It is not an anti-Semitic issue. It is not even an academic freedom issue. It is a common sense issue. When Rev. Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the first black archbishop in South Africa, agrees to speak at your university, you do not stop to think and you definitely do not decline the privilege-right?
Wrong. Our catholic neighbor to the west, St. Thomas, decided not to risk the slim possibility of controversy and turned down Tutu because of comments he had made in an April 13, 2002 speech in a Boston Church that, the administration contended, could be construed as pejorative toward the state of Israel. Of course, this incited more controversy and more of a media frenzy than allowing Tutu to speak ever would.
There was no precedent for believing that Tutu was a controversial figure. In 2003, he visited Willamette University, a private college in Salem, Ore. His Willamette lecture went off without a voice of protest and the university gave Tutu an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree.
Nor were Tutu’s words at the Boston speech very inflammatory.
Doug Hennes, vice president for university and government relations at St. Thomas, implied the decision not to invite Tutu was a pragmatic one.
“[Tutu] has been critical of Israel and Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians, so we talked with people in the Jewish community and they said they believed it would be hurtful to the Jewish community, because of things he’s said,” Hennes told the Star Tribune.
The president of St. Thomas, Rev. Dennis Dease, who made the decision not to allow Tutu to speak, was more explicit in the reasoning for the decision.
“I spoke with Jews for whom I have a great respect,” Dease told the Star Tribune. “What stung these individuals was not that Archbishop Tutu criticized Israel, but how he did so, and the moral equivalencies that they felt he drew between Israel’s policies and those of Nazi Germany, and between Zionism and racism.”
But this interpretation is less than obvious.
“Israeli Jew, Palestinian Arab can live amicably side by side in a secure peace,” Tutu said near the beginning of the 2002 speech.
He did say that what was going on in Israel “reminded [him] so much of what used to happen to us blacks in apartheid South Africa.” This claim is less than treasonous-President Jimmy Carter wrote a book last year called “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.”
But the closest Tutu came to declaring Israel a Nazi cousin is here, and the comparison is nebulous at best. “People are scared in this country to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful-very powerful,” Tutu said in his Boston speech.
“If you flout the laws of this universe, you’re going to bite the dust. Hitler was powerful. Mussolini was powerful. Stalin was powerful. Idi Amin was powerful. Pinochet was powerful. The Apartheid government were powerful. Milosevic was powerful. But, this is God’s world. A lie, injustice, oppression, those will never prevail in the world of this God.”
These are emotionally charged words but they are more of a rhetorical flourish than a direct comparison of Hitler with the Israeli government.
This nebulous connection might help explain the lack of outrage among Jewish groups to Tutu’s original speech and to the possibility of Tutu speaking at St. Thomas.
“Just for criticizing Israeli policies doesn’t mean he should be banned from speaking,” said Mordecai Specktor, editor of the American Jewish World, a weekly newspaper for the Minnesota Jewish community.
“I would have had no problem with them allowing him to speak,” Sim Glaser, a Minneapolis rabbi, told the Star Tribune.
Dease “received more than 2,500 e-mails from a national Jewish peace group urging him to reverse his decision,” the Star Tribune reported Tuesday.
St. Thomas has allowed controversial speakers in the past. In 2005 the university received criticism when it gave the flamboyant conservative pundit Ann Coulter a platform to speak on campus.
Coulter is arguably more religiously insensitive than Tutu.
“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” she wrote in the National Review two days after Sept. 11, referring to Muslim terrorists.
The Tutu to-do is what happens when a university makes decisions out of fear of reprisal and not out of any sort of moral reasoning or lucid policy. Sometimes doing the controversial thing is the only way to avoid controversy.
As for Macalester we welcome any Nobel laureate to Kagin any time.
