HAVING KEYED (“PENNED” NO LONGER IS ACCURATE) yesterday’s screed on Gandhi and Eichmann I did an internet search for more Gandhi-on-Jews articles.
One recurring theme in Gandhi’s life was that Jews should willing offer their necks to the slaughter’s sword, be the slaughter nazi or Muslim.
In sacrificing Jewish lives, Gandhi was absolutely consistent.
THE FIRST ARTICLE I encountered was an op-ed piece by Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. in the LA Times for September 24, 2009.1
Having already reminded the Jews that they should have allowed the nazis to slaughter them, Gandhi then tells the survivors that any Jew who wants to go home (to Israel) to let the Arabs slaughter them.
Of course no one would dare accuse the “holy man” of being anti-Semitic.
The final two paragraphs of the commentary read as follows:
"The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the Earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?
"Palestine belongs to the Arabs. ... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. ... The Palestine of the biblical conception is not geographical tract. It is in their hearts. ... They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart. The same God rules the Arab heart who rules the Jewish heart. They can offer ... themselves to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against them. They will find the world opinion in their favor in their religious aspiration. . I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of nonviolence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds."
Nelson Mandela was a believer in what Gandhi preached, despite what Gandhi wrote about South African blacks. (See Gandhi on blacks, below.)
Gandhi’s non-violent actions against the British in India worked because the British behaved in a (more or less) civilized manner. Unlike the nazis and Muslims, they did not butcher Gandhi’s followers.
Martin Luther King Jr. used Gandhi’s tactics in the U.S. to great success. Americans, like the Brits, were not rounding up blacks for wholesale killing. (That is not to pretend that no blacks were murdered by whites.)
Gandhi as Hitler’s friend
An opinion piece in the Jerusalem (nee’ Palestine) Post by Shmuley Boteach, contends that Gandhi decided to write Hitler a letter. In the letter, he refers to Hitler as his “friend.” While he condemns Hitler’s war and the actions toward the Jews, he assures Hitler, “Nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents.”
Hitler also counted among his political – if not actual – friends the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini . (Al-Husseini was appointed to his post by the British.)
As an aside, a telegram from Heinrich Himmler to the grand mufti of Jerusalem has been found in the archives of Israel’s National Library.2
Believed to have been sent in 1943, it contains a promise by Hitler’s deputy to Haj Amin al-Husseini that the German Reich will stand behind the Arabs of Palestine and support their struggle against “Jewish intruders.”
Published on the library website on Wednesday, the telegraph notes that the struggle against world Jewry has been a principle of the German National Socialists from the start, and that the regime has always followed “with particular sympathy,” the struggle of “freedom-loving Arabs,” especially those in Palestine battling the Jews.
Martin Buber makes a point
Martin Buber
Buber’s letter, in part, reads as follows: Jews are being persecuted, robbed, maltreated, tortured, murdered. And you, Mahatma Gandhi, say that their position in the country where they suffer all this is an exact parallel to the position of Indians in South Africa at the time you inaugurated your famous “Force of Truth” or “Strength of the Soul” (Satyagraha) campaign. There the Indians occupied precisely the same place, and the persecution there also had a religious tinge. There also the constitution denied equality of rights to the white and the black race including the Asiatics; there also the Indians were assigned to ghettos, and the other disqualifications were, at all events, almost of the same type as those of the Jews in Germany. I read and re-read these sentences in your article without being able to understand. Although I know them well, I re-read your South African speeches and writings, and called to mind, with all the attention and imagination at my command, every complaint you made therein, and I did likewise with the accounts of your friends and pupils at that time. But all this did not help me to understand what you say about us. In the first of your speeches with which I am acquainted, that of 1896, you quoted two particular incidents to the accompaniment of hisses from your audience: first, that a band of Europeans had set fire to an Indian village shop, causing some damage; and, second, that another band had thrown burning rockets into an urban shop. If I oppose to this the thousands on thousands of Jewish shops destroyed and burned out, you will perhaps answer that the difference is only one of quantity and that the proceedings were of almost the same type. But, Mahatma, are you not aware of the burning of synagogues and scrolls of the Law? Do you know nothing of all the sacred property of the community - some of it of great antiquity - that has been destroyed in the flames? I am not aware that Boers and Englishmen in South Africa ever injured anything sacred to the Indians. I find only one other concrete complaint quoted in that speech, namely, that three Indian schoolteachers, who were found walking in the streets after 9.00 p.m. contrary to orders, were arrested and only acquitted later on. That is the only incident of the kind you bring forward. Now do you know or do you not know, Mahatma, what a concentration camp is like and what goes on there? Do you know of the torments in the concentration camp, of its methods of slow and quick slaughter? I cannot assume that you know of this; for then this tragi-comic utterance “of almost the same type” could scarcely have crossed your lips.
Gandhi would have the Jews continue living in countries where they are prosecuted simply for being Jews.
Gandhi on Jews staying where they are
Gandhi seems to have believed that Jews born in France should stay in Frnce; born in England should stay in England.4. That might have been fine at one time; however, based on current news reports of attacks on Jews and Jewish property, that is not the case today.
Beyond that, what about Jews in Muslim-dominated lands.
During WW 2 there was at least one pogrom in Iran. Despite the ayatollahs’ assurances, Jews in Iran today are in jeopardy. About the only Muslim country where Jews were and are relatively safe – perhaps safer there than in France, Germany, or the Nordic countries, is Morocco. Libya, Algeria, not so much.
Still, Gandhi would have a Jew born in France stay in France, regardless of the level of anti-Semitism.
Gandhi on blacks
A group of Ghanaian academics, students and artists is calling for the removal of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi from a university campus, saying that the leader of India's independence movement was racist towards black people.5
The statue of Gandhi, who spent 21 years (1893-1914) in South Africa and fought for the rights of Indians living there, was erected at the University of Ghana in mid-June during a visit to the country by India's President Pranab Mukherjee.
They quoted several references in which he depicted Indians as being at a higher level than black Africans, and used the racist pejorative "kaffirs" to describe them.
One of Gandhi's writings cited in the petition reads: "Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness."
Sources
1. http://tinyurl.com/y8cmke2p
2. http://tinyurl.com/y783jxmg
3. http://tinyurl.com/yb8ruexh
4. http://tinyurl.com/y926etgv
5. http://tinyurl.com/yajxe7pw
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