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Friday, November 16, 2007

From this week's Jewish Advocate:

deng.jpg

Late last month, I went to hear Bishop Desmond Tutu speak at Boston’s Old South Church at a conference on "Israel Apartheid." Tutu is a well respected man of God. He brought reconciliation between blacks and whites in South Africa. That he would lead a conference that damns the Jewish state is very disturbing to me.

The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. I know because I write this from Jerusalem where I have seen Arab mothers peacefully strolling with their families – even though I also drove on Israeli roads protected by walls and fences from Arab bullets and stones. I know Arabs go to Israeli schools, and get the best medical care in the world. I know they vote and have elected representatives to the Israeli Parliament. I see street signs in Arabic, an official language here. None of this was true for blacks under Apartheid in Tutu’s South Africa.

I also know countries that do deserve the apartheid label: My country, Sudan, is on the top of the list, but so are Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. What has happened to my people in Sudan is a thousand times worse than Apartheid in South Africa. And no matter how the Palestinians suffer, they suffer nothing compared to my people. Nothing. And most of the suffering is the fault of their leaders. Bishop Tutu, I see black Jews walking down the street here in Jerusalem. Black like us, free and proud.

Tutu said Israeli checkpoints are a nightmare. But checkpoints are there because Palestinians are sent into Israel to blow up and kill innocent women and children. Tutu wants checkpoints removed. Do you not have doors in your home, Bishop? Does that make your house an apartheid house? If someone, Heaven forbid, tried to enter with a bomb, we would want you to have security people "humiliating" your guests with searches, and we would not call you racist for doing so. We all go through checkpoints at every airport. Are the airlines being racist? No.

Yes, the Palestinians are inconvenienced at checkpoints. But why, Bishop Tutu, do you care more about that inconvenience than about Jewish lives?

Bishop, when you used to dance for Mandela’s freedom, we Africans – all over Africa – joined in. Our support was key in your freedom. But when children in Burundi and Kinshasa, all the way to Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in particular in Sudan, cried and called for rescue, you heard but chose to be silent.

Today, black children are enslaved in Sudan, the last place in the continent of Africa where humans are owned by other humans – I was part of the movement to stop slavery in Mauritania, which just now abolished the practice. But you were not with us, Bishop Tutu.

So where is Desmond Tutu when my people call out for freedom? Slaughter and genocide and slavery are lashing Africans right now. Where are you for Sudan, Bishop Tutu? You are busy attacking the Jewish state. Why?

Simon Deng, a native of the Shiluk Kingdom in southern Sudan, is an escaped jihad slave and a leading human rights activist.

Also, there was a good op-ed in the Boston Herald at the time of the Sabeel Conference that I neglected to link: John R. Regier: Anti-Israeli agenda borders on sacrilege

Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Simon Deng: Disappearance of Bishop Tutu.

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5 Comments

sheesh you zionists are so sneaky - i mean getting people who have some moral authority to make statements actually based on logic! toda l'deng! what a gever/mensch

The link you provided is proving problematic as my browser "can't find the server" neither for this article nor the home page.

A google link to the letter pages just brings up a massive amount of spam.

Earlier, it looks like both The Jewish Advocate site and the site with the Herald article on it were down. Now the Herald link is working.

A thinking, probative man. Contrast Simon Deng's grounded, well considered thoughts with the contorted rationalizations of a Carter or the airy qualities exemplified in a Tutu.

Deng is refreshing, engaging, cogent, coherent and enlivens the discussion with both moral and intellectual seriousness, a genuine gravitas.

In answer to the writer's question "So where is Desmond Tutu when my people call out for freedom?", the unfortunate answer is that he's been pretty busy.

Right now he's attending a jihadist conference in Turkey. More specifically, he's an honored guest at a "...giant gathering in Istanbul of thousands of high level representatives from hundreds of radical Islamist organizations and institutions from Morocco to Indonesia... Mainstream Turkish daily Milliyet reported on the calls being made at the meetings to fight Jerusalem’s ‘judaicization’, and to continue the jihad against Zionist Israel until it no longer exists."

The details are reported on the MEMRI site quoting as its source Milliyet, Cumhuriyet, Vakit, Yeni Safak, Turkey, November 16, 2007.

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