reich itself: a Nazi propaganda film on the Katyn massacre that tried to whip up hatred against Communists and Jews.

Mead suggests to Desmond Tutu that he needs to “apologize to the Jews” for allowing Free Gaza to use his name (along with other “celebrities”) in pursuit of its goals.

Obviously Archbishop Tutu had no idea he was getting in bed with Nazi-class Jew haters and aspiring genocidaires when he allowed the Free Gaza Movement the use of his name.

Sorry, Walter, but there’s no reason to believe Tutu didn’t know whom he was in bed with–and many good reasons to believe he approves. The great hero of apartheid has a long and inglorious history of anti-Semitism—as Google auto-fill confirms.

Take, for example, this Front Page Magazine story by Alan Dershowitz:

[Tutu] has minimized the suffering of those killed in the Holocaust. He has attacked the “Jewish”–not Israeli–”lobby” as too “powerful” and “scar[y].”  He has invoked classic anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes about Jewish “arrogance”, “power” and money.  He has characterized Jews a “peculiar people,” and has accused “the Jews” of causing many of the world’s problems. He once even accused the Jewish state of acting in an “unChristian” way….Tutu has asserted that Zionism has “very many parallels with racism,” thus echoing the notorious and discredited “Zionism equals racism” resolution passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations and subsequently rescinded.  He has accused the Jews of Israel of doing “things that even Apartheid South Africa had not done.”

Read the whole thing for more stomach-churning details.  Or simply type Desmond Tutu anti-Semitism for a couple of million more hits. (You won’t have to type all of the characters.)

No question, Tutu is happily in the kind of company he has long enjoyed keeping under the clever guise of inviolate morality.  And if you want to know who else is keeping it with him, click on this rogue’s gallery of world-class Jew- and Israel-hating individuals and organizations.  The oldest hatred is again becoming institutionalized and respectable.

CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY