'Anti-Semitic' Today's winner of the Anti-Semitic Card is Michigan State University and Desmond Tutu

Michigan State University in the U.S. has come under fire from the Anti-Defamation League for inviting South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak at this year's commencement ceremony. Tutu is reknowned worldwide for his role in creating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which helped bring about a peaceful transition from apartheid South Africa to desegregation.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (file photo)

He was invited to be part of a human rights delegation by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights after a 2004 Israeli missile attack which killed an entire Palestinian family. But Israel denied him a visa, and the investigation of the attack was delayed for over three years, rendering it useless. Tutu has compared the treatment of Palestinians under Israeli occupation to the treatment of black South Africans under apartheid.

The ADL launched a similar challenge to the University of St Thomas in Minnesota when it invited Tutu to speak at their commencement in 2007. After pressure from the ADL, the University withdrew the invitation but later re-invited him a week before the ceremony (he was unable to attend). The University President Rev. Dennis Dease told an AP reporter at the time, "I have wrestled with what is the right thing to do in this situation, and I have concluded that I made the wrong decision earlier this year not to invite the archbishop. Although well intentioned, I did not have all of the facts and points of view, but now I do."

The President of Michigan State University, Lou Anna Simon, said that she would uphold the invitation to Desmond Tutu, despite the pressure from the ADL.

The ADL said that Tutu was anti-Semitic because of his support for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The group said the boycott was "based on ideas that are anti-Semitic and should be anathema to any institution of higher learning truly committed to academic freedom."

A similar boycott was successfully enacted against apartheid South Africa, which practiced policies that discriminated against indigenous Africans and people of mixed race. Israel also has race-based laws and policies that afford special rights to Jews while simultaneously reducing the rights of indigenous Palestinians, but supporters of Israeli policy say that these laws are not actually discriminatory.

Professor David Wiley, long-time head of the African Studies Department at the University, told an IMEMC reporter, “Archbishop Tutu has never made any statements against the Jewish people, but he has challenged Israeli policy. For the Anti-Defamation League to equate the two is dangerous and counter-productive to their cause.”