Do You Not Have a Shred of Decency? Why did the Guardian remove from its coverage of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s death any reference to the Palestinians?
Dear Kath and Jonathan,
Yesterday’s Guardian has 4 pages dedicated
to the life of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. 60% of the front page was also devoted
to his death. As someone whose first political activity, as a 16 year old schoolboy,
was demonstrating against the 1970 Springbok Rugby tour, I am the last person
to quarrel with the extent of your coverage.
What I find amazing though is that
there wasn’t even a passing mention of Tutu’s support for the Palestinians or his
description
of Israel as worse than its South African counterpart:
your struggle will be harder than ours, as Israel’s apartheid
is even worse than South Africa’s. We never had F-16s bomb our bantustans
killing hundreds of our children. Remember that.”
Tutu never lost an opportunity to
criticise what he termed an apartheid state. This was well before B’Tselem’s Report
describing Israel as ‘A regime of Jewish
supremacy’ and Human Rights Watch’s Report
‘A Threshold Crossed - Israeli
Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution’.
Perhaps I can make a more general
observation? When people pay a tribute to someone and deliberately, for unspoken
political reasons, excise a part of their life, they end up saying more about
themselves than their subject. Your coverage of Desmond Tutu’s death says more
about the Guardian than it does about him.
To do all these things and distort
someone’s life, because it’s politically inconvenient to tell the truth, and is
at variance with the Guardian’s editorial line, is not merely dishonest but politically
odious. It suggests that the tribute you paid to Archbishop Tutu’s struggle
against Apartheid is just hot air. Pious and empty words aimed at convincing
your readers that you retain some integrity.
We all know the reasons for the
Guardian’s dilemmas. You spent five years demonising Jeremy Corbyn and the Left
as ‘anti-Semites’. You lost no opportunity to portray people who were opposed
to apartheid as racists. Even worse you did it in the company of genuine
racists and anti-Semites.
People like Boris Johnson, who in his 2004 novel ‘72 Virgins’ depicted
Jews as controlling the media and being able to “fiddle” elections. Not
forgetting Jacob Rees-Mogg who, apart from tweeting in support
of the neo-Nazi AfD in Germany, described
fellow Jewish MPs John Bercow and Oliver Letwin as “Illuminati who are taking
the powers to themselves.” A comment described
as ‘expressly anti-Semitic’ by
Professor Michael Berkowitz of UCL.
Let me remind you both of one of
Desmond Tutu’s most famous speeches when he said:
“I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of
Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their
humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and
harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid
government.”
What
is there in this that you or your fellow scribes at the Guardian don’t
understand? Either your opposition to what happened in South Africa, the subjugation
of people according to the doctrines of racial supremacy, is a principle or it
is a narrow political calculus dependent on the circumstances of the time.
The omission of any mention of Desmond Tutu’s
longstanding support for the Palestinians was not accidental, an unfortunate
oversight but a deliberate editorial decision. We know this because a critical
comment from Professor David Mond, who pointed this out, was deleted
by the Guardian. It did not accord with your ‘community standards.’ Likewise
two comments from Mark Seddon, the former Editor of Tribune, were also deleted.
Desmond
Tutu was a strong supporter of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel,
just as he supported sanctions against South Africa. That was the real reason
for your selective editing.
Of
course you did not want to mention Tutu’s position on Palestine. Tutu’s
opposition to Israeli apartheid routinely attracted
cries of ‘anti-Semitism’ from those who refuse to understand that opposing the Israeli
state for what it does is not the same as hostility to Jew.
I
fully understand your dilemma. The Guardian has spent so much of its time making
false accusations of anti-Semitism that you don’t know how to handle the legacy
of someone who, according to your definition, was anti-Semitic. Desmond Tutu
was an opponent of apartheid in all its forms, including its Jewish equivalent,
Zionism.
Just
one final thing. The Guardian seems to have gone quiet on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’.
I presume that you are satisfied with the fact that in order to eradicate ‘anti-Semitism’,
Starmer is expelling dozens of Jewish members? If you are Jewish in the Labour
Party today you are 5
times more likely to be expelled as non-Jews. It seems a strange way to
oppose anti-Semitism which is presumably why the Guardian says nothing?
Is
it too much for you now to come clean and admit that the campaign against Labour
‘anti-Semitism’ was never about Jews and always about Israel and its apartheid
practices?
Yours
truly,
Tony Greenstein
