Gandhi’s Shadow
Arun Gandhi, the fifth grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, is the former president of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence based at the University of Rochester, and a contributor to the “On Faith” page of the venerable Washington Post. On January 7, Gandhi wrote that “we have created a culture of violence,” but made it clear that by “we” he actually meant somebody else, namely the Jews, who are the “biggest players.”
Israel, he wrote, is “a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs.” Wouldn’t it be better, he asked, “to befriend those who hate you?”
Gandhi saw this as an “alien concept,” in “the modern world so determined to live by the bomb.” Grandson Gandhi did not digress on the nuclear arsenals of India, Pakistan, China, or even Frances’s force de frappe, and whether those nations believed their survival could only be ensured by bombs.
Further, “You don’t befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity.” He didn’t say when that might happen. Other themes were on his mind.
As for Jewish identity, it “has been locked into the Holocaust experience – a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed It is a very good example of how a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends.”
Gandhi wrote of the Holocaust as “the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful … The world did feel sorry for the episode, but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on, the regret turns into anger.” Gandhi’s charges sparked plenty of that.
Larry Fine of the Jewish Federation of Rochester said Gandhi’s post was “reprehensible” and Abraham Foxman called it “shameful that a peace institute would be headed up by a bigot,” adding “one would hope that the grandson of such an illustrious human being would be more ………