Refusing to recognise evil
Jun 22, 2016
Gandhi wanted the victims of Nazism to remain courageous, and to adopt positive non-violence -the strength not to use force- in dealing with the killers. In 1938, just after Kristallnacht, when the Nazis systematically destroyed Germany’s and Austria’s synagogues, Gandhi wrote these shameful words where he urged Europe’s Jews to joyfully accept the Nazi onslaught:
“If I were a Jew and were born in Germany … I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon. … And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy. … The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant.”
There is no question about the meaning:
The Jewish-American journalist Louis Fischer, wrote a biography titled The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, which was used as the basis for the Richard Attenborough’s Academy Award-winning film Gandhi (1982). Fisher asked him: “You mean that the Jews should have committed collective suicide?” Gandhi responded: “Yes, that would have been heroism.”
A similar case is playing out in America today:
The best advice the Attorney General of the United States can provide on how to respond to terrorism is that we should offer a little love and compassion.
Brutal Islamic jihadists with an end goal of global conquest are killing Christians (including beheading children) and raping Yazidi girls and burning them alive if they refuse their captors. The lives of the families of the victims of 9/11 were forever changed. The Islamic State has called on its followers to wreak terror on America, and an Islamic jihadist just gunned down innocent people in Orlando.
Islamic terrorists don't need love. They just need a little killing.
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