Archbishop Desmond Tutu has pulled out of a speaking engagement in Johannesburg because he refuses to speak alongside Tony Blair. Explaining his decision, Tutu says Blair and George W Bush should face trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague over the Iraq war.
Blair can consider Tutu’s snub a badge of honour. After all, Tutu has some very colourful views about international affairs. He has made sinister and inaccurate insinuations about a “Jewish lobby” in America. He has frequently compared Israel to apartheid South Africa, and argued that Zionism has “very many parallels with racism”.
Tutu has also urged the Jewish people to “pray for” the Nazis, and is a subscriber to the obscene ‘they of all people’ argument.
So I doubt Blair, who has brilliantly responded to Tutu’s outburst, will lose much sleep over this. Indeed, one wonders what is really going on here. Tutu agreed to speak with Blair, accepted the fee, and signed-off promotional posters featuring him with the former PM.
At what stage did he decide that actually, no, he absolutely couldn’t bring himself to speak alongside him?
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The Archbishop appears to have become at best confused, I wonder whether this is what we formerly called senility, or is from too close contact with confrere Jimmy Carter and other political “elders” currently travelling the world advising use of policies that failed them in their time in power.
I would suggest that he pops in for a chat with Nelson Mandela,and picks up some tips on being a respected elder statesman.
OK, Tutu’s a fool. But as Zionism is a nationalist ideology, of course it has parallels with racism. So, to a lesser or greater extent, do all nationalist ideologies.
no actually, Zionism puts itself as cultural revival movement which takes its inspiration from post-Monarchist Europe, as such it gave a great place to the importance of every culture to thrive on its own and emphasizes the right of nationalities to their own secure borders. out of reasonable argument, Zionism proclaim that a single idea can’t work for all people on earth and therefore there have to be different political entities, the cultural, Jewish aspect of Zionism add that those entities must relate to one another on equal standing (as Judaism touches all aspects in life for Jews but rejects global aspects of religions such as Christianity or Islam – there’s no point for manmade global unity since such a thing wouldn’t last).
sadly a new kind of false pride has taken over the religious right in Israel and Zionism which sought to highlight cultural over religious aspects for the renewed Hebrew nation, has failed.
A summery of lecture by Shlomo Avinery.
“A picture is worth a thousand words”.
http://yeheeor.blogspot.com/2012/09/rare-photo-uncovered-of-three-stooges.html
Just a point – you are wrong.. Nationalism is just a movement for, and on behalf of, a group of people who see themselves as a nation and call for self determination as a result. It need not, though it can, morph into assertions of racial superiority. Mainstream Zionism has always eschewed any claims to racial superiority as a simple reading of the writings of both religous and secular Zionist leaders will reveal very clearly.
As for Archbishop Tutu, he no longer deserves to be wrapped in a mantle of virtue. As I put it in a recent article for The Jewish News, he has ‘succumbed to the bigotry he once fought’.
He of all people…
I didn’t say nationalism was racism – I said it has parallels with racism. Of course it does – it indicates a desire to live separately.
The serious point here is that Zionism – like Irish nationalism, Scottish nationalism or Andorran nationalism or any other – is an ideology, to attack it is not to attack the people who advocate it.
That said I still think Tutu is an idiot. Those who know their history will recall he was long closer to the ‘Africanists’ of the PAC etc than to the non-racialists of the ANC. He jumped ship when it became plain that the Africanists, when not actually in the pay of apartheid, had zero credibility or popular support.
Just a point – Zionism is the subscription to the idea that Jews should self-determine in their own state. It has nothing to do with ‘a desire to live separately’.
Over 20% of Israel’s population is not Jewish, which of course means that it is actually more multi-cultural than Britain with its ‘White British’ 85.67% majority (as of the 2001 census).
Israelinurse, all nationalisms, all “nations”, are about defining what separates one people from another. It’s not a point about Jews any more than it is about Italians or the Irish. You are not seriously suggesting Israel is a mere geographical expression are you?
I am not suggesting Israeli/jewish nationalists (ie Zionists) are any worse than anybody else. But I am suggesting that it is a mistake to attempt to suggest “anti-Zionists” are racists per se. Of course, though, we all know that for many racists “Zionist” is just a code word for Jew.
What the comparison with Britain is about I have no idea, except that it suggests you are being ultra-defensive and defending Israel from an attack that has not been made (by me in any case).
If anti-Zionists only object to Jewish self-determination (as so many of them indeed seem to do), then I’m afraid that yes – they are racists.
If, concurrently, they object to Jewish self-determination whilst promoting Palestinian self-determination, then I’m afraid they’re hypocrites too.
It’s not that simple, is it? If Ulster Unionists object to Irish self-determination because it means they cannot have self-determination, what are they? But what if the Unionists get self-determination and the the 40% of Northern ireland that isn’t unionist and sees itself part of a wider Ireland – are they racists or victims of racism?
If the Republicans in N Ireland want full self-determination, they have the option of moving to the Republic. Similarly the Unionists in the republic can move to NI. The current status quo gives everyone an option.
Israel provides an option for Jews, while the rest of MENA provides options for muslims, less so for other minorities, although thankfully the Kurds are gaining some autonomy.
There are two sharply distinct kinds of nationalism (others may exist too).
Ethnic nationalism indeed indicates ‘a desire to live separately’. Basically, for ethnic nationalists, a territory belongs to their ethnos (hereditary nation-as-kinship-group) only; in the territory, members of other ethnē are at best ‘guests’ and essentially there on suffrance.
Civic or ‘liberal’ nationalism says that a particular ethnos needs a place where it is in the majority for its future prosperity, indeed viability, to be assured. However, minorities are not only admissible, they are an essential ‘part of the environment’, almost an assurance that the majority nation is serious about human rights and running a state responsibly. All rights guaranteed to the majority ethnos are guaranteed to all minority ones.
Different national traditions seems to veer more to one or other of these poles. Modern French patriotism (‘the glorious achievements of 1789′); the ideologues of the Italian Risorgimento, Garibaldi and Mazzini; above all, the father of modern Czechoslovakia and its mainstream connotation, Tomáš Masaryk – and all the 19th-century and 20th-century fathers of modern Zionism, from Moses Hess, Ahad HaAm and Theodor Herzl to Chaim Weizmann and (yes!) Vladimir-Ze’ev Zhabotinsky; – all were civic nationalists.
For complex historical reasons, at least the following national traditions seem to be overwhelmingly ethnic: the (pan-)Arab; the French Canadian; the Georgian; the German; the Greek; the Hungarian; the Irish; the Slovak (in strong distinction from the Czech); the Turkish. Others could be named.
I make no secret of my preferences: (1) nationalism is necessary, to defend languages and local traditions that are valuable responses to the time and place, and a first line of defence around the potentially persecuted indiviual; (2) there’s absolutely no case for ethnic nationalism, as opposed to the strong case for civic nationalism.
if everyone could live in civic nationalities (no religious or cultural aspects involved accept for the privacy of the home) there would be no need for nationalities – there would be a great global democracy.
except…
If Tutu has had nothing to say about the SA police slaughter of 30+ striking miners and the subsequent attempt to use an apartheid era law to transfer blame to the victims, I’d say that it’s because Tutu wanted to avoid being raked over the coals for his uncritical support of the ANC-led government.
Shira that was once tried a very long time ago. It ended up with the Tower of Babble and you know how that story ended; it did not end well.