Apparently, South Africa has decided not to grant the Dalai Lama a visa for the upcoming peace conference this week. As reported by CNN, the South African government is concerned that allowing the Dalai Lama would shift the focus away from the upcoming World Cup and to China, which South Africa has no interest in offending.
To move away from inanity of all this; obviously, a peace conference where a game of soccer is more important than the suffering of millions of people at the hands of an authoritarian regime is not much of a peace conference. This is the same South Africa that hosted the Durban conference on racism and we know how much that had to do with racism. Are we seeing a pattern here? I would actually like to focus my criticism here on the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama is one of the truly great spiritual leaders of the world (everything that the Haredi gedolim are not). That being said, this incident is just one further example of something that I have often said, that the Dalai Lama is a rather pathetic creature. His continued decision to put his pacifist scrupulous over pragmatic reality has made him completely irrelevant and has cost his people a country.
In the lead up to last summer’s Olympics in Beijing (which I wanted America to boycott) many Tibetans rose up in revolt against the Chinese. The Dalai Lama not only denounced the violence and threatened to resign he even refused to call for a boycott of the Olympics. I am reminded of a different group, the Palestinians, which took a different attitude toward the Olympics. During the 1972 Olympics in Munich, members of the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September kidnapped and murdered Israeli Athletes. This did not harm the Palestinian cause on the contrary within several decades Yasser Arafat was on the White House front lawn being handed a Palestinian state. Arafat even received a Noble Peace Prize for his efforts. Where would the Tibetan cause be if only the Dalai Lama was willing to put aside his moral scruples and become a terrorist like Arafat? What if this past summer the world had witnessed Buddhist suicide bombers crashing China’s glorious opening ceremony? What if images of China’s adorable “under sixteen” women’s gymnastics team having being beheaded were seen across the internet? I am sure the world would have expressed its moral indignation, but soon there would be a call by modern liberals to understand the root causes of these acts of terrorism and the frustrations of Tibetans and those of the Buddhist faith as China continued its cultural hegemony over them. To help this along, Buddhist “militants” could extend their reach beyond China. Why attack China and ignore countries like the United States whose love for cheap manufactured goods supports Chinese rule over Tibet? It would take just a few embassy bombings and some attacks on American soil before the United States would begin to rethink its trade deals with China.
Under such circumstances, the Dalai Lama would not be lacking a visa to come to any peace conference in South Africa. I suspect he would be made the opening speaker. He could harangue the Chinese for their oppression and call for the end of the cycle of violence as the nations of the world would rush to pledge money and support for his Tibetan state. Those who proved to be the most compliant would be able to count on being spared the wrath of the Buddhist Jihad.
I wished we lived in a world where terrorism was not rewarded; where any cause that was tainted by adherents who turned to terrorism would be forced to the back of the line particularly if this was terrorism targeted against civilians. In such a world, Palestinian terrorism would have gotten the Palestinians nothing and we might actually have peace in the Middle East with the states of Israel and Palestine living together side by side. In such a world a man of true moral courage such as the Dalai Lama would be rewarded for his decision not to turn to violence with a peace conference where peace actually did come before soccer and where he could arouse the world’s moral indignation against China causing countries such as the United States to decide that the freedom of the people of Tibet was more important than Chinese manufactured products.
Until we live in this world my advice to those with a cause, whatever the cause might be, is to turn to terrorism. Blow up some buildings, kill some people, the more grisly the deed the better. Until we live in a world where modern liberals no longer fall over themselves to make excuses for those who turn to violence, taking attention away from those who do not use violence, than terrorism must be the choice of every reasonable and rational person.
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