All this talk about Desmond Tutu’s speech at St. Thomas University — which he was disinvited, then re-invited to — got me thinking about South African voices on the Israel apartheid debate. Here is another anti-apartheid campaigner, professor Farid Esack, drawing the parallels.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGWFnsqLPVE]
Farid Esack, a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School, is the author of Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity against Oppression and On Being a Muslim: Finding a Religious Path in the World Today.
A former national commissioner on gender equality appointed by President Nelson Mandela, Esack was active in the struggle against apartheid in the United Democratic Front and the Call of Islam. His current major field of research and activism is the response of Islam to AIDS; he founded Positive Muslims, an organization working with Muslims who are HIV positive in South Africa.
[tarboush tip: Leo Africanus and Monthly Review]
Related posts:
- Israel as the New South Africa
- Israelis Adopt What South Africa Dropped
- Learning From South Africa?
- The Coming Solution Is Apartheid…
- South African Union Head: “Israel is an apartheid state”
“The Jewish community can survive a speech by Archbishop Tutu. We’ve endured worse,” said Mordecai Specktor, editor for American Jewish World, a weekly Jewish newspaper in Minnesota.
wow. way to win supporters, mordecai! congratulations to the minnesota jewish community leaders for shooting themsevles in the foot over this one.
Posted by Anonymous | October 11, 2007, 1:57 pm