Desmond Tutu

"Never, 'for the sake of peace and quiet', deny your own experience or convictions"

      - Dag Hammarskjold

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice"

      - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Having written on many hot-button topics over the years, I'm quite used to impassioned responses to my writing by now, both for and against my point of view. However, nothing I've written before - not my rants regarding religion, not my denunciations of police brutality, and not even my many pieces about Israel's crimes against the Palestinians - has ever generated such a dramatic, emotional response like the one caused by my last piece, Freedom Denied! Are We Happy Now: The Crushing of Sri Lanka's Tamils. We're talking a real shitstorm of controversy here.

"He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy"
     -  Brian's Mom to the masses in "Monty Python's Life of Brian"

Like all petty dictators and megalomaniacs throughout history, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe seems to see himself as the saviour of his country, but, far from being Zimbabwe's Messiah, the man has now clearly become the destroyer of this once proud and prosperous nation. Self-delusion and pompous self-importance simply don't get much better than with this buffoon.

As a heroic fighter against apartheid, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, now 76 years old, knows bigotry and discrimination when he sees it. And he doesn't mind speaking up, even when he sees it in his own church.