This Casts Ghandi in a Whole New (Lack of) Light

This one from last week was so hard to handle I traced it a bunch of additional places (Wiki, plus here, here, and here) to make sure I wasn’t being played. It comes from a Fred Thompson commentary from his gig as a substitute host for Paul Harvey (HT Ann Althouse guesting at Instapundit; bold is mine):

Mahatma Gandhi ….. is pretty much the symbol of the anti-war movement. Code Pink was founded on his birthday, and when Saddam Hussein was being given a last chance to open Iraq to U.N. weapons inspectors, posters appeared around America asking “What would Gandhi do?”

And that’s a pretty good question. At what point is it okay to fight dictators like Saddam or the al Qaeda terrorists who want to take his place?

It turns out that the answer, according to Gandhi, is NEVER. During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis. Later, when the extent of the holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” he said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”

That is a sentiment Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, if he actually admitted to the historical reality of the Holocaust, would heartily endorse.