Nelson Mandela was not the saint that world leaders and the media depict him to be. He was merely a gifted, practical politician. After being released from prison and becoming president of South Africa, Mandela understood — what many perceived as being saintly rather than practical — that South Africa would sustain civility, stability, economic growth and security only if he embraced the White minority and retain the state’s institutions; this included the police, the army and the rest of what the apartheid regime had employed to reinforce the White minority rule over the Black majority. He treated the Whites with respect, did not avenge their crime of apartheid, and did not deprive them of their rights, wealth and security. He did so because it was in the best interest of his fellow Black citizens. It was a bright, genius move, devoid of emotional needs for revenge. It was the rational act that earned him the world’s admiration.But then he stumbled badly.He slipped into the trap of mischaracterizing many of the world’s bad guys as freedom fighters akin to himself. He befriended, embraced and allied with Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor Ali Khamenei. He viewed these oppressors as liberators. Outside of his country, he approved of violence as a means for achieving independence from the “bigoted minority rule” over the “sizeable oppressed majority.” He failed to see that those “liberators” failed to free the “oppressed majority,” but rather subjected their own people to a different and even worse form of tyranny and suppression.Outside of his own country, he was not the same Nelson Mandela who had transformed South Africa from an apartheid state into a true democracy by means of an olive branch and reconciliation. Outside of his own country he approved of violent resistance to what he considered to be either an imperialistic foreign element, or corrupt elite in control of the suffering masses. So was the case in Cuba, in Libya, in Iran, and in Palestine.Mandela deemed the Palestinian propaganda as truth. He referred to Israel as a “terrorist state”; he made known to the Palestinians that they were his “comrades-in-arms” and supported their struggle for the liberation of Palestine. He repeated Palestinian blood libels and false propaganda claiming that Israel was slaughtering defenseless, innocent Palestinians. He likened Israel to an apartheid state, implying that Yasser Arafat was a Palestinian Mandela and that his South African countrymen were ready and willing to fight with the Palestinians against the "racist Zionists." He viewed Zionism as an imperialistic movement, whose objective was to seize Palestinian territory and subjugate the true owners of the land.He was not speaking the truth. He was repeating lies and propaganda that he wanted to believe in. His hostility towards the state of Israel did not end there. He let it spill over to the rest of the Jews as well. When Iran tried 13 Jews for espionage in the year 2000, Mandela claimed that these Jews “received a fair trial” — as if anyone can receive a fair trial under the Ayatollah’s oppressive system. He dismissed South African Jews’ concerns regarding his stand on Israel; he let it be known that he cared less about their feelings.But the worst part of it all was the fact that Mandela was the George Washington of South Africa. He was the first leader of the new true democracy. He set examples and established paradigms for others to follow. And although the examples he set and the path he outlined internally was great and pure, the roadmap he delineated outside of his country and especially the one concerning Israel and Jews was filled with anti-Semitic flavor. Desmond Tutu, the influential South African Leader, and his anti-Semitic views are a perfect specimen of that fact.Sorry world, but I can’t bring myself to the same outpouring feeling and extolling eulogies I have been reading, watching and listening to in every news medium I have tuned in to. I just can’t.The writer is a talk show host at Paltalk News Network (PNN). He served as an intelligence expert for the Israeli government and was a professor at Northwestern University. He is the author of Fundamentals of Voice Quality Engineering in Wireless Networks, and more recently, 72 Virgins. Both books can be purchased at www.aviperry.org.
