Boston Sabeel Conference Keynote Address

Zionists Oppose Justice
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

October 27, 2007, Boston, MA -- Boston Zionists at the behest of Nancy Kaufman of the Jewish Community Relations Council and under the leadership of Hillel Stavis of the David Project, which is a Boston Israel advocacy and anti-Arab anti-Muslim hate group, stationed themselves in front of the Boston Public Library and on the corner next to Old South Church in order to protest the Sabeel Conference entitled "The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine/Israel: Issues of Justice and Equality."

Despite inclement weather, a far larger audience attended than was expected, and far fewer lunches, which consisted of wraps of stuffed grape leaves and other foods, were available than the number of attendees.

From 1:30 until 2:20, after Bishop Tom Shaw and Archbishop Michael Peers introduced him and after the audience sang "Happy Birthday" to him, Nobel Laureate and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu gave the keynote speech. Desmond Tutu first discussed the slander to which he was subjected by President Rev. Dennis Dease of the University of St. Thomas. Although Tutu was grateful for the gracious apology and for the invitation to come to speak, he reiterated his unwillingness to visit the University before it reinstated Professor Cris Toffolo to her position as director of the University's peace and justice studies program with her personnel file cleared of all criticism related to the incident.

Next, the Archbishop briefly compared Apartheid and the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian territories. He observed the similarity of the seizure of Palestinian property and forced relocation of the native Palestinian population to squalid refugee camps in 1947 to the seizure of property and forced relocation of the non-white population of Capetown to squalid ghettoes at the beginning of the 20th century. The Archbishop remarked that Palestinians were subjected to forms of oppression that non-whites had never experienced in South Africa.

Then, apparently under the false assumption that Zionism draws its inspiration from Jewish religion, Desmond Tutu advocated reconciliation between Israeli Zionists and Palestinians by quoting Leviticus 19:2: "Ye shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy" and referred to other passages from Leviticus and Deuteronomy like Leviticus 19:9-10:

9 When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field to its very border, neither shall you gather the gleaning after your harvest. 10 And you shall not strip you vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the sojourner: I am the Lord your God.

He also discussed David's sin against Uriah the Hittite as well as murder of Naboth by Jezebel with the connivance of Ahab in order to demonstrate that God demands justice and that therefore Palestinians have the right to justice within the framework of the two state solution.

Such arguments are probably much more effective with Christians than with American Jews because Jews generally consider Christianity a false religion and usually view Christian clergy as Jew-haters, who are especially hypocritical when they make sermons to Jews on morality. For the most part American Jews long ago abandoned worship of God, and the vast majority of them express their yiddishkeyt (Jewishness) via ethnic narcissism, Holocaust obsession and worship of the State of Israel.

A Zionist could reply to Desmond Tutu by quoting Psalm 137:5-9 with emphasis on the last verse.

5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
6 Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!

7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, "Rase it, rase it!
Down to its foundations!'
8 O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall he be who requites you
with what you have done to us!
9 Happy shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!

Zionists are immune to the faith and justice based arguments of Desmond Tutu because Zionism is an Eastern European politicized form of ethnic fundamentalism that judges right and wrong only by benefit to Jews. Zionists slice and dice scripture to fit their ideology. Believers like Tutu drive Zionists wild because reminding Christian Zionists of the true meaning of the Bible might create an awareness among Christian believers of how alien Zionism is to the core of Christian (as well as genuine Jewish) beliefs and values.

Overall Desmond Tutu sent an extremely mixed message. He mentioned that "a recent report by clinical psychologist Nufan Yishai Katrim at Hebrew University speaks of how Israeli soldiers were gratuitously cruel and carried out acts of brutality to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip." He asserted, "When you uphold an unjust dispensation it corrodes your humanity." Yet, he implied that the unjust dispensation was the Occupation and not the belief that racist Eastern European invaders had the right to make Palestine into a Zionist state despite the democratic will of the native Palestinian population.

Tutu claimed to support justice for Palestinians even as he advocated a two-state solution that unjustly sacrifices Palestinian human rights -- especially residence and property rights -- to illegitimate Zionist claims. Tutu confused modern Rabbinic Judaism with Second Temple Judaism even though the two religions are very different, and he equated Judeans and Galileans of Jesus' time period with modern ethnic Ashkenazim, who for the most part are quite secular and who are descended from mixed Eastern European and Southern Russian populations with no ancestral ties whatsoever in Palestine.

In 1989 in the midst of the First Intifada, when IDF soldiers were casually killing, maiming, and breaking the bones of unarmed Palestinians, Tutu visited Yad Vashem and preached the following message.

"Our Lord would say that in the end the positive thing that can come is the spirit of forgiving, not forgetting, but the spirit of saying: God, this happened to us. We pray for those who made it happen, help us to forgive them and help us so that we in our turn will not make others suffer."

Both Rabbi Hier of the Wiesenthal Center, which uses the Holocaust to deflect criticism of Jewish extremism, and also the ADL, which is one of the leading Jewish hate groups in the USA, strongly condemned Tutu for expressing this fundamental Christian religious belief.

Unfortunately, Tutu's 1989 prayer was already too late. At that time period conditions then as now for Israeli Palestinians were comparable to the situation of German Jews circa 1935 or 1937 while Jerusalem Palestinians lived in circumstances similar to the experiences of German Jews during the first half of 1939, and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories faced conditions worse than those of Polish ethnic Ashkenazi in German-occupied Poland during 1940. Today, Israeli Zionists move ever closer to carrying out the sorts of mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide that Soviet Ashkenazi Communist leaders and officials planned and orchestrated in the Soviet Union during the 20s and 30s.

Of course, Tutu's logic for forgiving Israeli Zionists and their American Zionist supporters is compelling, but there must also be honest acknowledgement that Israeli Zionists are for the most part unrepentant, remorseless murderous genocidal thieves and interlopers, who are fanatically supported by some very racist Ashkenazi Americans and some very un-Christian non-Jewish Zionists of the sort that stood outside Old South Church and waved signs during the Sabeel Conference (see pictures below).

At the conclusion of the Archbishop's address, the conference organizers requested that that audience not engage the protesters as it departed for the rally in Copley Square, where Martin Federman, Jeff Halperin of ICAHD and others spoke. According to one attendee, Jeff Halperin stated the day before that a two-state solution was no longer viable. Toward the end of the rally, indie singer/songwriter David Rovics performed in support of Palestine.

During the rally New England United marched as part of a nation-wide demonstration against the US occupation of Iraq and plans to attack Iran. The marchers circled Copley Square to express solidarity with the Sabeel Conference.

I joined them as they confronted the Zionist groups with shouts of "No more wars for Israel." I yelled in Hebrew at the pro-war anti-Palestinian Jewish groups that Jewish racists like them should go f*ck themselves and received only blank stares or occasionally smiles (for speaking Hebrew?) in return.

After a few blocks of marching, I returned to Copley Square and noticed that some of the Zionists were harassing two ladies in hijab. They were Turkish from Bursa and were in a local English language class. One of the young women intended to study engineering at Northeastern after completing the class.

An elderly female Jewish Zionist was trying to get them to agree that the democratically elected ruling Turkish AK party was a force for Islamic extremism. I pointed out that Turkey has a problem with intolerant secularists, who are unwilling to permit religious women to wear hijabs in universities and in government buildings. I asked the Zionist whether she would support an American government that forbade married Orthodox Jewish women from attending a university because they wore head coverings. She left.

Then three more Zionists ganged up on the Turkish women to intimidate them into expressing support for Israel. An Oriental argued that Israeli Palestinians had equality because he knew an Israeli Palestinian that had a successful law practice within the State of Israel. I retorted than one of the largest slaveholders in ante bellum Georgia was black. Did that mean that blacks and whites were equal before the Civil War?

The Zionists cycled through the usual claims. Because there was no sovereign Palestinian state, Jews could create their own state there despite the wishes of the native population. The Zionists won, and the Palestinians should just get over it. It was ridiculous for Palestinians to claim a right of return on the basis of events that took place 60 years ago even though Jews may dishonestly claim a right of return on the basis of a misinterpretation of events of 2000 years ago. These Zionists were racist, denied the human rights of the native population and rejected the concept of democratic self-determination for all but white Europeans. For the sake of the State of Israel they were willing to sacrifice every American principle as well as American lives, influence, and wealth.

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