In this week’s episode of Australian ABC’s Q&A program, the debate turned to Israel, the BDS movement, and the Gaza flotilla. Comedian Austen Tayshus (real name Sandy Gutman), who was once described by anti-Israel activist Antony Loewenstein as looking “so much like those awful caricatures we know from the 1930s” , did an admirable job against Greens nutcase Lee Rhiannon and “journalist” Paul McGeough.
This is what the Daily telegraph’s Miranda Devine had to say about the exchange:
Tutu’s view is Austen Tayshus
You have to worry when a comedian has more moral sense than an archbishop. But that is the conclusion to draw from the news that South Africa’s celebrated cleric Desmond Tutu has written a letter congratulating Sydney’s wacky left-wing Marrickville Council for its attempt to boycott Israel.
“I want to pay my respects to you and your fellow Councillors in Marrickville for taking a stand to isolate the Israeli state,” wrote the 79-year-old Anglican Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, to Marrickville’s Green mayor Fiona Byrne.
You’d think Tutu might find more pressing humanitarian concerns in the Middle East at the moment to write letters about than continuing to demonise the only democracy in the region.
For instance, he could have penned a stiff letter to the Syrian government condemning the torture murder by its security forces of a cherubic 13-year-old boy, Hamza al-Khatib, snatched from his father during an anti-regime demonstration.
This was the point made by comedian Austen Tayshus, aka Sandy Gutman, to Lee Rhiannon on the ABC’s Q&A program this week, after the anti-Israel Greens senator revealed the glorious existence of the Tutu letter.
“Why aren’t you obsessed with Syria?” Gutman, the son of a Holocaust survivor, asked.
We could ask the same of Tutu. Where is his advocacy on behalf of a Syrian boy whose broken body was delivered back to his parents two weeks ago covered with cigarette burns, bullet holes and a wound where his penis used to be?
The one place in the Middle East where little Arab boys are safe is the one place Tutu is trying to destabilise.
Of course, Tutu has form on Israel. “Jews … think they have cornered the market on suffering,” he once said. They are “quick to yell anti-semitism [because of] an arrogance of power”.
Give that man a Sydney Peace Prize. Oh, wait, we already did.
Update: I have a bit of a history with Austen Tayshus. Back in Australia, I met him a few times over Sabbath lunch at my friend’s house. He once called me a “slimy lawyer” (which I probably deserved, given I made clear one of his jokes was not that funny). But when I went back to Australia over 3 years ago, I went to one of his shows and we chatted a bit about Israel and Antony Loewenstein. He is funny and sharp as a razor blade.
