St. Thomas University Refused Rev. Desmond Tutu the Opportunity to Speak on Campus

It is not an anti-Semitic issue. It is not even an academic freedom issue. It is a common sense issue. When Rev. Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the first black archbishop in South Africa, agrees to speak at your university, you do not stop to think and you definitely do not decline the privilege-right?
Wrong. Our catholic neighbor to the west, St. Thomas, decided not to risk the slim possibility of controversy and turned down Tutu because of comments he had made in an April 13, 2002 speech in a Boston Church that, the administration contended, could be construed as pejorative toward the state of Israel. Of course, this incited more controversy and more of a media frenzy than allowing Tutu to speak ever would.

There was no precedent for believing that Tutu was a controversial figure. In 2003, he visited Willamette University, a private college in Salem, Ore. His Willamette lecture went off without a voice of protest and the university gave Tutu an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree.

Nor were Tutu's words at the Boston speech very inflammatory.

Doug Hennes, vice president for university and government relations at St. Thomas, implied the decision not to invite Tutu was a pragmatic one.

"[Tutu] has been critical of Israel and Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians, so we talked with people in the Jewish community and they said they believed it would be hurtful to the Jewish community, because of things he's said," Hennes told the Star Tribune.

The president of St. Thomas, Rev. Dennis Dease, who made the decision not to allow Tutu to speak, was more explicit in the reasoning for the decision.

"I spoke with Jews for whom I have a great respect," Dease told the Star Tribune. "What stung these individuals was not that Archbishop Tutu criticized Israel, but how he did so, and the moral equivalencies that they felt he drew between Israel's policies and those of Nazi Germany, and between Zionism and racism."

But this interpretation is less than obvious.

"Israeli Jew, Palestinian Arab can live amicably side by side in a secure peace," Tutu said near the beginning of the 2002 speech.