Desmond Tutu, the South African bishop known for his fight to end apartheid, is being universally lauded.  I do not share that sentiment.  While I will certainly acknowledge that he was a warrior against one of the great evils of his time, I believe that, on the scales of goodness, he squandered that moral virtue by being an ardent advocate of anti-Semitism and an enemy to Israel.

Over the years, I've found philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism to be good yardsticks of both nations and people.  Regarding the former, it's no coincidence that, throughout history, those nations that thrive are, for their time and place, philo-Semitic, while those that fail are anti-Semitic.  One can say this is God's will, or one can note that free societies benefit all citizens, and part of a free society is that it leaves its Jews alone.  You don't have to love Jews; you just have to leave them be.  Totalitarian societies, on the other hand, the ones that oppress their people, invariably hate their Jews, and use them as a scapegoat to distract the masses from the horrors of the regime.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, the same turns out to be true: totalitarian individuals hate Jews; freedom-oriented people don't.  I happen to believe that this is because the Torah stands for absolute moral truths, justice, and a reckoning in the afterlife.  Totalitarians oppose all those things.

This doesn't mean that individual Jews are all moral or just or will be rewarded in the afterlife.  There have been and still are a lot of Jews who are bad people.  Still, symbolically, those core virtues are Jewish ideas, and leftists back away from them like slugs from salt or vampires from the cross.

And this gets me to Desmond Tutu.  I won't repeat here, because you can read it everywhere else, that he fought to end apartheid, which was, as I said, one of the great evils of the modern era.  However, Desmond Tutu also practiced the African version of liberation theology — and liberation theology, quite simply, is a fusion of communism and Christianity.

Image: Desmond Tutu by Anvcomp.  CC BY-SA 4.0.

As is true for all leftist ideologies, those who support liberation theology are hostile to Israel.  Karl Marx, a self-hating Jewish convert, baked anti-Semitism into the communist cake, both because he personally bought into all the worst stereotypes about Jews and because he melded Jews in with capitalism, which encouraged the true believers to think overthrowing Jews was a shortcut to achieving "true" socialism.

Back in 2015, the Gatestone Institute wrote how Desmond Tutu strongly supported both liberation theology and the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, which attempts to use economic means to destroy Israel:

A virulent global campaign by a powerful Christian lobby is trying to influence the Church and use it to delegitimize Israel. The lobbying group is the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, with Nobel Prize Laureate and retired Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu as its patron.

Tutu not only agreed to serve as Sabeel's patron but also to "assist the Palestinian Christian organization in its outreach and development work with Christian Churches around the world."

CAMERA has also commented upon Tutu's virulent hostility to Israel and the Jews — although Israel is the only religiously free nation in the Middle East, extending full civil rights to all within its borders, while the Palestinian-controlled territories are cesspools of hate, violence, murder, and oppression. Still:

Tutu alleged, for example, that Israeli Jews "dominate over Palestinians." A United Church of Christ meeting in Cleveland in 2015 cited the archbishop in support of a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) resolution aimed at companies doing business in and products from what it mistakenly labeled "Palestinian territories" and "illegal" Israeli settlements. Tutu wrote:

"We grieve over Israel's decades long oppression of Palestine [Sic.] and Palestinians: The illegal occupation ... the separation wall ... the network of checkpoints and settler bypass roads ... [the] disruption of every aspect of daily life for Palestinians" ("UCC Action Seeking Peace Between Israel and Palestine," Huffingtonpost.com, July 9, 2015).

Tutu was an ignorant man, who used his tremendous reach to opine about and prescribe actions regarding a subject as to which he knew nothing.

Tutu, more than most in the modern era, always reminded me of the anti-Semitic little poem "How odd of God to choose the Jews," to which a more intelligent wit added, "But not so odd as those who choose the Jewish God but not the Jews."  I will not mourn his passing.

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