"For the past three decades, Nelson Mandela has been swathed in global media adulation unlike any other human being in history. No pope, president, king, war hero, movie star, or rock star can boast of having been the beneficiary of such undiluted, unalloyed, and unbroken acclaim.
Countless thousands of genuine prisoners of conscience, who have never done anything more “criminal” than praying, or speaking out against tyranny, are languishing in prisons all across the planet without so much as a peep of protest from the legions of Mandela worshippers and his chorus of media promoters. How many of those praising Mandela as the world’s moral compass have ever heard of Ignatius Cardinal Kung, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shanghai, who was imprisoned in Communist China for 33 years, most of it overlapping the same period in which Mandela was in prison? Cardinal Kung’s heroic incarceration was in many ways more severe than that faced by Mandela, but no media love-fest awaited him when he was released in 1988.
Ditto for Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, a black Cuban physician who was released from Fidel Castro’s prison system in 2011 after brutal captivity for the “crime” of criticizing the island’s communist regime. But did Nelson Mandela chastise his comrades in Beijing and Havana when he visited there, or did he bring up the plight of the countless political and religious prisoners in their gulags? If so, there is no public record of it, though there is plenty on record of him praising those oppressive regimes...." Read it all
Countless thousands of genuine prisoners of conscience, who have never done anything more “criminal” than praying, or speaking out against tyranny, are languishing in prisons all across the planet without so much as a peep of protest from the legions of Mandela worshippers and his chorus of media promoters. How many of those praising Mandela as the world’s moral compass have ever heard of Ignatius Cardinal Kung, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shanghai, who was imprisoned in Communist China for 33 years, most of it overlapping the same period in which Mandela was in prison? Cardinal Kung’s heroic incarceration was in many ways more severe than that faced by Mandela, but no media love-fest awaited him when he was released in 1988.
Ditto for Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, a black Cuban physician who was released from Fidel Castro’s prison system in 2011 after brutal captivity for the “crime” of criticizing the island’s communist regime. But did Nelson Mandela chastise his comrades in Beijing and Havana when he visited there, or did he bring up the plight of the countless political and religious prisoners in their gulags? If so, there is no public record of it, though there is plenty on record of him praising those oppressive regimes...." Read it all
