Richard Shepherd
Think Tank Blog
28 August 09
Enter former anti-apartheid campaigner, Nobel laureate, and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu who has used an interview with the liberal-Left Israeli newspaper Haaretz today to make some typically ill considered remarks of his own:
“The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns,” he was quoted by the paper as saying. “…in South Africa, they tried to get security from the barrel of a gun. They never got it. They got security when the human rights of all were recognized and respected.”
This is crass even by Tutu’s standards when talking about Israel. But it was nothing compared to the truly disturbing comments made earlier this week by Virgin Atlantic boss and international NGO financier Richard Branson.
Asked to draw on his business and public relations skills to advise Israel on how to improve its image, he said:
“I think it’s something similar to what happened after 9/11. You know after 9/11 the world had enormous sympathy for America, and you know that sympathy was somehow lost. And obviously after the Second World War, the world had enormous sympathy for the Jewish people. Over a number of decades, that sympathy has been lost …. You’ve got a great country, but you’ve just got to hold the hands of your neighbors, and then you’ll get back on top again.”
I have remarked on a number of occasions on how submersion in the anti-Zionist agenda leads otherwise reasonable and sane individuals to say things which make them look ridiculous. But “you’ve just got to hold the hands of your neighbours, and then you’ll get back on top again.”? Don’t these people ever think about what they are saying? The mind boggles.
That aside, the first thing to note about Branson and Tutu is that it is obvious that neither of them has any idea of what they are talking about. They seek to pronounce on a matter of great complexity while demonstrating that the history and basic facts of the conflict are simply lost on them. All we are left with is the standard UN/NGO narrative in which a belligerent and colonialist Israel is juxtaposed with oppressed third-world freedom fighters struggling against all odds for justice and recognition.
Tutu in particular has form in this regard. As an attentive reader reminded me earlier today, he made some particularly vicious remarks in a commentary in the Guardian along such lines in April 2002. In an article tellingly entitled Apartheid in the Holy Land he said of the struggle against Israel:
“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, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.”
Well, I’m glad that Desmond Tutu thinks we are living in a “moral universe”. And one trusts he is confident that, when confronted with the higher authority he invokes, his Faustian pact with the forces of anti-Zionist bigotry is not held against him.
As for Richard Branson, one really has to marvel at his audacity. I am not Jewish myself, but I would venture to say that “sympathy” is not quite what the Jewish people were looking for in establishing their state after the Holocaust.
Even so, if defending that state against extremism is all it has taken for all that “sympathy” to evaporate I am not convinced that it was all that deeply rooted in the first place.
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