The Importance of Being Desmond Tutu

Avi Davis
The Intermediate Zone
18 April "10

Being an ex-Apartheid activist must surely exist one of the best jobs in the world. What could be better than being invited to prestigious university campuses to deliver highly paid lectures on the evils of Western imperialism and then be fêted as a hero?; Or being able to make the most hateful pronouncements about white Anglo- Saxons and watch while everyone smiles in quiet acknowledgment? Or then again having carte blanche to unleash your vitriol against other unsuspecting nations whom you deem to have inflicted apartheid regimes on their own minorities, and have no one challenge you?

Yes Desmond Tutu, one of his country’s most famous anti-Apartheid activist, has made it. The former South African Archbishop, who built a reputation manning the barricades in the South Africa’s long struggle against apartheid, collecting a Nobel Peace Prize along the way, is universally hailed as a fair minded advocate of peace, love and freedom.

Everywhere, that is, except Israel. In Tutu’s mind, Israel is the equivalent of the South African Apartheid regime, for its discrimination against Palestinian Arabs. Since 2002, he has called strenuously and aggressively for universities around the world to conduct campaigns of divestment from companies doing business with Israel, an obvious replication of the same boycott that contributed to the collapse of his homeland’s former Apartheid regime.

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