Thursday, January 22, 2015

Why Is Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Giving Props to Gandhi, A Man Who Thought Jews Should Have Willingly "Sacrified" Themselves to the Nazis?

This photo (along with those of Anne Frank, Martin Luther King and Simon Wiesthenal) appears on the FSW site:

Personally, I would not have chosen to highlight Gandhi in this way, knowing as I do (but as FSW apparently does not) that he said some rather problematic things about Europe's Jews vis-a-vis their Nazi liquidators. Being really big on that passive resistance stuff, he told his biographer Louis Fisher that he believed Jews slated for extermination should have gone to their deaths willingly and without complaint--for the sake of making a point to the rest of the world:
“Hitler,” Gandhi solemnly affirmed, “killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. I believe in hara-kiri. I do not believe in its militaristic connotations, but it is a heroic method.” 
“You think,” I said, “that the Jews should have committed collective suicide?” 
“Yes,” Gandhi agreed, "that would have been heroism. It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to the evils of Hitler’s violence, especially in 1938, before the war. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”
What an idiot! Given these ludicrous words, FSW, which, after all, is in the business of trying to prevent the next Holocaust, should be asking itself: is this really a man whose visage belongs on its website?

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