No Desmond, violence is not the solution.

obama-islamTHE problem with dichotomies like good and bad, black and white, is they don’t apply to the Middle East. If you thought Netanyahu was simply going to hand over the keys when Hamas and Fatah formed a coalition government you were wrong. The solution isn’t the destruction of Israel as apparently advocated by modern crusaders such as Desmond Tutu, The solution is rather a binational state in which both parties coexist under a common constitution recognising each others laws and allowing for local autonomy and federalism.

Tutu’s latest invective,* including unconditional support of the Hamas Death Charter which advocates the destruction of Jews in a final battle, the use of violence and forced conversion of Jews, who are now expected to either die or conform to another religion —  Christianity or an Islamic version of Judaism — places the aging South African Anglican in the same league as similar religious zealots.

Pope Urban II the sponsor of the First Crusade, ignited violence against Jews, which some historians have deemed “the first Holocaust”.**  At the end of 1095 and beginning of 1096, months before the departure of the official crusade there were attacks on Jewish communities in France and Germany much like the recent upsurge in Antisemitism in Europe, labelled by the Guardian as the worst since the Nazis

In May 1096, Emicho of Flonheim attacked the Jews living along the Rhine at Speyer and Worms.

The replacement theology in which the archbishop emeritus has sought to exchange the history of the South African struggle against apartheid with events surrounding the creation of an independent Jewish Palestine in 1948 and the ongoing territorial dispute involving Arab Palestinian factions waving versions of the Jordanian Flag, must be condemned. Like the Anglican Covenant and Christian blood libel against the Jews, placing Anglicans at the head of a colonial narrative founded upon the Old Testament whilst condoning violence, murder and mayhem, Tutu’s support for the armed struggle against Jewish Palestine is the exact opposite of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

That we have already seen a two-state solution in the first partition plan which saw the 1946 independence of Hashemite Palestine as the Kingdom of Jordan, followed by several UN-sponsored partition plans, each one reducing the size of Jewish Palestine (aka Israel) is all part of the historical record. (Interestingly enough Jordan signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1994, the same year that South Africa had its first democratic election.) That we have to deal with a gerontocrat who believes all Jews are white and that all Palestinians comprise a single ethnic group, is par for the course in the ongoing debate by Christians on the Jewish problem..

* For a working definition of Anti-Semitism visit the European Forum on Anti-Semitism.

** Riley-Smith, Jonathan (1991). The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading. University of Pennsylvania. ISBN 0-8122-1363-7.

[Redacted version published in Cape Argus, Cape Points, 8/26/2014]

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SEE: Open Letter to Desmond Tutu by Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein

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