With tributes pouring in from around the world for Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who passed away at the age of 90,
lawyer Alan Dershowitz used a recent interview to criticize the Nobel
Peace Prize laureate, who was known for taking part in South Africa's
struggle against apartheid.
During a segment on Fox News,
Dershowitz blasted the laudatory tributes to Tutu heard in recent days,
saying that his views and statements about the Jewish community were
problematic.
"The world is mourning Bishop Tutu, who just died the
other day,” Deshowitz said. “Can I remind the world that although he
did some good things, a lot of good things on apartheid, the man was a
rampant antisemite and bigot?"
He added: “The man minimized the
Holocaust. The man compared Israel to Nazi Germany. When we’re tearing
statues of Jefferson and Lincoln and Washington, let’s not build statues
to a deeply, deeply flawed man like Bishop Tutu. Let’s make sure that
history remembers both the good he did and the awful bad he did as
well.” Tutu “didn't talk about the Israel lobby, he talked about the Jewish lobby," Dershowitz told
Newsweek.
"He
minimized the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust,” Dershowitz
recalled. “He said that getting killed in gas chambers was an easy death
compared to apartheid. He said that Jews claimed a monopoly on the
Holocaust.”
“He demanded that Jews forgive the Nazis for
killing them,” Dershowitz said, referring to Tutu’s 1989 visit to Yad
Vashem during which he called on Israelis to pray for the Nazis,
according to the New York Times.
Charging that Tutu
"encouraged others to have similar views and because he was so
influential, he became the most influential antisemite of our time,"
Dershowitz went on to say that he thought it was wrong in the case of
Tutu that “people say you shouldn't speak ill of the dead.”
“The
bottom line is that at a time when people are reckoning with the
careers, of people with mixed legacies, whether it be Thomas Jefferson,
Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and others, we have to include in a
reckoning of Tutu his evil, bigotry against Jews, which has existed for
many, many, many years,” he said.
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