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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 2:11 pm Post subject: Desmond Tutu Banned From Campus in Minnesota |
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| Quote: | Tutu Banned From Campus in Minnesota
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has been disinvited to speak on the campus of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. The reason: The head of the Catholic university said he was worried that the appearance of the Nobel Peace Prize-winner would be “hurtful” to the Jewish community, citing Tutu’s criticism of Israeli policies.
In addition, a tenured faculty member was removed from her position as director of the university’s Justice and Peace Studies program after she protested this decision.
The story, broken by the City Pages of Minneapolis, involves a partnership between St. Thomas and a group called PeaceJam International, based in Denver. That group arranges for Nobel Laureates to meet with at-risk and other youth in various places. For the past five years, the Justice and Peace Studies program at the University of St. Thomas has arranged with a local affiliate of PeaceJam to bring Nobel Laureates to campus to conduct the sessions. Under these auspices, Rigoberta Menchu, Betty Williams, Wangari Maathai, and Shirin Ebadi have all participated at St. Thomas.
The Justice and Peace Studies program was delighted that Archbishop Desmond Tutu had agreed to come in April 2008.
But when the program staff notified the university administrators this spring that Tutu was coming, the response was chilly. “We’re going to have to pass,” they said, according to Cris Toffolo, who was then the director of the Justice and Peace Studies program.
In telephone conversations with Toffolo and another staffer of the program, various members of the administration “cited three reasons: a concern that Tutu was anti-Semitic, that he’d engaged in hate speech, and that he’d acted erratically lately (and the evidence of that was his dancing on stage),” Toffolo says.
Toffolo wrote a memo to the university president, Father Dennis Dease, on April 24, objecting to the decision and defending Tutu, saying he wasn’t coming to talk about the Middle East or Israel/Palestine and as far as she could tell there was not a general impression of him being anti-Semitic.
She did some more research and found on the Internet that the Zionist Organization of America was making a big deal out of a speech that Tutu gave in Boston in 2002. The ZOA quoted Tutu as saying, “Israel is like Hitler and apartheid,” she says. But when she dug up Tutu’s speech, she saw that the quote was not there. (I discuss Tutu’s speech in the appendix to this article.)
So she wrote another letter to Father Dease, pointing this out. But the university president said he wasn’t going to change his mind.
Upset at the turn of events, Toffolo and another member of the Justice and Peace Studies faculty wrote to the university president that they could not remain silent about this. After waiting a couple of weeks, they sent a letter off to Archbishop Tutu informing him about what had happened. “But we did not take this to the press,” Toffolo says. “We only informed those directly concerned because we though this decision would directly affect them.”
In early August, Toffolo was canned as director of the Justice and Peace Studies program.
“I was given a dismissal letter claiming I had invited Tutu without permission, and for using my title and letterhead to write to him,” she says.
Toffolo says that previous Nobel laureates were invited in the same way as Tutu, and that she has never been directly involved in that process. She also says she used university letterhead simply to let Tutu know where the letter was coming from.
“Outrageous” is how she describes the university’s decision not to allow Tutu to speak on campus. “This is one of the living saints of the church, one of a handful of moral voices in the world, and we can’t afford to lose his moral voice. Part of his work is to call governments out that are acting unjustly. That he is criticizing Israeli government policy is not unique or surprising.”
Toffolo puts the controversy in a larger perspective.
"What happened at the University of St. Thomas is not an isolated event,” she says. “Today around the country more and more faculty members and institution are getting caught in the net of the negative politics that surrounds these issues. This causes many well-meaning people to remain silent, while those who do speak up get attacked.” She hopes to confront this negative politics, and by so doing “contribute to the end of the dying and the killing in the Middle East, and to an end to the fights that are destroying careers and hurting universities here in the U.S.”
On October 5, Father Dease issued a public letter to the students, faculty, and staff on the Tutu and Toffolo controversies.
As to why he decided to disinvite Tutu, Father Dease wrote:
“We became aware of concerns about some of Archbishop Tutu's widely publicized statements that have been hurtful to members of the Jewish community. I spoke with Jews for whom I have great respect. 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. . . . I am not in a position to evaluate what to a Jew feels anti-Semitic and what does not. I can, however, take seriously the judgments of those whom I trust by not putting St. Thomas in a position that would add to that hurt.”
As to why Professor Toffolo was removed as director of Justice and Peace Studies, Father Dease wrote: “This is a personnel matter. I will say only that she was not removed because of any private or public disagreement with my decision not to invite Archbishop Tutu to St. Thomas.”
Toffolo says she is still dealing with the repercussions. “I got a punitive evaluation that didn’t reflect the work that I did,” she says. “ I fear for my job.”
Appendix:
Archbishop Desmond Tutu gave a keynote address on April 13, 2002, at Old South Church, Boston, for the Friends of Sabeel North America’s Conference, “Ending the Occupation.”
Ironically, Tutu said: “You know as well as I do that somehow the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal where to criticize them is immediately to be dubbed anti-Semitic.” He then drew a careful distinction. “We don’t criticize Jewish people,” he said. “We criticize, we will criticize, when they need to be criticized, the government of Israel.” He defended Israel’s right to exist: “I believe that Israel has a right to secure borders, internationally recognized, in a land assured of territorial integrity and with acknowledged sovereignty as an independent country.” But he criticized Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, saying it reminded him “of what used to happen to us Blacks in Apartheid South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at the roadblocks and recall what used to happen to us in our motherland.” He talked about how “the rough and discourteous demands for IDs from the Palestinians were so uncannily reminiscent of the infamous pass law raids of the vicious Apartheid regime.” And he denounced the demolition of Palestinian homes.
In perhaps the most controversial passage, he referred to the powerful “Jewish lobby,” but dismissed its power in the following manner. “So what? This is God’s world. . . . The Apartheid government was very powerful, but we said to them: Watch it! If you flout the laws of the universe, you’re going to bite the dust. Hitler was powerful. Mussolini was powerful. Stalin was powerful. Idi Ami was powerful. Pinochet was powerful. . . . Milosevic was powerful. But this is God’s world. A lie, injustice, oppression, those will never prevail in the world of this God. . . . An unjust Israeli government, however powerful, will fall in the world of this kind of God. Because we don’t want for that to happen but those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: What is your treatment of the poor, the hungry? What is your treatment of the vulnerable, the voiceless?”
He ended his sermon with a call for peace: “It is God’s dream that you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers, side by side because you belong in God’s family. Peace! Peace! Peace!” |
funny really, the other week they had ahmadinejad speaking at columbia uni, who the media ( falsely ) has built up to some hitler like character - yet desmond tutu gets banned!
but i understand why, any criticism from ahmadinejad can be put down to him being the new hitler, its not so easy to do that to an archbishop |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 2:14 pm Post subject: |
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oops - i just posted that then saw this ...
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faceless
admin
Joined: 25 Apr 2006
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| Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 2:37 pm Post subject: |
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What a twisted state of affairs!
cheers for posting though - the link at the end of the article to the Tony Karon page is worth reading.
http://tinyurl.com/29yotg |
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