25-Jul-16: More on Tutu, Barghouti, terror, peace and prizes

Nobel Peace Prize laureate,
Bishop Desmond Tutu [Image Source]

A Pakistani website today published an op ed lauding Marwan Barghouti, providing us (we're guessing this was not their intention) with an opportunity to share our feelings concerning the man and those who seek to aggrandize him.

The article is entitled simply "Marwan Barghouti". We had not heard of the author before; his name is Abbas Hasan and his self-description is sparse: "an engineer and a cricket fan who works in the Middle East".

Here's our comment.

It's helpful to see acolytes of Barghouti highlighting, as this piece does, the emphatically *anti-peace* stance of the convicted and imprisoned murderer. Our attention was drawn to this article because of our tracking the efforts of Bishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace laureate himself, in shilling for Barghouti to get the same prize. In his public statements, Mr Tutu repeatedly speaks of Barghouti as an agent for peace. But as this fine article makes clear, Barghouti totally rejects peace in the Arab vs Israel wars as this quote makes clear:-
“The role and mission of the Palestinian authority should be reassessed so that its main mission must be in supporting and assisting a comprehensive resistance, which necessitates the immediate termination of security coordination and cooperation with Israel as this only reinforces occupation and is a tremendous detriment to the Palestinian people. We must stop betting on the illusion of peace negotiations”.
It's a valuable service to the cause of peace (in which most Israelis, us among them, believe passionately) that Abbas Hasan has done. Sincere thanks to him.

In case you missed our recent commentary on the odious and fundamentally dishonest efforts by Bishop Desmond Tutu to have the murderer Barghouti awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, it's posted at "09-Jun-16: The convicted killer, the churchman, the prize". We hope you will click and read it.

We have felt the need to speak out against Mr. Tutu several times in the past, the first time some nine years ago [link]. At that time, the learned churchman said he was "in despair" over the savagery being visited on one another in Gaza by the forces of Fatah and Hamas - actually a blood-soaked struggle for control of the Gaza Strip that was resoundingly won by the side (i.e. Hamas) that managed to be more effective at hacking, shooting and beating to death and hurling from high building more of its brethren than the other (i.e. Fatah).

But not totally in despair at the Arab-on-Arab carnage for, as Tutu noted, 

"When you are oppressed, it is so very easy to turn on yourselves..." [June 2007 Source]

Forgive us, Bishop, but we find that view racist, irrational and frankly nauseating. As we wrote all those years back:

And so easy, too, to blow up innocent women, children, men, schools, hospitals, restaurants. So easy. And to have church leaders slobber their sympathy all over your poor oppressed heads. The only thing more appalling about what the Palestinian Arabs have done to themselves is the unforgivable forgiveness, the incomprehensible understanding emanating from such ill-informed, theologically-addled, hand-wringing, high-profile individuals as the pious church-man quoted above. Without him and the many others like him, the devastation and misery of the Pal-Arabs could have ended decades ago.

It hasn't ended, as we all know. And as Tutu's campaigning for a prize to be given to Barghouti demonstrates, his ill-informed hand-wringing and irrational urge to forgive remains unaffected by any knowledge he might have acquired - but clearly has not - in the intervening years.